trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Tool ideology
by PhilGoetz — 2011-09-09T22:37:18.089Z

Follow-up to Journal article about politics and mindkilling. That post showed that people can be convinced that a view is correct by being told that their political party endorses it, even if their party actually opposes it. A similar, but stranger, effect, is that people can be convinced that a view is correct because their favorite software implements it - even if they have stated that the view is wrong just minutes ago.

Subversion is a popular version-control system used by software developers. The "repository" is where subversion stores the definitive copy of each file it is keeping track of. A "diff" is when you ask subversion to show you all differences between your new code, and the last version of that code that it knows was in the repository. A "tag" is when you associate a set of versions of different files together, in a way so that they can be easily compared against or reverted to, without creating something called a "branch".

I've had variants of this conversation about Subversion three times so far:

Me: [problem X] happened because Subversion doesn't let you diff against the repository.

Other: What?

Me: Subversion doesn't let you diff against the repository. It only diffs against its local copy of the repository, which it updates when you do a checkout, commit, or update. So it won't show you any changes that someone else has made to the code since then. You can never see what changes other people have made since your last commit, because to get the changes, you have to do an update; and the changes are added to your code without being shown to you, and a diff won't show them. So you just cross your fingers and hope their changes are compatible with yours.

Other: That's ridiculous! Subversion doesn't do that. That would defeat the whole purpose of version control. That would be idiotic.

Me: Really, it does that. I've tried it. Repeatedly. I've wasted days of work because of it.

Other: Nonsense. Of COURSE Subversion diffs against the repository.

Me: Try this: Create a new file foo in your checkout in directory X. Then svn add foo and svn commit foo. Check out the same repository in directory Y. Modify foo in directory X. svn commit foo. Then do an svn diff foo from directory Y.

[A few minu...
Living Forever is Hard, part 2: Adult Longevity
by gwern — 2011-09-09T18:52:38.271Z

Previous: "Living Forever is Hard, or, The Gompertz Curve"

Following Fight Aging's "A Primer on Compression of Morbidity" today to Fries's 2011 review article "Compression of Morbidity 1980–2011: A Focused Review of Paradigms and Progress" (Fries, incidentally, introduced the concept of "compression of morbidity" in 1980), I found some interesting details in it.

From section 3:

Mortality changes can be tracked with acceptable accuracy using the Vital Statistics of the United States or other sources [16]. Figure 2 summarizes the US data since 1900, which is generally similar to that of other developed nations. All measures of longevity increase monotonically for almost all years, providing periodic headlines and prophecies of impending crises. The real message, however, is that longevity gains from age 65 and above are quite slow and probably getting slower.

...Table 1 shows the average number of years of life remaining from 1900 to 2007 from various ages, combining both sexes and ethnic groups. From birth, life expectancy increased from 49.2 years (previously estimated at 47.3 years in these same sources) in 1900 to 77.9 in 2007, a gain of life expectancy of nearly 29 years and a prodigious accomplishment. The increase was largely due to declines in perinatal mortality and reduction in infectious diseases which affected mainly younger persons. Over this period, developed nations moved from an era of acute infectious disease to one dominated by chronic illness. As a result, life extension from age 65 was increased only 6 years over the entire 20th century; from age 75 gains were only 4.2 years, from age 85 only 2.3 years and from age 100 a single year. From age 65 over the most recent 20 years, the gain has been about a year [16].

Much confusion in longevity predictions comes from using projections of life expectancy at birth to estimate future population longevity [18]. For example, “If the pace of increase in life expectancy (from birth) for developed countries over the past two centuries continues through the 21st century, most babies born since 2000 will celebrate their 100th birthdays” [29]. Note from the 100-year line of Table 1 that life expectancies for centenarians would be projected to rise only one year in the 21st century, as in the 20th. Such attention-grabbing statements follow from projecting from birth rather than age 65, th

...
Optimal User-End Internet Security (Or, Rational Internet Browsing)
by Arkanj3l — 2011-09-09T18:23:49.084Z

Hacking and Cracking, Internet security, Cypherpunk. I find these topics fascinating as well as completely over my head.

Yet, there are still some things that can be said to a layman, especially by the ever-poignant Randall Munroe:

Password Strength

Passwords Reuse

I'm guilty on both charges (reusing poorly formulated passwords, not stealing them).

These arguments may be just be the tip of the iceberg of a much larger problem that needs optimizing: Social Engineering, or mainly how it can be used against our interests (to quip Person 2, "It doesn't matter how much security you put on the box. Humans are not secure."). I get the feeling that I'm not managing my risks on the Internet as well as I should.

So the questions I ask are: In what ways do our cognitive biases come into play when we surf the Internet and interact with others? Of which of these biases can actively we protect against, and how? I've enforced HTTPS when available, as well as kept my Internet use iconoclastic rather than typical, but I doubt that's a comprehensive list.

I don't know how usefully I can contribute, but I hope that many on Less Wrong can.
What are good techniques and resources for teaching bayes theorem hands on?
by jsalvatier — 2011-09-09T15:51:51.543Z

Guy Srinivasan and I want to do a hands on tutorial on Bayes theorem for the Seattle LessWrong group. Neither of us have done this before, so we're searching for prior art; techniques that other people have tried before and descriptions of how they turned out.

What are good techniques and resources for teaching Bayes theorem? Reports of both successes and failures are useful, I'd like to know what not to do in addition to what to do.

We expect ~8 programmers and natural science students to show up.
[SEQ RERUN] Occam's Razor
by MinibearRex — 2011-09-09T14:38:31.795Z

Today's post, Occam's Razor was originally published on 26 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

To a human, Thor feels like a simpler explanation for lightning than Maxwell's equations, but that is because we don't see the full complexity of an intelligent mind. However, if you try to write a computer program to simulate Thor and a computer program to simulate Maxwell's equations, one will be much easier to accomplish. This is how the complexity of a hypothesis is measured in the formalisms of Occam's Razor.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be 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 Einstein's Arrogance, 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.
JSTOR gives public access to pre-1870 publications
by satt — 2011-09-09T14:19:48.693Z

JSTOR is a massive online archive of academic journals, virtually all of which were behind a subscription wall. (JSTOR's been quite arbitrary about locking up its content; some of the papers it hosts are available at no cost elsewhere. For example, these papers from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA are freely available on the PNAS website but not on JSTOR.) Two days ago JSTOR opened up part of its database by giving free access to nearly 500,000 old articles. From JSTOR's announcement:

I am writing to share exciting news: today, we are making journal content on JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere, freely available to the public for reading and downloading. This includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals, representing approximately 6% of the total content on JSTOR.

The announcement also refers obliquely to two related recent events — Greg Maxwell releasing a slice of old JSTOR material on the Pirate Bay (previously discussed on Less Wrong) and Aaron Swartz being charged for illicitly downloading papers from JSTOR en masse:

I realize that some people may speculate that making the Early Journal Content free to the public today is a direct response to widely-publicized events over the summer involving an individual who was indicted for downloading a substantial portion of content from JSTOR, allegedly for the purpose of posting it to file sharing sites. While we had been working on releasing the pre-1923/pre-1870 content before the incident took place, it would be inaccurate to say that these events have had no impact on our planning.

JSTOR makes similar comments in its FAQ for the new initiative too. There's also a two-minute video demo.

(Via MetaFilter. Another recent LW discussion of academic publishing.)
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 9
by Oscar_Cunningham — 2011-09-09T13:29:52.355Z

(The HPMOR discussion thread after this one is here.)

The previous thread is over the 500-comment threshold, so let's start a new Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread. This is the place to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic and anything related to it. The latest chapter as of 09/09/2011 is Ch. 77.

The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. The fanfiction.net author page is the central location for information about updates and links to HPMOR-related goodies, and AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author's Notes.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it's fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that "Eliezer said X is true" unless you use rot13.
Partners in scholarship - Search and Find
by TrE — 2011-09-09T12:50:38.844Z

Pondering the question of how to do efficient scholarly study, I figured a good way for me may be having something like a chavruta although not quite the same, a partner with which to study a field of science together, helping each other at answering questions which arise, searching for useful articles, in general, being more awesome together than each of us could be alone. Such a scholar partner should, for me, have a similar state of knowledge, i.e. the difference should be small enough to overcome it in a short amount of time, have similar interests as well as a similar amount of motivation, have enough spare time, live in a similar time zone and ideally be of similar age and nationality/language. In case others are searching for a scholar partner as well, I'm posting my personal information in the comments instead of here.

What is your opinion on this type of cooperation? What might be pitfalls in this approach? Did I forget any important criteria for a useful scholar partner?
Scholarship Booster: My favorite journals
by lukeprog — 2011-09-09T09:41:15.747Z

Those interested in my same primary area of interest (cogsci/philosophy) may like to know what my favorite journals are. (Notice they are heavily weighted for review articles.) Here are some of my favorites:

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Annual Review of Psychology

Topics in Cognitive Science

Current Directions in Psychological Science

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science

Mind and Language

Artificial Intelligence Review

Philosophy Compass

Review of Philosophy and Psychology

Nature Reviews Neuroscience

Judgment and Decision Making

Journal of Behavioral Decision Making

Thinking and Reasoning
An attempt to 'explain away' virtue ethics
by lukeprog — 2011-09-09T08:49:58.256Z

Recently I summarized Joshua Greene's attempt to 'explain away' deontological ethics by revealing the cognitive algorithms that generate deontological judgments and showing that the causes of our deontological judgments are inconsistent with normative principles we would endorse.

Mark Alfano has recently done the same thing with virtue ethics (which generally requires a fairly robust theory of character trait possession) in his March 2011 article on the topic:

I discuss the attribution errors, which are peculiar to our folk intuitions about traits. Next, I turn to the input heuristics and biases, which — though they apply more broadly than just to reasoning about traits — entail further errors in our judgments about trait-possession. After that, I discuss the processing heuristics and biases, which again apply more broadly than the attribution errors but are nevertheless relevant to intuitions about traits... I explain what the biases are, cite the relevant authorities, and draw inferences from them in order to show their relevance to the dialectic about virtue ethics. At the end of the article, I evaluate knowledge-claims about virtues in light of these attribution biases, input heuristics and biases, and processing heuristics and biases. Every widely accepted theory of knowledge must reject such knowledge-claims when they are based merely on folk intuitions.

An overview of the 'situationist' attack on character trait possession can be found in Doris' book Lack of Character.
"Friends do not let friends compute p values."
by lukeprog — 2011-09-09T07:10:40.078Z

LWers may find useful two recent articles summarizing (for cognitive scientists) why Bayesian inference is superior to frequentist inference.

Kruschke - What to believe: Bayesian methods for data analysis

Wagenmakers et al - Bayesian versus frequentist inference

(The quote "Friends do not let friends compute p values" comes from the first article.)
Human consciousness as a tractable scientific problem
by lukeprog — 2011-09-09T06:39:41.633Z

I encounter many intelligent people (not usually LWers, though) who say that despite our recent scientific advances, human consciousness remains a mystery and currently intractable to science. This is wrong. Empirically distinguishable theories of consciousness have been around for at least 15 years, and the data are beginning to favor some theories over others. For a recent example, see this August 2011 article from Lau & Rosenthal in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, one of my favorite journals. (Review articles, yay!)

Abstract:

Higher-order theories of consciousness argue that conscious awareness crucially depends on higher-order mental representations that represent oneself as being in particular mental states. These theories have featured prominently in recent debates on conscious awareness. We provide new leverage on these debates by reviewing the empirical evidence in support of the higher-order view. We focus on evidence that distinguishes the higher-order view from its alternatives, such as the first-order, global workspace and recurrent visual processing theories. We defend the higher-order view against several major criticisms, such as prefrontal activity reflects attention but not awareness, and prefrontal lesion does not abolish awareness. Although the higher-order approach originated in philosophical discussions, we show that it is testable and has received substantial empirical support.
Meetup : Seattle Biweekly Meetup: Occam's Razor, Repetition and Time's Up
by jsalvatier — 2011-09-09T04:46:49.745Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Biweekly Meetup: Occam's Razor, Repetition and Time's Up

WHEN:
19 September 2011 04:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
414 50th St NE, Seattle, WA

The biweekly meetup is happening at the regular place and time. The plan is to:

Read and then discuss EY's post Occam's Razor

Play a variant of Repetition (two people conversing, one making observations)

Play the good version of Time's Up

We will be ordering take out again, so please bring some cash if you expect to be hungry.

The official end of the meetup will be 6:30pm, but people are welcome to stay and hang out after that.

Looking forward to seeing you guys!

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Biweekly Meetup: Occam's Razor, Repetition and Time's Up
[Story] Rejection
by atucker — 2011-09-09T04:39:18.007Z

Just a piece about rejection therapy I did yesterday on the subway. The language might be a bit hyperbolic, but I was kind of on-edge last night. It seemed like it might be a fun story, I want to get better at writing, and gooey self-disclosure seems to be in vogue, so I posted it. If you don't like reading about feelings, then don't continue.

Hope you enjoy,

Story

I felt electric. It was as if my blood was made up of cool and charged water, chilling my bones as it energized my flesh, making me feel like at any moment my body could snap into doing something else. I got out of my seat, and lurched over to one of the hand holds in front of me. Reflecting, I decided that I would be in a more central position if I stood in front of the exit door, and my body swayed over there.

My head was a bit foggy, but my path was clear. The outside world or my thoughts were racing by, but I could couldn't tell which. The girl who had glanced at me while I was sitting down looked up. I noticed a few other eyes glancing up towards me while I was walking, and felt like I was at risk for shattering into a bunch of pieces. I was ready for anything, but there was only one thing I was thinking of doing.

“Excuse me.

“This probably sounds kind of creepy.

“But would anyone like to have a conversation?”

The train stopped moving.

I intended to look around, but I'm not convinced that I actually did. I wanted to have some time to see other people's reactions, but as far I can tell, I could only look at an oblique angle through the window that was above where I was sitting when I was reading.

I had actually expected someone to say yes. I looked around expectantly to the side of people who did not fit my demographic expectations of a person who would actually say yes. A few went back to their distractions.

“Okay, no problem. Bye then.”

I semi-purposefully turned around and walked off the train. My legs were shaking in the way they did back when I was scared of public speaking, my knees feeling like rounding errors in their control code was threatening to make them send my shin in all sorts of nasty directions, while the tensed muscles in my leg seemed to hold it all together. The world did not end. Weird.

I felt like throwing up. Luckily, the sensation was blocked in my chest by a collision with some coldhot coming from my arms. They seemed to be really in contro...
Optimal User-End Internet Security (Or, Rational Internet Browsing)
by Arkanj3l — 2011-09-09T01:04:06.792Z

Hacking and Cracking, Internet security, Cypherpunk. I find these topics fascinating as well as completely over my head.

Yet, there are still some things that can be said to a layman, especially by the ever-poignant Russel Monroe:

https://www.xkcd.com/936/

https://www.xkcd.com/792/

I'm guilty on both charges (reusing poorly formulated passwords, not stealing them).

These arguments may be just be the tip of the iceberg of a [much larger problem that needs optimizing](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Social_engineering_%28security%29): Social Engineering, or [mainly how it can be used against our interests](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Dark_arts) (to quip [Person 2](http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox), "It doesn't matter how much security you put on the box. Humans are not secure."). I get the feeling that I'm not managing my risks on the Internet as well as I should.

So the questions I beg are: In what ways do our cognitive biases come into play when we surf the Internet and interact with others? Of which of these biases can actively we protect against, and how?

I don't know how usefully I can contribute, but I hope that many on Less Wrong can.
Meetup : Vancouver Rationalists: LAN Party + Board Games + Discussion at Waves Cafe: September 10th 3:00 to 5:00PM
by Arkanj3l — 2011-09-08T22:39:37.434Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Rationalists: LAN Party + Board Games + Discussion at Waves Cafe: September 10th 3:00 to 5:00PM

WHEN:
10 September 2011 03:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
Waves Coffee House, 100-900 Howe St. Vancouver, BC V6Z 2M4

Yet another meetup at Waves. This time, on a Saturday; hopefully three days of school have been nice to the students, and there is time enough for... rationality.

Currently, what I have in mind is a LAN and Games party (details in link). However, some may consider that too tangential to the cause. As a result, I propose the following prompt:

Discuss, and examine, what you think your desires are. Are they truly your desires? Do you desire to desire them, and/or are they simply "signals"?

Bring interested friends and beloveds, enemies and nemesises (nemesii?).

Contact me at kenneth(dot)bruskiewicz(at)gmail(dot)com for questions, details, or Google Group membership.

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Rationalists: LAN Party + Board Games + Discussion at Waves Cafe: September 10th 3:00 to 5:00PM
[Link] New arm of GiveWell Research: GiveWell Labs
by multifoliaterose — 2011-09-08T21:23:54.234Z

Announcing GiveWell Labs

We’re now launching a new initiative within GiveWell that will not be subject to either of these constraints. We plan to invest about 25% of our research time in what we’re calling GiveWell Labs: an arm of our research process that will be open to any giving opportunity, no matter what form and what sector.

Through GiveWell Labs, we will try to identify outstanding giving opportunities (whether they’re organizations or specific projects), publish rankings of these giving opportunities (separate from the top charities list we maintain using our existing research process) and try to raise money for these opportunities. Donors have pre-committed a minimum of $1 million to the GiveWell Labs initiative, meaning that we will have at least $1 million to commit to our choice of projects even if we are able to raise nothing else. (We expect to raise more if and when we find great giving opportunities; the $1 million has been committed based on donors’ trust in our ability to find such opportunities.)