trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Price of Life
by BenAlbahari — 2010-03-20T09:40:12.278Z

Less Wrong readers are familiar with the idea you can and should put a price on life. Unfortunately the Big Lie that you can't and shouldn't has big consequences in the current health care debate. Here's some articles on it:

Yvain's blog post here (HT: Vladimir Nesov).
Peter Singer's article on rationing health care here.
Wikipedia here.
Experts and policy makers who debate this issue here.

For those new to Less Wrong, here's the crux of Peter Singer's reasoning as to why you can put a price on life:

The dollar value that bureaucrats place on a generic human life is intended to reflect social values, as revealed in our behavior. It is the answer to the question: "How much are you willing to pay to save your life?" — except that, of course, if you asked that question of people who were facing death, they would be prepared to pay almost anything to save their lives. So instead, economists note how much people are prepared to pay to reduce the risk that they will die. How much will people pay for air bags in a car, for instance? Once you know how much they will pay for a specified reduction in risk, you multiply the amount that people are willing to pay by how much the risk has been reduced, and then you know, or so the theory goes, what value people place on their lives. Suppose that there is a 1 in 100,000 chance that an air bag in my car will save my life, and that I would pay $50 — but no more than that — for an air bag. Then it looks as if I value my life at $50 x 100,000, or $5 million.

The theory sounds good, but in practice it has problems. We are not good at taking account of differences between very small risks, so if we are asked how much we would pay to reduce a risk of dying from 1 in 1,000,000 to 1 in 10,000,000, we may give the same answer as we would if asked how much we would pay to reduce the risk from 1 in 500,000 to 1 in 10,000,000. Hence multiplying what we would pay to reduce the risk of death by the reduction in risk lends an apparent mathematical precision to the outcome of the calculation — the supposed value of a human life — that our intuitive responses to the questions cannot support. Nevertheless, this approach to setting a value on a human life is at least closer to what we really believe — and to what we should believe — than dramatic pronouncements about the infinite value of ev

...
Lights, Camera, Action!
by Alicorn — 2010-03-20T05:29:21.102Z

Sequence index: Living Luminously
Previously in sequence: The ABC's of Luminosity
Next in sequence: The Spotlight

You should pay attention to key mental events, on a regular and frequent basis, because important thoughts can happen very briefly or very occasionally and you need to catch them.

You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the third story from Seven Shiny Stories.

Luminosity is hard and you are complicated. You can't meditate on yourself for ten minutes over a smoothie and then announce your self-transparency. You have to keep working at it over a long period of time, not least because some effects don't work over the short term. If your affect varies with the seasons, or with major life events, then you'll need to keep up the first phase of work through a full year or a major life event, and it turns out those don't happen every alternate Thursday. Additionally, you can't cobble together the best quality models from snippets of introspection that are each five seconds long; extended strings of cognition are important, too, and can take quite a long time to unravel fully.
Sadly, looking at what you are thinking inevitably changes it. With enough introspection, this wouldn't influence your accuracy about your overall self - there's no reason in principle why you couldn't spend all your waking hours noting your own thoughts and forming meta-thoughts in real time - but practically speaking that's not going to happen. Therefore, some of your data will have to come from memory. To minimize the error introduction that comes of retrieving things from storage, it's best to arrange to reflect on very recent thoughts. It may be worth your while to set up an external reminder system to periodically prompt you to look inward, both in the moment and retrospectively over the last brief segment of time. This can be a specifically purposed system (i.e. set a timer to go off every half hour or so), or you can tie it to convenient promptings from the world as-is, like being asked "What's up?" or "Penny for your thoughts".
When you introspect, there is a lot to keep track of. For instance, consider the following:

What were you thinking about? (This could be more than one thing. You are a massively parallel system.) Was it a concept, image, sensation, desir

...
Information theory and the symmetry of updating beliefs
by Academian — 2010-03-20T00:34:09.078Z

Contents:

1. The beautiful symmetry of Bayesian updating
2. Odds and log odds: a short comparison
3. Further discussion of information

Rationality is all about handling this thing called "information". Fortunately, we live in an era after the rigorous formulation of Information Theory by C.E. Shannon in 1948, a basic understanding of which can actually help you think about your beliefs, in a way similar but complementary to probability theory. Indeed, it has flourished as an area of research exactly because it helps people in many areas of science to describe the world. We should take advantage of this!

The information theory of events, which I'm about to explain, is about as difficult as high school probability. It is certainly easier than the information theory of multiple random variables (which right now is explained on Wikipedia), even though the equations look very similar. If you already know it, this can be a linkable source of explanations to save you writing time :)

So! To get started, what better way to motivate information theory than to answer a question about Bayesianism?

The beautiful symmetry of Bayesian updating

The factor by which observing A increases the probability of B is the same as the factor by which observing B increases the probability of A. This factor is P(A and B)/(P(A)·P(B)), which I'll denote by pev(A,B) for reasons to come. It can vary from 0 to +infinity, and allows us to write Bayes' Theorem succinctly in both directions:

P(A|B)=P(A)·pev(A,B), and P(B|A)=P(B)·pev(A,B)

What does this symmetry mean, and how should it affect the way we think?

A great way to think of pev(A,B) is as a multiplicative measure of mutual evidence, which I'll call mutual probabilistic evidence to be specific. If pev=1 if they're independent, if pev>1 they make each other more likely, and if pev<1 if they make each other less likely.

But two ways to think are better than one, so I will offer a second explanation, in terms of information, which I often find quite helpful in analyzing my own beliefs:

Probabilistic evidence is related to "mutual information"

Lets examine a simple example, and work our way up to illustrating what I mean:

Say I flip four fair coins with faces "0" and "1" to generate a 4...
Think Before You Speak (And Signal It)
by Wei Dai — 2010-03-19T22:21:12.297Z

In deciding whether to pay attention to an idea, a big clue, if it were readily available, would be how many people have checked it over for correctness, and for how long. Most new ideas that human beings come up with are wrong, and if someone just thought of something five seconds ago and excitedly wants to tell you about it, probably the only benefit of listening is not offending the person.

But it seems quite rare for this important piece of metadata to be straightforwardly declared, perhaps because such declarations can't be trusted in general. Instead, we usually have to infer it from various other clues, like the speaker's personality (how long do they typically think before they speak?), formality of the language employed to express the idea, the presence of spelling and grammar mistakes, the venue where the idea is presented or published, etc.

Unfortunately, such inferences can be imprecise or error-prone. For example, the same speaker may sometimes think a lot before speaking, and other times think little before speaking. Using costly signals like formal language is also wasteful compared to everyone simply telling the truth (but can still be a second-best solution in low-trust groups). In a community like ours, where most of us are striving to build reputations for being (or at least trying to be) rational and cooperative, and therefore there is a level of trust higher than usual, it might be worth experimenting with a norm of declaring how long we've thought about each new idea when presenting it. This may be either in addition to or as an alternative to other ways of communicating how confident we are about our ideas.

To follow my own advice, I'll say that I've thought about this topic off and on for about two weeks, and then spent about three hours writing and reviewing this post. I first started thinking about it at the SIAI decision theory workshop, which was the first time I ever worked with a large group of people on a complex problem in real time. I noticed that the variance in the amount of time different people spend thinking through new ideas before they speak is quite high. I was surprised to discover, for example, that Gary Drescher has been working on decision theory for many years and has considered and discarded about a dozen possible solutions.

The trigger for actually writing this post is yesterday's Overcoming Bias post Twin Conspira...
The ABC's of Luminosity
by Alicorn — 2010-03-18T21:47:05.648Z

Sequence index: Living Luminously
Previously in sequence: Let There Be Light
Next in sequence: Lights, Camera, Action!

Affect, behavior, and circumstance interact with each other. These interactions constitute informative patterns that you should identify and use in your luminosity project.

You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the second story from Seven Shiny Stories.

The single most effective thing you can do when seeking luminosity is to learn to correlate your ABC's, collecting data about how three interrelated items interact and appear together or separately.
A stands for "affect". Affect is how you feel and what's on your mind. It can be far more complicated than "enh, I'm fine" or "today I'm sad". You have room for plenty of simultaneous emotions, and different ones can be directed at different things - being on a generally even keel about two different things isn't the same as being nervous about one and cheerful about the other, and neither state is the same as being entirely focused on one subject that thrills you to pieces. If you're nervous about your performance evaluation but tickled pink that you just bought a shiny new consumer good and looking forward to visiting your cousin next week yet irritated that you just stubbed your toe, all while being amused by the funny song on the radio, that's this. For the sake of the alphabet, I'm lumping in less emotionally laden cognition here, too - what thoughts occur to you, what chains of reasoning you follow, what parts of the environment catch your attention.
B stands for "behavior". Behavior here means what you actually do. Include as a dramatically lower-weighted category those things that you fully intended to do, and actually moved to do, but were then prevented from without from doing, or changed your mind about due to new, unanticipated information. This is critical. Fleeting designs and intentions cross our minds continually, and if you don't firmly and definitively place your evidential weight on the things that ultimately result in action, you will get subconsciously cherry-picked subsets of those incomplete plan-wisps. This is particularly problematic because weaker intentions will be dissuaded by minor environmental complications at a much higher rate. Don't worry overmuch about "re...
"Life Experience" as a Conversation-Halter
by Seth_Goldin — 2010-03-18T19:39:40.860Z

Sometimes in an argument, an older opponent might claim that perhaps as I grow older, my opinions will change, or that I'll come around on the topic. Implicit in this claim is the assumption that age or quantity of experience is a proxy for legitimate authority. In and of itself, such "life experience" is necessary for an informed rational worldview, but it is not sufficient.

The claim that more "life experience" will completely reverse an opinion indicates that the person making such a claim believes that opinions from others are based primarily on accumulating anecdotes, perhaps derived from extensive availability bias. It actually is a pretty decent assumption that other people aren't Bayesian, because for the most part, they aren't. Many can confirm this, including Haidt, Kahneman, and Tversky.
When an opponent appeals to more "life experience," it's a last resort, and it's a conversation halter. This tactic is used when an opponent is cornered. The claim is nearly an outright acknowledgment of moving to exit the realm of rational debate. Why stick to rational discourse when you can shift to trading anecdotes? It levels the playing field, because anecdotes, while Bayesian evidence, are easily abused, especially for complex moral, social, and political claims. As rhetoric, this is frustratingly effective, but it's logically rude.

Although it might be rude and rhetorically weak, it would be authoritatively appropriate for a Bayesian to be condescending to a non-Bayesian in an argument. Conversely, it can be downright maddening for a non-Bayesian to be condescending to a Bayesian, because the non-Bayesian lacks the epistemological authority to warrant such condescension. E.T. Jaynes wrote in Probability Theory about the arrogance of the uninformed, "The semiliterate on the next bar stool will tell you with absolute, arrogant assurance just how to solve the world's problems; while the scholar who has spent a lifetime studying their causes is not at all sure how to do this."
Sequential Organization of Thinking: "Six Thinking Hats"
by JustinShovelain — 2010-03-18T05:22:48.488Z

Many people move chaotically from thought to thought without explicit structure. Inappropriate structuring may leave blind spots or cause the gears of thought to grind to a halt, but the advantages of appropriate structuring are immense:

Correct thought structuring ensures that you examine all relevant facets of an issue, idea, or fact.

It ensures you know what to do next at every stage and are not frustrated or crippled by akrasia between moments of choice; the next action is always obvious.

It minimizes the overhead of task switching: you are in control and do not dither between possibilities.

It may be used in a social context so that potentially challenging issues and thoughts may be brought up in a non-threatening manner (let's look at the positive aspects, now let's focus purely on the negative...).

To illustrate thought structuring, I use the example of Edward de Bono's "six thinking hats" mnemonic. With Edward de Bono's "six thinking hats" method you metaphorically put on various colored "hats" (perspectives) and switch "hats" depending on the task. I will use the somewhat controversial issue of cryonics as my running example.1

Gather the inputs:
White hat - Facts and information
This is the perspective where you focus on gathering all the information relevant to the situation by deducing facts, remembering, asking colleagues, reviewing the literature, and conducting experiments.
Concrete declarative facts:

Most of the information is retained when someone is cryogenically frozen.

No one has been revived yet.

Bacteria, seeds, and human embryos may be frozen and revived.

Red hat - Feelings and emotions
This is the perspective where you think about or convey vague intuitions. These are rules of thumb, abstracted probabilities, impressions, and things in your procedural understanding. This is also the time to focus on anything that might be interfering with your objectivity.
Intuitions and vague inputs:

The technology will exist in the future to revive the cryogenically frozen.

People in the future will revive us if they can.

Family relations will be saddened by choosing cryonics.

Life will be better in the future than in the present.

Invention and problem solving:
Green hat - New ideas
Going into this perspective you have gathered the evidence and intuitions. Now you focus on using these to solve the problem or invent new approaches. At this po...
Let There Be Light
by Alicorn — 2010-03-17T19:35:59.046Z

Sequence index: Living Luminously
Previously in sequence: You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue
Next in sequence: The ABC's of Luminosity

You can start from psych studies, personality tests, and feedback from people you know when you're learning about yourself. Then you can throw out the stuff that sounds off, keep what sounds good, and move on.

You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the first story from Seven Shiny Stories.

Where do you get your priors, when you start modeling yourself seriously instead of doing it by halfhearted intuition?
Well, one thing's for sure: not with the caliber of introspection you're most likely starting with. If you've spent any time on this site at all, you know people are riddled with biases and mechanisms for self-deception that systematically confound us about who we are. ("I'm splendid and brilliant! The last five hundred times I did non-splendid non-brilliant things were outrageous flukes!") Humans suck at most things, and obeying the edict "Know thyself!" is not a special case.
The outside view has gotten a bit of a bad rap, but I'm going to defend it - as a jumping-off point, anyway - when I fill our luminosity toolbox. There's a major body of literature designed to figure out just what the hell happens inside our skulls: it's called psychology, and they have a rather impressive track record. For instance, learning about heuristics and biases may let you detect them in action in yourself. I can often tell when I'm about to be subject to the bystander effect ("There is someone sitting in the middle of the road. Should I call 911? I mean, she's sitting up and everything and there are non-alarmed people looking at her - but gosh, I probably don't look alarmed either..."), have made some progress in reducing the extent to which I generalize from one example ("How are you not all driven insane by the spatters of oil all over the stove?!"), and am suspicious when I think I might be above average in some way and have no hard data to back it up ("Now I can be confident that I am in fact good at this sort of problem: I answered all of these questions and most people can't, according to someone who has no motivation to lie!"). Now, even if you are a standard psych study subject, of course you aren't going to align with every psychol...
Disconnect between Stated/Implemented Preferences
by Strange7 — 2010-03-17T02:26:45.596Z

Currently, the comment for which I've received the most positive karma by a factor of four is a joke about institutionalized ass-rape. A secondhand joke, effectively a quote with no source cited. Furthermore, the comment had, at best, tangential relevance to the subject of discussion. If anyone were to provide a detailed explanation of why they voted as they did, I predict that I would be appreciative.

Based on this evidence, which priors need to be adjusted? Discuss.
You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue
by Alicorn — 2010-03-17T01:18:13.672Z

Previously in sequence/sequence index: Living Luminously
Next in sequence: Let There Be Light

Luminosity is fun, useful to others, and important in self-improvement. You should learn about it with this sequence.

Luminosity? Pah! Who needs it?
It's a legitimate question. The typical human gets through life with astonishingly little introspection, much less careful, accurate introspection. Our models of ourselves are sometimes even worse than our models of each other - we have more data, but also more biases loading up our reflection with noise. Most of the time, most people act on their emotions and beliefs directly, without the interposition of self-aware deliberation. And this doesn't usually seem to get anyone maimed or killed - when was the last time a gravestone read "Here Lies Our Dear Taylor, Who Might Be Alive Today With More Internal Clarity About The Nature Of Memory Retrieval"? Nonsense. If Taylor needs to remember something, it'll present itself, or not, and if there's a chronic problem with the latter then Taylor can export memories to the environment. Figuring out how the memories are stored in the first place and tweaking that is not high on the to-do list.
Still, I think it's worth investing considerable time and effort into improving your luminosity. I submit three reasons why this is so.
First, you are a fascinating creature. It's just plain fun and rewarding to delve into your own mind. People in general are among the most complex, intriguing things in the world. You're no less so. You have lived a fair number of observer-moments. Starting with a native architecture that is pretty special all by itself, you've accumulated a complex set of filters by which you interpret your input - remembered past, experienced present, and anticipated future. You like things; you want things; you believe things; you expect things; you feel things. There's a lot of stuff rolled up and tucked into the fissures of your brain. Wouldn't you like to know what it is? Particularly because it's you. Many people find themselves to be their favorite topics. Are you an exception? (There's one way to find out...)
Second, an accurate model of yourself can help you help others deal with you in the best possible way. Right now, they're pr...
Living Luminously
by Alicorn — 2010-03-17T01:17:47.086Z

The following posts may be useful background material: Sorting Out Sticky Brains; Mental Crystallography; Generalizing From One Example

I took the word "luminosity" from "Knowledge and its Limits" by Timothy Williamson, although I'm using it in a different sense than he did. (He referred to "being in a position to know" rather than actually knowing, and in his definition, he doesn't quite restrict himself to mental states and events.) The original ordinary-language sense of "luminous" means "emitting light, especially self-generated light; easily comprehended; clear", which should put the titles into context.

Luminosity, as I'll use the term, is self-awareness. A luminous mental state is one that you have and know that you have. It could be an emotion, a belief or alief, a disposition, a quale, a memory - anything that might happen or be stored in your brain. What's going on in your head? What you come up with when you ponder that question - assuming, nontrivially, that you are accurate - is what's luminous to you. Perhaps surprisingly, it's hard for a lot of people to tell. Even if they can identify the occurrence of individual mental events, they have tremendous difficulty modeling their cognition over time, explaining why it unfolds as it does, or observing ways in which it's changed. With sufficient luminosity, you can inspect your own experiences, opinions, and stored thoughts. You can watch them interact, and discern patterns in how they do that. This lets you predict what you'll think - and in turn, what you'll do - in the future under various possible circumstances.

I've made it a project to increase my luminosity as much as possible over the past several years. While I am not (yet) perfectly luminous, I have already realized considerable improvements in such subsidiary skills like managing my mood, hacking into some of the systems that cause akrasia and other non-endorsed behavior, and simply being less confused about why I do and feel the things I do and feel. I have some reason to believe that I am substantially more luminous than average, because I can ask people what seem to me to be perfectly easy questions about what they're thinking and find them unable to answer. Meanwhile, I'm not trusting my mere impression that I'm...