trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
New arm of GiveWell Research: GiveWell Labs [Link]
by multifoliaterose — 2011-09-08T21:23:52.981Z

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.)
Pressure to publish increases scientists' vulnerability to positive bias
by lukeprog — 2011-09-08T20:49:23.821Z

More evidence for this hypothesis:

The growing competition and “publish or perish” culture in academia might conflict with the objectivity and integrity of research, because it forces scientists to produce “publishable” results at all costs. Papers are less likely to be published and to be cited if they report “negative” results (results that fail to support the tested hypothesis). Therefore, if publication pressures increase scientific bias, the frequency of “positive” results in the literature should be higher in the more competitive and “productive” academic environments. This study verified this hypothesis by measuring the frequency of positive results in a large random sample of papers with a corresponding author based in the US. Across all disciplines, papers were more likely to support a tested hypothesis if their corresponding authors were working in states that, according to NSF data, produced more academic papers per capita. The size of this effect increased when controlling for state's per capita R&D expenditure and for study characteristics that previous research showed to correlate with the frequency of positive results, including discipline and methodology. Although the confounding effect of institutions' prestige could not be excluded (researchers in the more productive universities could be the most clever and successful in their experiments), these results support the hypothesis that competitive academic environments increase not only scientists' productivity but also their bias. The same phenomenon might be observed in other countries where academic competition and pressures to publish are high.

Fanelli (2010). Do Pressures to Publish Increase Scientists' Bias? An Empirical Support from US States Data. PLoS ONE 5(4): e10271.
Meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup
by EvelynM — 2011-09-08T20:28:57.930Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup

WHEN:
14 September 2011 07:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
Bean Cycle, 144 North College Avenue, Fort Collins, CO 80524

An opportunity to practice improving your thinking skills in a supportive group. And fun and games.

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup
[Question] Do you know a good game or demo for demonstrating sunk costs?
by AnnaSalamon — 2011-09-08T20:07:55.420Z

I'm hoping to find something that can be done in 5 minutes or so, as a classroom demonstration (for the rationality curricula).

I find sunk costs have a large effect in the board game "Go" (so that beginners are instructed "not to throw good stones after bad"), and I assume it also does in poker, but both of those games are too long and too full of distractors to be used in a simple demo.

Thanks for any suggestions!
Rationality Boot [Mini]Camp... night class style?
by jwhendy — 2011-09-08T16:35:20.237Z

I was very interested in the Rationality Boot Camp, when it was announced, but the practical limitations for someone with kids, financial commitments dependent on a full time job, etc. made it completely unfeasible. I'm still very interested in something like this and wondered if there would be any interest in a "night class" version. Perhaps webcast or broadcast live via something like skype or similar? (I guess I'm not sure if it ever happened, was cancelled, or whether it morphed or inspired the Rationality Minicamp which I know did happen.)

I see benefit in pre-committing to something organized, as my own desires to read everything LW has to offer have been only partially successful (lots of random articles here and there, and only a partial sequence). A commitment, especially one that I've paid for, will up the ante for failure. But... I just can't deal with the travel, time away from work/wife/kids, etc. all at one time for something like a Boot [Mini]Camp.

Are there any others who might find something like this beneficial?

Can anyone from the "teacher side" of the Rationality Camp speak to the feasibility of something like this? Any interest? What would the cost need to be to make this worth while? Would typical bandwidths allow for something like this?

I suppose another route would be to conduct another Boot/Mini-Camp and make the recordings available afterward?

I think in the end, it's the personal "tutor" aspect that I appreciate so much about something like this. There's something to the notion of a flesh and blood guide that really appeals to me. I could probably do the same by reading something and posting a million discussion posts on questions I have, but one who has mastered a topic just has the wonderful ability to explain it such that it finally clicks at which point all makes sense. Sometimes, without the ability to pester and prod, I can't get that with every LW post.

'Nuff rambling about this. Thoughts/comments/suggestions?
Rough calculations: Fermi and the art of guessing
by XiXiDu — 2011-09-08T10:39:34.009Z

Fermi problem

In science, particularly in physics or engineering education, a Fermi problem, Fermi question, or Fermi estimate is an estimation problem designed to teach dimensional analysis, approximation, and the importance of clearly identifying one's assumptions. Named after physicist Enrico Fermi, such problems typically involve making justified guesses about quantities that seem impossible to compute given limited available information.

Fermi was known for his ability to make good approximate calculations with little or no actual data, hence the name. One example is his estimate of the strength of the atomic bomb detonated at the Trinity test, based on the distance travelled by pieces of paper dropped from his hand during the blast. Fermi's estimate of 10 kilotons of TNT was remarkably close to the now-accepted value of around 20 kilotons, a difference of less than one order of magnitude.

[...]

Scientists often look for Fermi estimates of the answer to a problem before turning to more sophisticated methods to calculate a precise answer. This provides a useful check on the results: where the complexity of a precise calculation might obscure a large error, the simplicity of Fermi calculations makes them far less susceptible to such mistakes. (Performing the Fermi calculation first is preferable because the intermediate estimates might otherwise be biased by knowledge of the calculated answer.)

Fermi estimates are also useful in approaching problems where the optimal choice of calculation method depends on the expected size of the answer. For instance, a Fermi estimate might indicate whether the internal stresses of a structure are low enough that it can be accurately described by linear elasticity; or if the estimate already bears significant relationship in scale relative to some other value, for example, if a structure will be over-engineered to withstand loads several times greater than the estimate.

Although Fermi calculations are often not accurate, as there may be many problems with their assumptions, this sort of analysis does tell us what to look for to get a better answer.

Link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem

Fermi Problem: Power developed at the eruption of the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcanic system in June 2011

Enrico Fermi was renowned for his ability to make reliable estimates. But how well can you do on a modern estimation problem?

[

...
[SEQ RERUN] Einstein's Arrogance
by MinibearRex — 2011-09-08T02:34:51.857Z

Today's post, Einstein's Arrogance was originally published on 25 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Albert Einstein, when asked what he would do if an experiment disproved his theory of general relativity, responded with "I would feel sorry for [the experimenter]. The theory is correct." While this may sound like arrogance, Einstein doesn't look nearly as bad from a Bayesian perspective. In order to even consider the hypothesis of general relativity in the first place, he would have needed a large amount of Bayesian evidence.

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 How Much Evidence Does It Take?, 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.
Is That Your True Rejection? by Eliezer Yudkowsky @ Cato Unbound
by XiXiDu — 2011-09-07T18:27:42.794Z

A response essay written by Eliezer Yudkowsky posted at Cato Unbound for the issue Brain, Belief, and Politics:

Is That Your True Rejection? by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky suggests that the partial mutability of human traits is an auxiliary reason at best for Michael Shermer’s libertarianism. Take that fact away, and Shermer’s politics probably wouldn’t go with it. Yudkowsky says that his own small-l libertarian tendencies come from the long history of government incompetence, indifference, and outright malevolence. These, and not brain science, are the best reasons for libertarians to believe what they do.

Moreover, we make a logical error when we infer shares of causality from shares of observed variance; the relationship between nature and nurture is cooperative, not zero-sum. One thing, however, is clear: Human genetic variance is tiny, as indeed it must be for human beings all to constitute a single species. Environmental manipulation can only achieve so much in part because of this universal human inheritance.

The lead essay has been written by Michael Shermer:

Liberty and Science by Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer discusses scientific findings about belief formation. Beliefs, including political beliefs, are usually the result of automatic or intuitive moral judgments, not rational calculations. One cluster of those intuitions presumes that human nature is malleable; these usually produce a liberal politics. Another group of intuitions presumes that human nature is static; these tend to produce conservatism. But Shermer argues that humans really fall somewhere in between — malleable, within some important limits. He argues that this set of findings should produce a libertarian politics.
Meetup : Ottawa Weekly Meetup
by XFrequentist — 2011-09-07T18:18:11.307Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa Weekly Meetup

WHEN: 12 September 2011 07:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: Pub Italia: 434 Preston St, Ottawa, ON

Type: Discussion & Skill training

Date: Monday September 12, 7:30pm until at least 9:00pm.

Venue: Pub Italia

(likely in a booth in the abbey - back of the pub)

(We've settled on Monday evenings as the best time for most people, so we'll try this as the standard time and place for a while. Proposal for a more cost-effective or convenient location are eagerly solicited.)

Skill: Mind mapping

(I'll give an overview of mind maps and several potential applications, particularly as a tool for granularizing skills)

Discussion post: Reflections on rationality a year out

(A nice post on the question of what one should expect to gain as a result of actively participating in a rationalist community.)

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa Weekly Meetup
Can we rely on business as usual to get us to the future?
by  — 2011-09-07T17:32:10.373Z

We make decisions based upon our expectations of the future going 10 to 20 years out. However we don't have good systematic ways of making predictions. We rely on pundits and experts in their fields, which might ignore changes in other fields.

We are currently experiencing a period of low growth in the western world, so reliable economic growth is not an iron law throughout the world. So the projects and the organisations we start should depend upon what we expect of the future. If it unlikely to be a wealthy future for the sections of the world we are in or have influence over, we might do well to consider if we can do things to improve our prospects; our ability to shape the future depends upon our wealth.

A lot of current discussion on lesswrong and research by institutions such as FHI is predicated on a high wealth, high tech, high energy society. But what happens if this doesn't come to pass? There is not much point discussing existential risk or life extension if the next 40 years has us scrabbling for resources to transition away from oil, coping with the demographic transition, and social upheaval caused by continued outsourcing and mechanisation. Even if concentrating on existential risks was the right thing to do rationally, it would be politically untenable and it might become a low status activity if there are more obvious problems.

So it is not obvious to me that directly grappling with existential risk is the best thing we can do. It is currently neglected, but maybe the best thing we can do for the future is grapple with the problems in the 10-20 year time scale, so that growth is maintained at the current rate or a severe depression mitigated as much as possible, if one is likely. This would enable our future selves to have more resources to cope with existential risk

I single out the 10-20 year time scale as problems on that time scale are not normally tackled by government or business, but we still have some inkling of what we will be dealing with. These issues are currently neglected as both entities have incentives to look problems at the 3-5 year scale and so may be ignoring low hanging fruit.

So what we can do to shape the future?

Have a unified model of the earth - Everyone currently models the future, when making decisions about what subjects to study, where to live. They just do it in their heads, generally using snippets of id...
Doing medical research with (a lot) of personal money [link]
by Dr_Manhattan — 2011-09-07T12:46:43.535Z

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-07/mogul-using-own-100-million-in-race-to-cure-daughter-prompts-novartis-aid.html

I think this an interesting data point (though obviously a single one) of what money can do when directed with a lot of drive to a particular medical issue. Are there other examples of this? I wonder what kind of results can be achieved if this level of effort was directed at cryonics.
A 2011 summary of modern intelligence tests
by lukeprog — 2011-09-07T11:26:20.877Z

...and the theories of intelligence they use to measure 'intelligence'. Here, from the new (and very good) Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence.

Bonus fun fact from chapter 3: "Persons with higher IQs apparently are also likely to be taller and have more body symmetry than persons with lower ability scores." [Silventoinen et al. (2006); Prokosch & Miller (2006)]
The beginnings of a test for Rationality Quotient
by lukeprog — 2011-09-07T08:45:37.355Z

In their 2011 chapter for the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence, Stanovich et al. review the evidence suggesting that intelligence and rationality are not the same thing and that rationality is often more important than intelligence. They then lament the fact that there are no standard tests for measuring one's "Rationality Quotient." Then they take a few steps toward such a thing by suggesting some important rationality skills (actively open-minded thinking, fine-grained emotional regulation, tendency to seek information and fully process it, etc.) and rationality 'mindware' (probability theory, scientific process, economic thinking, etc.).

Here are those pages in particular: first a graphic of some important rationality skills and mindware, and then a table of the components of rational thought: rationality components, relevant literature citations, and example word problems that would test for each rationality component.
Journal article about politics and mindkilling
by CronoDAS — 2011-09-07T07:46:54.386Z

I just found a link to a paper written in 2003 by Geoffrey L. Cohen of Yale University.

"Party over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on Political Beliefs"

Abstract:

Four studies demonstrated both the power of group influence in persuasion and people’s blindness to it. Even under conditions of effortful processing, attitudes toward a social policy depended almost exclusively upon the stated position of one’s political party. This effect overwhelmed the impact of both the policy’s objective content and participants’ ideological beliefs (Studies 1–3), and it was driven by a shift in the assumed factual qualities of the policy and in its perceived moral connotations (Study 4). Nevertheless, participants denied having been influenced by their political group, although they believed that other individuals, especially their ideological adversaries, would be so influenced. The underappreciated role of social identity in persuasion is discussed.

That's written in journal-ese, so I'll post a translation from the article I found that contained the link:

My favorite study (pdf) in this space was by Yale’s Geoffrey Cohen. He had a control group of liberals and conservatives look at a generous welfare reform proposal and a harsh welfare reform proposal. As expected, liberals preferred the generous plan and conservatives favored the more stringent option. Then he had another group of liberals and conservatives look at the same plans, but this time, the plans were associated with parties.

Both liberals and conservatives followed their parties, even when their parties disagreed with their preferences. So when Democrats were said to favor the stringent welfare reform, for example, liberals went right along. Three scary sentences from the piece: “When reference group information was available, participants gave no weight to objective policy content, and instead assumed the position of their group as their own. This effect was as strong among people who were knowledgeable about welfare as it was among people who were not. Finally, participants persisted in the belief that they had formed their attitude autonomously even in the two group information conditions where they had not.”

Also, the final study conducted had subjects write editorials either in support of or against a single policy proposal. The differences in...
Safety can be dangerous
by PhilGoetz — 2011-09-07T05:24:47.540Z

In 2005, Hurricane Rita caused 111 deaths. 3 deaths were caused by the hurricane. 90 were caused by the mass evacuation.

The FDA is supposed to approve new drugs and procedures if the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs. If they actually did this, their errors on both sides (approvals of bad drugs vs. rejections of good drugs) would be roughly equal. The most-publicized drug withdrawal in the past 10 years was that of Vioxx, which the FDA estimated killed a total of 5165 people over 5 years. This suggests that the best drug that the FDA rejected during that decade could have saved 1000 people/year. During that decade, many drugs were (or could have been) approved that might save more than that many lives every year. Gleevec (invented 1993, approved 2001) is believed to save about 10,000 lives a year. Herceptin (invented in the 1980s, began human trials 1991, approved for some patients in 1998, more in 2006, and more in 2010) was estimated to save 1,000 lives a year in the United Kingdom, which would translate to 5,000 lives a year in the US. Patients on Apibaxan (discovered in 2006, not yet approved) have 11% fewer deaths from stroke than patients on warfarin, and stroke causes about 140,000 deaths/year in the US. To stay below the expected drug-rejection error level of 1000 people/year, given just these three drugs (and assuming that Apibaxan pans out and can save 5,000 lives/year), the FDA would need to have a faulty-rejection rate F such that F(10000) + F(5000) + F(5000) < 1000, F < 5%. This seems unlikely.

ADDED: One area where this affects me every day is in branching software repositories. Every software developer agrees that branching the repository head for test versions and for production versions is good practice. Yet branching causes, I would estimate, at least half of our problems with test and production releases. It is common for me to be delayed one to three days while someone figures out that the software isn't running because they issued a patch on one branch and forgot to update the trunk, or forgot to update other development or test versions that are on separate branches. I don't believe in branching anymore - I think we would have fewer bugs if we just did all development on the trunk, and checked out the code when it worked.&nbs...
[SEQ RERUN] How Much Evidence Does It Take?
by MinibearRex — 2011-09-07T03:55:22.580Z

Today's post, How Much Evidence Does It Take? was originally published on 24 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you are considering one hypothesis out of many, or that hypothesis is more implausible than others, or you wish to know with greater confidence, you will need more evidence. Ignoring this rule will cause you to jump to a belief without enough evidence, and thus be wrong.

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 The Lens That Sees Its Flaws, 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.