trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
I need to understand more about...
by DilGreen — 2010-10-07T09:15:22.910Z

... the general take on climate change here.

Please read a little more before voting this down - I am not looking to initiate a debate on climate change - merely to understand what goes on when it is mentioned.

Disclosure: I am personally concerned about the impact of climate change in the medium term; I am largely convinced it is caused by human activity; I can get moralistic about it. I won't push any of that in this discussion.

I am a relatively recent habituee of the these fora, and mostly I find it full of entertaining, intelligent people talking thoughtfully about things that interest/concern me. I'm pleased - this is rare. Thanks, all.

I searched for mentions of climate change, and read some threads. I got the impression that a majority viewpoint here was that it is not an issue that concerns people here. I got the further impression that it is an issue which arouse feelings of irritation or worse in a significant minority of people here.

Neither of these impressions were strong enough to give me any useful level of certainty, though.

So I thought Will Newsome's wonderful Irrationality Game post might help me with an experiment.

I posted the following:

"Human activity is responsible for a significant proportion of observable climate change. 90% confidence"

I expected (in the topsy turvy context of that post) to get UPvoted, as I assumed a majority of viewers would disagree. I hoped to see some comments which would help clarify my weak impressions.

In fact, I got downvoted (-7), suggesting fairly significant agreement. At the same time, the comment is invisible (to my attempts) in the list of comments to the post, leading me to suspect that it has been removed by a moderator (perhaps on the grounds that CC is viewed as 'political'?).

Can anyone help me? I do not intend to use anything here as a platform for pushing an agenda - I'd just like to understand.
Greg Egan disses stand-ins for Overcoming Bias, SIAI in new book
by Kaj_Sotala — 2010-10-07T06:55:56.543Z

From a review of Greg Egan's new book, Zendegi:

Egan has always had difficulty in portraying characters whose views he disagrees with. They always end up seeming like puppets or strawmen, pure mouthpieces for a viewpoint. And this causes trouble in another strand of Zendegi, which is a mildly satirical look at transhumanism. Now you can satirize by nastiness, or by mockery, but Egan is too nice for the former, and not accurate enough at mimicry for the latter. It ends up being a bit feeble, and the targets are not likely to be much hurt.
Who are the targets of Egan’s satire? Well, here’s one of them, appealing to Nasim to upload him:
“I’m Nate Caplan.” He offered her his hand, and she shook it. In response to her sustained look of puzzlement he added, “My IQ is one hundred and sixty. I’m in perfect physical and mental health. And I can pay you half a million dollars right now, any way you want it. [...] when you’ve got the bugs ironed out, I want to be the first. When you start recording full synaptic details and scanning whole brains in high resolution—” [...] “You can always reach me through my blog,” he panted. “Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future—”
(We’re supposed, I think, to contrast Caplan’s goal of personal survival with Martin’s goal of bringing up his son.)
“Overpowering Falsehood dot com” is transparently overcomingbias.com, a blog set up by Robin Hanson of the Future of Humanity Institute and Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Which is ironic, because Yudkowsky is Egan’s biggest fan: “Permutation City [...] is simply the best science-fiction book ever written” and his thoughts on transhumanism were strongly influenced by Egan: “Diaspora [...] affected my entire train of thought about the Singularity.”
Another transhumanist group is the “Benign Superintelligence Bootstrap Project”—the name references Yudkowsky’s idea of “Friendly AI” and the description references Yudkowsky’s argument that recursive self-optimization could rapidly propel an AI to superintelligence. From Zendegi:
“Their aim is to build an artificial intelligence capable of such exquisite powers o

...
What is known about consciousness?
by natural_number — 2010-10-06T17:31:58.477Z

Three questions I would like to find some answers for are:

What is known (to a high degree of certitude) about consciousness?

What experimental tests have been able to verify predictions made?

What predictions have been made that nobody has managed to test yet, but could, have an experimental proof or disproof?

Does anyone know some good sources which do cover any of these? Also it would be great to hear less-wrongers own input to these questions!
What I wish the internet had: pharmaceutical forum
by  — 2010-10-06T13:09:59.918Z

Maybe this exists already; maybe it would be drastically illegal; but it would be awesome.

I want a forum where people compare their experiences with pharmaceuticals. You add an entry that includes: what condition you have, what drug you took, what the side effects were, how well the drug worked. Some of these are pull-down menus and ratings on a built-in scale, but there's also room for your own commentary. The site runs stats on the drugs based on user data, and also provides a place to chat and vent about the success or failure of the medications.

I came to this idea from two perspectives. One, I'm a twenty-something woman. Everyone I know has a different experience with birth control; there are a variety of pills, and girls talk about a corresponding variety of side effects. But that's all anecdotal. What your doctor will tell you is based on the side effects in the clinical trials (and is calculated to reassure you.) My doctor told me, for instance, that if you don't get any side effects in the first three months, you never will -- but this happens to run counter to direct experience. I wish I could aggregate all the personal stories about birth control and other drugs. (Medications for mental illness also seem to be common among people my age, and there's a corresponding variety of stories about side effects and success rates, some very positive and some very negative. Wouldn't it be really useful to compare experiences with lots of people before making a decision about that?)

The other perspective I come from here is as someone with a passing interest in statistics and science methodology. Pharmaceuticals are tested in scientifically controlled but small studies. It would be useful, as a sanity check, to see if really large quantities of unscientific internet data come up with roughly the same results. We now have the opportunity to do what I think of as "Big & Sloppy" science -- it may be sloppy, but its very enormity might make it useful. Sergey Brin's search for a Parkinson's cure is based on self-reported internet data. It's not the way medical researchers conduct tests, but it takes advantage of the vast amount of anecdotal information that so far medicine doesn't have a great way to harness. People were experiencing health benefits from aspirin for de...
[LINK] Humans are bad at summing up a bunch of small numbers
by Vladimir_Golovin — 2010-10-06T13:01:58.192Z

"Outsmart your brain by knowing when you are wrong":
http://troysimpson.co/outsmart-your-brain-by-knowing-when-you-are-w

Humans are incredibly bad at summing up a bunch of small numbers. I had recently read a study that looked into why people are so bad at this task, but the important part was people commonly underestimate the total.

...

Knowing what you are bad can be incredibly important. Use this trick when estimating the timeline for a lot of small tasks, or figuring out what your monthly expenses are. It always seems shocking your credit card bill is so high when it is a bunch of small purchases. Learn what else your brain cannot perform well and use that to your advantage.
Help: Info on intelligence-focused genetic engineering?
by Will_Newsome — 2010-10-06T01:41:31.959Z

This is a request for analyses and info on intelligence-related genetic engineering; how far away is genetic engineering designed to increase intelligence? What's the scientific/cultural/technological landscape? Are the obstacles funding-related or technological? Are there any proposed methods of intelligence-boosting gene therapy? Any good overall introductions?

I expect genetic engineering and especially intelligence-enhancing genetic engineering to drastically change the socioeconomic and sociocultural landscape when the effects hit. This affects singularity timelines along with everything else about the future. Thanks in advance for any links or explanations.
Sam Harris' surprisingly modest proposal
by sketerpot — 2010-10-06T00:46:05.838Z

Sam Harris has a new book, The Moral Landscape, in which he makes a very simple argument, at least when you express it in the terms we tend to use on LW: he says that a reasonable definition of moral behavior can (theoretically) be derived from our utility functions. Essentially, he's promoting the idea of coherent extrapolated volition, but without all the talk of strong AI.

He also argues that, while there are all sorts of tricky corner cases where we disagree about what we want, those are less common than they seem. Human utility functions are actually pretty similar; the disagreements seem bigger because we think about them more. When France passes laws against wearing a burqa in public, it's news. When people form an orderly line at the grocery store, nobody notices how neatly our goals and behavior have aligned. No newspaper will publish headlines about how many people are enjoying the pleasant weather. We take it for granted that human utility functions mostly agree with each other.

What surprises me, though, is how much flak Sam Harris has drawn for just saying this. There are people who say that there can not, in principle, be any right answer to moral questions. There are heavily religious people who say that there's only one right answer to moral questions, and it's all laid out in their holy book of choice. What I haven't heard, yet, are any well-reasoned objections that address what Harris is actually saying.

So, what do you think? I'll post some links so you can see what the author himself says about it:

"The Science of Good and Evil": An article arguing briefly for the book's main thesis.

Frequently asked questions: Definitely helps clarify some things.

TED talk about his book: I think he devotes most of this talk to telling us what he's not claiming.
Rationality quotes: October 2010
by Morendil — 2010-10-05T11:38:59.920Z

This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Everyday Questions Wanting Rational Answers
by Relsqui — 2010-10-05T06:04:58.990Z

I'm working on a list of question types which come up frequently in day-to-day life but which I haven't yet found a reliable, rational way to answer. Here are some examples, including summaries of any progress made in the comments.

The third request in the Serenity Prayer[1] is for "the wisdom to know the difference" between things we should accept with our serenity and things we should change with our courage. Pending an official response to the prayer, what are some rational criteria for deciding between those two responses to an unfavorable situation?

Practice the ability to judge how important something is to change, making sure to examine your criteria of importance. Identify the reasons you want to change it, and try to normalize your emotional response to the facts. Learn about the difficulty of changing a thing by investigating other peoples' attempts to. Be aware that, the less one knows about a field, the less one is able to judge how difficult a task in that field is. Ask an expert if you need to. Another heuristic for difficulty of changing something is that the closer it is to one's own mind, the more control one has over it. When you know as much as you can, do a cost-benefit analysis.

I know that asking for what I want is often the best way to get it ("Will you take your hat off so I can see the screen, please?"), but it's sometimes clearly not appropriate ("Will you please give me all your money with no expectation of benefit nor repayment?"). Those are two ends of a spectrum. When the thing I want is somewhere in between ("Can I have a little of your time to vent about something that's bothering me?"), how should I decide whether to ask?

Unreasonable requests are those which would only be fulfilled if the asker had power over the askee which they do not, which represent an unequal exchange between equals, or which are not actually possible. We don't want to make unreasonable requests because they are at best unfair social impositions and at worst rude and damaging to relationships. This is complicated because requests between friends aren't about direct exchange; it's expected that sometimes one person will need help, and sometimes the other will, and in the long run it'll even out. In a strong friendship where both people have treated each other well, it's more appropriate to ask for a large favor than it would be to ask a relativ...
[META] Proposed title keywords for Discussions
by ata — 2010-10-05T05:09:23.935Z

I propose the following title keywords for Discussion posts, to be included as I did with [META] in this one.

META: Posts about LW, in general.

DRAFT: Drafts of posts that may be promoted to the main LW, posted for comments and criticism.

POLL: Polls and (essay question–type) surveys on whatever topics seem to merit that format.

LINK: Discussions centered primarily around a linked webpage.

HELP: Posts requesting help with some question or problem.

QUICK: The same sort of content (with respect to topic and structure and style) that you'd post to main LW, but smaller and quicker, perhaps.

Feel free to propose others, debate the merit of the ones I've suggested, tell me that the whole thing is a stupid idea, etc.

This is not meant to replace the actual Tags system, which is good for arbitrarily tagging posts by topic. I see this as a way to allow us to quickly scan through the list of Discussions and know what general type of content to expect from each item. I don't expect that absolutely everything will need one of these keywords, but many/most of the things that have been posted in Discussion so far seem to be categorizable along these lines. And I don't intend by this to encourage specific types of content (e.g. if we get more polls as Discussion posts now as a result of having a [POLL] keyword, then it is not working correctly), I only suggest that it may be useful for organizing the things people are already using this section for.
Hive mind scenario
by snarles — 2010-10-04T21:02:25.750Z

In a conceivable future, humans gain the technology to eliminate physical suffering and to create interfaces between their own brains and computing devices--interfaces which are sufficiently advanced that the border between the brain and the computer practically vanishes. Humans are able to access all public knowledge as if they 'knew' it themselves, and they can also upload their own experiences to this 'web' in real-time. The members of this network would lose part of their individuality since an individual's unique set of skills and experiences are a foundational component of identity.

However, although knowledge can be shared for low cost, computing power will remain bounded and valuable. Even if all other psychological needs are pacified, humans will probably still compete for access to computing power.

But what other elements of identity might still remain? Is it reasonable to say that individuality in such a hive mind would reduce to differing preferences for the use of computational power?
Pascal's Mugging as an epistemic problem
by  — 2010-10-04T17:52:30.266Z

Related to: Some of the discussion going on here

In the LW version of Pascal's Mugging, a mugger threatens to simulate and torture people unless you hand over your wallet. Here, the problem is decision-theoretic: as long as you precommit to ignore all threats of blackmail and only accept positive-sum trades, the problem disappears.

However, in Nick Bostrom's version of the problem, the mugger claims to have magic powers and will give Pascal an enormous reward the following day if Pascal gives his money to the mugger. Because the utility promised by the mugger so large, it outweighs Pascal's probability that he is telling the truth. From Bostrom's essay:

Pascal: Gee . . . OK, don’t take this personally, but my credence that you have these magic powers whereof you speak is about one in a quadrillion.
Mugger: Wow, you are pretty confident in your own ability to tell a liar from an honest man! But no matter. Let me also ask you, what’s your probability that I not only have magic powers but that I will also use them to deliver on any promise – however extravagantly generous it may seem – that I might make to you tonight?
Pascal: Well, if you really were an Operator from the Seventh Dimension as you assert, then I suppose it’s not such a stretch to suppose that you might also be right in this additional claim. So, I’d say one in 10 quadrillion.
Mugger: Good. Now we will do some maths. Let us say that the 10 livres that you have in your wallet are worth to you the equivalent of one happy day. Let’s call this quantity of good 1 Util. So I ask you to give up 1 Util. In return, I could promise to perform the magic tomorrow that will give you an extra 10 quadrillion happy days, i.e. 10 quadrillion Utils. Since you say there is a 1 in 10 quadrillion probability that I will fulfil my promise, this would be a fair deal. The expected Utility for you would be zero. But I feel generous this evening, and I will make you a better deal: If you hand me your wallet, I will perform magic that will give you an extra 1,000 quadrillion happy days of life.
Pascal: I admit I see no flaw in your mathematics.

As a result, says Bostrom, there is nothing from rationally preventing Pascal from taking the mugger's offer even though it seems intuitively unwise. Unlike the LW version, in this version the problem is epistemic and cannot be solved as easily....
Limitations of eyewitness testimony
by NancyLebovitz — 2010-10-04T13:03:16.282Z

From wikipedia:

Eyewitness testimony isn't reliable-- it degrades rapidly with time (significant fading in 20 minutes), is easily overridden by circumstances (people are apt to assume that the guilty person is in a line-up unless they're specifically told the guilty person might not be there-- there's a risk of saying the best match is it rather than looking for a genuinely satisfying match), cross-racial identification is less competent than within race identification[1], the presence of a weapon makes accurate identification less likely....

It goes on-- if you have any interest in this sort of thing, I recommend reading the whole article.

[1] I wonder if this has been tested in societies with different classification systems. For example, I've been told by someone who lived there that in Ireland, everyone is classified as Catholic or Protestant-- even if they're Jewish. Would Irish people have problems doing identification across the Catholic-Protestant line, even if all the people involved would be considered white in America and not set off the identification problem?
News: The Quest for Unknown Unknowns
by XiXiDu — 2010-10-04T11:48:55.663Z

How important are 'the latest news'? What would it mean to ignore most news and to concentrate on our present goals?

Is there more to news than just curiosity and leisure?

Should every rationalist administer a balanced information diet?

How do we guarantee a healthy exposure to unfocused information?

These days many people are following an enormous amount of news sources. I myself notice how skimming through my Google Reader items is increasingly time-consuming. But by acknowledging that news media consumption is a time killer should we also jump to the conclusion that it is a waste of time?

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things
We know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

— Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

As long as we embed ourselves into the collective intelligence of 'the sphere of human thought', as long as we are a part of the growing Noosphere, we will be nourished. But we have to keep care not to be drowned. The balance between an ill-nourished information diet and gluttony is unsteady.

Google and its kind are the first representations of the wonders of our possible future. They are slave-Gods at our disposal, all the time ready to serve us. Google is a literal-minded information genie, there to satisfy our desires indifferently of the consequences that might arise for us.

Thus we have to learn how, when and for what to ask the right questions. But the underlying nature of unknown unknowns does not permit us to question them. The impossibility to know the possibilities that lie ahead is the dilemma we face. For that we know about, or rather assume, the possibility of prospects or possible possibilities that we don't know we don't know about.

How much of what you know and do has its origins in some blog post or other kind of news item. Would I even know about Less Wrong if I wasn't the heavy news addict that I am?

Have I already reached a level of knowledge that allows me to get from here to everywhere, without exposing myself to all the noise out there in hope of coming across some valuable information nugget which might help me reach the next level?

How do we ever know that there isn't something out there which might trump our current goals? Just on...
Math prerequisites for understanding LW stuff
by cousin_it — 2010-10-04T11:30:10.679Z

I just got a PM with this question: "What would be the minimum intellectual investment necessary to be able to fruitfully take part in the discussion of decision theory on LW?" This is not the first time I've been asked that. Our new discussion section looks like the perfect place to post my answer:

1) Learn enough game theory to correctly find Nash equilibria in 2x2 games all by yourself.

2) Learn enough probability theory to correctly solve Monty Hall, Monty Fall, Monty Crawl all by yourself.

3) Learn enough programming to write a working quine (in any language of your choice) all by yourself.

4) Learn enough logic to correctly solve the closing puzzle from Eliezer's cartoon guide.

Then you're all set. Should take you a few days if you've studied math before, a few weeks if you haven't. No special texts needed beyond Wikipedia and Google.