trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Sacred Mundane
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-25T09:53:33.583Z

So I was reading (around the first half of) Adam Frank's The Constant Fire, in preparation for my Bloggingheads dialogue with him. Adam Frank's book is about the experience of the sacred. I might not usually call it that, but of course I know the experience Frank is talking about. It's what I feel when I watch a video of a space shuttle launch; or what I feel—to a lesser extent, because in this world it is too common—when I look up at the stars at night, and think about what they mean. Or the birth of a child, say. That which is significant in the Unfolding Story.

Adam Frank holds that this experience is something that science holds deeply in common with religion. As opposed to e.g. being a basic human quality which religion corrupts.

The Constant Fire quotes William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience as saying:

Religion... shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude; so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.

And this theme is developed further: Sacredness is something intensely private and individual.

Which completely nonplussed me. Am I supposed to not have any feeling of sacredness if I'm one of many people watching the video of SpaceShipOne winning the X-Prize? Why not? Am I supposed to think that my experience of sacredness has to be somehow different from that of all the other people watching? Why, when we all have the same brain design? Indeed, why would I need to believe I was unique? (But "unique" is another word Adam Frank uses; so-and-so's "unique experience of the sacred".) Is the feeling private in the same sense that we have difficulty communicating any experience? Then why emphasize this of sacredness, rather than sneezing?

The light came on when I realized that I was looking at a trick of Dark Side Epistemology—if you make something private, that shields it from criticism. You can say, "You can't criticize me, because this is my private, inner experience that you can never access to question it."

But the price of shielding yourself from criticism is that you are cast into solitude—the solitude that William James admired as the core of religious experience, as if loneliness were a good thing.

Such relics of Dark Side ...
Contests vs. Real World Problems
by badger — 2009-03-25T01:29:02.264Z

John Cook draws on the movie Redbelt to highlight the difference between staged contests and real-world fights. The main character of the movie is a Jiu Jitsu instructor who is willing to fight if necessary, but will not compete under arbitrary rules. Cook analogies this to the distinction between academic and real-world problem solving. Academics and students are often bound by restrictions that are useful in their own contexts, but are detrimental to someone who is more concerned with having a solution than where the solution came from.

Robin pointed arbitrary restrictions in academia out to us before, but his question then was regarding topics neglected for being silly. Following Cook's line of reasoning, are there any arbitrary restrictions we have picked up in school or other contexts that are holding us back? Are there rationalist "cheats" that are being underused?
The Implicit Association Test
by Scott Alexander — 2009-03-25T00:11:25.076Z

Continuation of: Bogus Pipeline, Bona Fide Pipeline
Related to: The Cluster Structure of Thingspace

If you've never taken the Implicit Association Test before, try it now.
Any will do. The one on race is the "classic", but the one on gender and careers is a bit easier to watch "in action", since the effect is so clear.
The overwhelming feeling I get when taking an Implicit Association Test is that of feeling my cognitive algorithms at work. All this time talking about thingspace and bias and categorization, and all of a sudden I have this feeling to attach the words to...
...which could be completely self-delusional. What is the evidence? Does the Implicit Association Test work?
Let the defense speak first1. The Implicit Association Test correctly picks up control associations. An IAT about attitudes towards insects and flowers found generally positive attitudes to the flowers and generally negative attitudes to the insects (p = .001), just as anyone with their head screwed on properly would expect. People's self-reports were also positively correlated with their IAT results (ie, someone who reported loving flowers and hating insects more than average also had a stronger than average IAT) although these correlations did not meet the 95% significance criterion. The study was repeated with a different subject (musical instruments vs. weapons) and similar results were obtained.
In the next study, the experimenters recruited Japanese-Americans and Korean-Americans. Japan has been threatening, invading, or oppressing Korea for large chunks of the past five hundred years, and there's no love lost between the two countries. This time, the Japanese-Americans were able to quickly match Japanese names to "good" stimuli and Korean names to "bad" stimuli, but took much longer to perform the opposite matching. The Korean-Americans had precisely the opposite problem, p < .0001. People's self-reports were also positively correlated with their IAT results (ie, a Korean who expressed especially negative feelings towards the Japanese on average also had a stronger than average IAT result) to a significant level.
There's been some evidence that the IAT is pretty robust. Most trivial matters like position of items don't much much of a difference. People who were asked to convincingly fake an IAT effect couldn't do it. If the same person takes the test twice, there's a co...
Terrorism is not about Terror
by gwern — 2009-03-24T17:08:52.494Z

Statistical analysis of terrorist groups' longevity, aims, methods and successes reveal that groups are self-contradictory and self-sabotaging, generally ineffective; common stereotypes like terrorists being poor or ultra-skilled are false. Superficially appealing counter-examples are discussed and rejected. Data on motivations and the dissolution of terrorist groups are brought into play and the surprising conclusion reached: terrorism is a form of socialization or status-seeking.

http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror
Levels of Power
by Patrick — 2009-03-24T15:54:08.431Z

Intended for Levels 0-1.9 Related to: Playing Video Games In Shuffle Mode

Taking the advice of talisman, I thought it would be useful to compile a list of levels of general rationalist skill. I think these levels loosely correllate to how effective one is as a rationalist, but they are not the same thing, a level 2 might still compartmentalize. This list is more a specification of the difficulty of material that a person will be able to follow, as well as providing a list of levels above mine, that I can aspire to. Of course, skill is more of a continuum than a discrete set, I've leveled up once before, but I don't remember any single moment in which this occured, just like I don't remember any single moment where I suddenly matured.

The first level, level 0, is the rationality skill of an average 20 year old with internet access, which is the skill of the vast majority of people in the world, if not higher. They've probably forgotten what math they knew beyond a little algebra and arithmetic, and haven't gotten in to the habit of checking facts. These are the kind of people who think Spock when you mention logic. This level of skill is something any rationalist has to go through, so the majority of people who arrive here without coming from OB will probably fall in to this category. With any luck, these people might discover debate forums, and seeing someone shred an argument to pieces introduces them to the idea of a logical fallacy, and begins their transition in to level 1.

The transition from level 0 to level 1 is fairly painless. With a good reading list, it should probably take about three months. Level 1 is the stage where people start self-identifying as rationalists. The usual transition to this stage comes from thinking about rationality as rhetoric, many rationalists become rationalists after a long time spent arguing with creationists and other crackpots, and slowly developing a list of silly arguments and misconcpetions and why they're so silly, until they've got a big enough list that it becomes a matter of turning on the "bullshit detector". After a bit of practice doing this, people become more willing to think hard about their beliefs after their arguments are torn to shreds in the same way that they tore other people's arguments down.

Knowing (to the core of one's being) the fundamentals of logic: that a good argument should go fro

...
Hyakujo's Fox
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-24T10:14:33.346Z

From "Hyakujo's Fox", #2 of the 49 koans in The Gateless Gate:

Once when Hyakujo delivered some Zen lectures an old man attended them, unseen by the monks. At the end of each talk when the monks left so did he. But one day he remained after the had gone, and Hyakujo asked him: `Who are you?'

The old man replied: `I am not a human being, but I was a human being when the Kashapa Buddha preached in this world. I was a Zen master and lived on this mountain. At that time one of my students asked me whether the enlightened man is subject to the law of causation. I answered him: "The enlightened man is not subject to the law of causation." For this answer evidencing a clinging to absoluteness I became a fox for five hundred rebirths, and I am still a fox. Will you save me from this condition with your Zen words and let me get out of a fox's body? Now may I ask you: Is the enlightened man subject to the law of causation?'

Hyakujo said: `The enlightened man is one with the law of causation.'

At the words of Hyakujo the old man was enlightened.

Mumon's poem:

Controlled or not controlled?
The same dice shows two faces.
Not controlled or controlled,
Both are a grievous error.

It really makes you wonder how the hell they got that far while still believing that the wrong answer could turn you into a fox.
On Things that are Awesome
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-24T03:24:07.108Z

This post, which touched on the allowedness of admiration, started me thinking about the nature of things that are awesome.

The first thing one does in such a situation is generate examples. And my brain, asked to enumerate things that are awesome, said: "Douglas Hofstadter, E. T. Jaynes, Greg Egan..."

Upon that initial output of my brain, I had many other thoughts:

(1) My brain was able to list more than one thing that is awesome. I am not going to dwell on this, because I think it needless to go around saying, "Douglas Hofstadter is awesome, but E. T. Jaynes is awesome too," as though to deliberately moderate or subtract from the admiration of Hofstadter. The enjoyment of things that are awesome is an important part of life, and I don't think a healthy mind should have to hold back. But the more things you know that are awesome, the more there is to enjoy—this doesn't mean you should artificially inflate your estimations of awesomeness, but it does mean that if you can think of only one awesome thing, you must be missing out on a lot of life. And some awesome things, but not all, are compatible enough with yourself that you can draw upon the awesome—Hofstadter and Jaynes are both like this for me, but Greg Egan is not. So even leaving aside certain mental health risks from having only one awesome thing—it is both enjoyable, and strengthening, to know of many things that are awesome.

(2) I can think of many places where I disagree with statements emitted by Douglas Hofstadter and Greg Egan, and even one or two places where I would want to pencil in a correction to Jaynes (his interpretation of quantum mechanics being the most obvious). In fact, when my brain says "Greg Egan" it is really referring to two novels, Permutation City and Quarantine, which overshadow all his other works in my book. And when my brain says "Hofstadter" it is referring to Gödel, Escher, Bach with a small side order of some essays in Metamagical Themas. For most people their truly awesome work is usually only a slice of their total output, from some particular years (I find that scary as hell, by the way).

(3) Once you realize that you're only admiring someone's peak work, you also realize that the work is not the person: I don't actually know Hofstadter, or Greg Egan, or E. T. Jayne...
Bogus Pipeline, Bona Fide Pipeline
by Scott Alexander — 2009-03-24T00:10:44.198Z

Related to: Never Leave Your Room

Perhaps you are a psychologist, and you wish to do a study on racism. Maybe you want to know whether racists drink more coffee than non-racists. Sounds easy. Find a group of people and ask them how racist they are, then ask them how much coffee they drink.
Problem: everyone in your study says they're completely non-racist and some of their best friends are black and all races are equally part of this vast multicolored tapestry we call humanity. Maybe some of them are stretching the truth here a bit. Until you figure out which ones, you're never going to find out anything interesting about coffee.
So you build a foreboding looking machine out of gleaming steel, covered with wires and blinking lights. You sit your subjects down in front of the machine, connect them to its electrodes, and say as convincingly as possible that it is a lie detector and they must speak the truth. Your subjects look doubtful. Didn't they hear on TV that lie detectors don't really work? They'll stick to their vehement assertions of tolerance until you get a more impressive-looking machine, thank you.
You get smarter. Before your experiment, you make the subjects fill in a survey, which you secretly copy while they're not looking. Then you bring them in front of the gleaming metal lie detector, and dare them to try to thwart it. Every time they give an answer different from the one on the survey, you frown and tell them that the machine has detected their fabrication. When the subject is suitably impressed, you start asking them about racism.
The subjects start grudgingly admitting they have some racist attitudes. You have invented the Bogus Pipeline.

The Bogus Pipeline is quite powerful. Since its invention in the 70s, several different studies demonstrate that its victims will give significantly less self-enhancing answers to a wide variety of questions than will subjects not connected to the machinery. In cases where facts can be checked, Pipeline subjects' answers tend to be more factually correct than normal subjects'.
In one of the more interesting Bogus Pipeline experiments, Millham and Kellogg wanted to know how much of a person's average self-enhancement is due to self-deception biases, and how much is due to simple lying. They asked people some questions about themselves under normal and Pipeline conditions, using the Marlowe-Crowne scale. This sca...
Thoughts on status signals
by pwno — 2009-03-23T21:25:26.871Z

The LW community knows all too well about the status-seeking tendencies everyone has, not excluding themselves. However, the discussion on status signaling needs to be developed further. Here are some questions I don’t think have been addressed: what can we conclude about people who are blatantly signaling higher status? Should we or can we stop people from signaling?

First, let me clarify what I believe to be the nature of status signals. A status signal only exists in certain contexts. A signal in one community may not be affective in another simply because the other community has a different value system. Driving up to a Singularity Summit with 24 inch spinning rims on your car will signal low status, if anything.

An interesting property of status signals is that they expire. If everybody knows that everybody knows that a certain behavior has been used as a status signal in the past, it no longer works. One example of a status signal that is nearing expiration is buying an unacquainted woman a drink at the bar (note the context I am referring to; buying someone a drink may signal high status in other contexts). There is nothing inherently wrong with this act; it’s just that women know that most men are just trying to signal for high status—therefore, the signal won’t work. Some men know that women know about this signal and, thus, stop using the signal.

On LW, one signal on the verge of expiring is being a contrarian about everything or always finding faults with another’s arguments. This, however, could lead to a new anti-signal signal: agreeing too much.

Signals that have completely expired are infinitely more numerous. For example, showing your resume or college transcript in most contexts is unacceptable. Even when applying for a job, the resume is no longer sufficient—several interviews are now necessary. Of course, in the interviews, the interviewer is just looking for unexpired signals i.e. signals they don’t know are signals.

This discussion on the expiration of signals raises this question: why do signals expire?

When A realizes that B is signaling, B’s incentive scheme is exposed. A knows that B is trying to make himself appear higher status in the eyes of A or anyone else he is signaling to. Furthermore, A knows that B thinks A doesn’t know the signal is, in fact, a signal. Otherwise...
Book: Psychiatry and the Human Condition
by patrissimo — 2009-03-23T19:14:41.401Z

I'm about half-way through this fascinating book, conveniently available for free online, which is at the intersection of psychiatry and evolutionary psychology. I don't have the time to do it justice, so I'm going to post a few choice excerpts here in the hope that those who are more prolific and insightful than I am will add further analysis.

Just to make sure it's clear how this all ties in to bias, I'll start with a bias-relevant section. The book ties delusional behavior in with the theory of consciousness as primarily existing for social intelligence purposes, and thus malfunctions in our reading of the social facts such as human intention are what cause delusions:

But some people with delusions are entirely ‘normal’ except for the false belief, and the belief itself is neither impossible nor outlandish. Any other unusual behaviors can be traced back to that false belief. For instance, a man may have the fixed, false and dominating belief that his wife is having an affair with a neighbour. This belief may be so dominating as to lead to a large program of surveillance - spying on his wife, searching her handbag, examining her clothes etc. Yet the same man may show no evidence of irrationality in other areas of his life, being able to function normally at work and socializing easily with acquaintances, so that only close friends and family are aware of the existence of the delusion. In such instances the delusion is said to be ‘encapsulated’, ie. sealed-off from other aspects of mental life, and these people are said to have a delusional disorder.

...

Delusions are typically stated to have three major defining characteristics. Firstly that a delusional belief is false, secondly that this false belief is behaviorally dominant, and thirdly that the false belief is resistant to counter-argument. All these characteristics are shown by delusional disorders, yet they occur in a context of generally non-pathological cognitive functioning.

Humans are extremely prone to ‘false’ beliefs, or at least beliefs that strike many or most other people as false. Some of these false beliefs are strongly held and dominate behavior. It is trivially obvious that humans are imperfect logicians operating for most of the time on incomplete information, so mistakes are inevitable. But it is striking that although everyone would...
Playing Video Games In Shuffle Mode
by talisman — 2009-03-23T11:59:33.469Z

One of the missions of OB/LW is to attract new learners, and it's clear that they are succeeding. But the format feels like a very difficult one for those new to these ideas, with beginner-level ideas interspersed with advanced or unsettled theory and meta-level discussions. You wouldn't play <insert cool-sounding, anime-ish video game here> with the levels on shuffle mode, but reading Less Wrong must feel like doing so for initiates.

How do we make the site better for learners? Provide a "syllabus" that shows a series of OB and LW posts which should be read in order? Have a separate beginner site or feed or header? Put labels on posts that designate them with a level?
I'm confused. Could someone help?
by CronoDAS — 2009-03-23T05:26:24.617Z

Imagine that I'm offering a bet that costs 1 dollar to accept. The prize is X + 5 dollars, and the odds of winning are 1 in X. Accepting this bet, therefore, has an expected value of 5 dollars a positive expected value, and offering it has an expected value of -5 dollars. It seems like a good idea to accept the bet, and a bad idea for me to offer it, for any reasonably sized value of X.

Does this still hold for unreasonably sized values of X? Specifically, what if I make X really, really, big? If X is big enough, I can reasonably assume that, basically, nobody's ever going to win. I could offer a bet with odds of 1 in 10100 once every second until the Sun goes out, and still expect, with near certainty, that I'll never have to make good on my promise to pay. So I can offer the bet without caring about its negative expected value, and take free money from all the expected value maximizers out there.

What's wrong with this picture?

See also: Taleb Distribution, Nick Bostrom's version of Pascal's Mugging

(Now, in the real world, I obviously don't have 10100 +5 dollars to cover my end of the bet, but does that really matter?)

Edit: I should have actually done the math. :(