trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
How credible is neuroeconomics?
by jsalvatier — 2011-07-30T18:51:55.943Z

Paul Glimcher's book Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis claims that the field of neuroeconomics has made great strides in creating a unified descriptive theory of individual human choice, bringing together positive economics (basically insights from VNM utility theory), neuroscience and psychology. The field was recommended to me by a friend doing a PhD in psychology. If true, the field sounds very useful to study. I don't have the cognitive science background knowledge to evaluate the credibility of these claims (my economics background is strong), so I have a couple of questions:

Is neuroeconomics founded on solid evidence?

Are there intelligent criticisms of the field?

If neuroeconomics is a useful field to study, what are the best books on the topic?
Polarized gamma rays and manifest infinity
by rwallace — 2011-07-30T06:56:49.555Z

Most people (not all, but most) are reasonably comfortable with infinity as an ultimate (lack of) limit. For example, cosmological theories that suggest the universe is infinitely large and/or infinitely old, are not strongly disbelieved a priori.

By contrast, most people are fairly uncomfortable with manifest infinity, actual infinite quantities showing up in physical objects. For example, we tend to be skeptical of theories that would allow infinite amounts of matter, energy or computation in a finite volume of spacetime.

Consider the following thought experiment (I forget where I first heard it):

Aliens in a passing flying saucer offer to sell us a halting oracle. It's a black box of ordinary size and mass, galactic intellectual property law prohibits giving us an explanation of how it works and it's far beyond our ability to reverse engineer. Nonetheless, if you feed it the description of a Turing machine, it will calculate for a millisecond and then indicate whether that Turing machine halts or not. Obviously we're skeptical and exhaustive testing is impossible, but the device passes every test we can throw at it.

In practice, willingness to pay for it might be based on a belief that it will probably work for every case we are going to be in a position to care about in the near future, but do we believe the sales pitch that it is a true halting oracle, i.e. a device that performs infinite computation in finite spacetime? Some people would give more than 50% credence to this proposition, and some people less, but almost everyone would give it a subjective probability greater than zero.

It is worth noting that Solomonoff induction would do otherwise. SI is based on the assumption that the universe is computable; it assigns a halting oracle a prior probability (and therefore a posterior probability after any finite amount of evidence) of zero. In other words, while human intuition is finitely skeptical of manifest infinity, SI is infinitely skeptical.

This has been used as a reductio ad absurdum of SI, but is that correct? If a halting oracle really is absolutely impossible or at least infinitely improbable across the Tegmark multiverse by a correct weighting, then SI is right and human intuition is wrong. If not, then vice versa. At this time, I don't know which is the case, or even whether there is a fact of the matter regarding which is the case.

In...
[SEQ RERUN] Guessing the Teacher's Password
by MinibearRex — 2011-07-30T06:13:19.399Z

Title: [SEQ RERUN] Guessing the Teacher's Password Tags: sequence_reruns Today's post, Guessing the Teacher's Password was originally published on 22 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

In schools, "education" often consists of having students memorize answers to specific questions (i.e., the "teacher's password"), rather than learning a predictive model that says what is and isn't likely to happen. Thus, students incorrectly learn to guess at passwords in the face of strange observations rather than admit their confusion. Don't do that: any explanation you give should have a predictive model behind it. If your explanation lacks such a model, start from a recognition of your own confusion and surprise at seeing the result.

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 Fake Explanations, 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.
[Conversation Log] Compartmentalization
by AdeleneDawner — 2011-07-30T00:51:06.630Z

(7:40:37 PM) handoflixue: Had an odd thought recently, and am trying to see if I understand the idea of compartmentalization.
(7:41:08 PM) handoflixue: I've always acted in a way, whereupon if I'm playing WOW, I roleplay an elf. If I'm at church, I roleplay a unitarian. If I'm on LessWrong, I roleplay a rationalist.
(7:41:31 PM) handoflixue: And for the most part, these are three separate boxes. My elf is not a rationalist nor a unitarian, and I don't apply the Litany of Tarski to church.
(7:41:49 PM) handoflixue: And I realized I'm *assuming* this is what people mean by compartmentalizing.
(7:42:11 PM) handoflixue: But I also had some *really* interesting assumptions about what people meant by religion and spiritual and such, so it's probably smart to step back and check ^^
(7:43:45 PM) Adelene: I'm actually not sure what's usually meant by the concept (which I don't actually use), but that's not the guess I came up with when you first asked, and I think mine works a little better.
(7:44:50 PM) handoflixue: Then I am glad I asked! :)
(7:45:24 PM) Adelene: My guess is something along the lines of this: Compartmentalizing is when one has several models of how the world works, which predict different things about the same situations, and uses arbitrary, social, or emotional methods rather than logical methods to decide which model to use where.
(7:46:54 PM) handoflixue: Ahhhh
(7:47:05 PM) handoflixue: So it's not having different models, it's being alogical about choosing a method/
(7:47:08 PM) handoflixue: ?
(7:47:14 PM) Adelene: That's my guess, yes.
(7:47:37 PM) Adelene: I do think that it's specifically not just about having different behavioral habits in different situations.
(7:48:00 PM) Adelene: (Which is what I think you mean by 'roleplay as'.)
(7:49:21 PM) handoflixue: It's not *exactly* different situations, though. That's just a convenient reference point, and the process that usually develops new modes. I can be an elf on LessWrong, or a rationalist WOW player, too.
(7:49:53 PM) Adelene: Also, with regards to the models model, some models don't seem to be reliable at all from a logical standpoint, so it's fairly safe to assume that someone who uses such a model in any situation is compartmentalizing.
(7:50:34 PM) handoflixue: But the goddess really does talk to me during rites >.>;
(7:51:16 PM) Adelene: ...okay, maybe that's not the best wording of that conce...
On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die
by gwern — 2011-07-29T21:06:41.763Z

From Mike Darwn's Chronopause, an essay titled "Would You Like Another Plate of This?", discussing people's attitudes to life:

The most important, the most obvious and the most factual reason why cryonics is not more widely accepted is that it fails the “credibility sniff test” in that it makes many critical assumptions which may not be correct...In other words, cryonics is not proven. That is a plenty valid reason for rejecting any costly procedure; dying people do this kind of thing every day for medical procedures which are proven, but which have a very low rate of success and (or) a very high misery quotient. Some (few) people have survived metastatic head/neck cancer – the film critic Roger Ebert, is an example (Figure 1). However, the vast majority of patients who undergo radical neck surgery for cancer die anyway. For the kind and extent of cancer Ebert had, the long term survival rate (>5 years) is ~5% following radical neck dissection and ancillary therapy: usually radiation and chemotherapy. This is thus a proven procedure – it works – and yet the vast majority of patients refuse it.

Cryonics is not proven, and it is aesthetically disturbing (indeed even disgusting) to many people. It is also costly, and not just in terms of money alone. It is costly in countless other ways, ranging from the potential for marital discord, social alienation, ridicule, social isolation, disruption of family relationships (and with grief coping mechanisms) during the dying process, and on and on and on. And it does cost a lot of money, because if you figure the lost present value of capital for life insurance, dues, and end of life expenses related to cryonics, then that is a very significant dollar amount; my guess is that for a whole body patient who signs up at age 35 with Alcor, it is in the range of ~ $500,000 to $750,000 2010 dollars!

...Beyond this, many other factors come into play, such as perceived interference or lack of competitiveness with religion by cryonics, lack of endorsement by authority figures, such as physicians and scientists, actual marketing faux pas’s, such as the Chatsworth debacle and the use the words “death” and “dead” to describe cryonics patients. Then come factors which would, if cryonics were proven to work, be down in the noise, or more accurately, nonexistent, such

...
The $125,000 Summer Singularity Challenge
by Kaj_Sotala — 2011-07-29T21:02:54.792Z

From the SingInst blog:

Thanks to the generosity of several major donors†, every donation to the Singularity Institute made now until August 31, 2011 will be matched dollar-for-dollar, up to a total of $125,000.

Donate now!

(Visit the challenge page to see a progress bar.)

Now is your chance to double your impact while supporting the Singularity Institute and helping us raise up to $250,000 to help fund our research program and stage the upcoming Singularity Summit… which you can register for now!

† $125,000 in backing for this challenge is being generously provided by Rob Zahra, Quixey, Clippy, Luke Nosek, Edwin Evans, Rick Schwall, Brian Cartmell, Mike Blume, Jeff Bone, Johan Edström, Zvi Mowshowitz, John Salvatier, Louie Helm, Kevin Fischer, Emil Gilliam, Rob and Oksana Brazell, Guy Srinivasan, John Chisholm, and John Ku.

2011 has been a huge year for Artificial Intelligence. With the IBM computer Watson defeating two top Jeopardy! champions in February, it’s clear that the field is making steady progress. Journalists like Torie Bosch of Slate have argued that “We need to move from robot-apocalypse jokes to serious discussions about the emerging technology.” We couldn’t agree more — in fact, the Singularity Institute has been thinking about how to create safe and ethical artificial intelligence since long before the Singularity landed on the front cover of TIME magazine.

The last 1.5 years were our biggest ever. Since the beginning of 2010, we have:

Held our annual Singularity Summit, in San Francisco. Speakers included Ray Kurzweil, James Randi, Irene Pepperberg, and many others.

Held the first Singularity Summit Australia and Singularity Summit Salt Lake City.

Held a wildly successful Rationality Minicamp.

Published seven research papers, including Yudkowsky’s much-awaited ‘Timeless Decision Theory‘.

Helped philosopher David Chalmers write his seminal paper ‘The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis‘, which has sparked broad discussion in academia, including an entire issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies and a book from Springer devoted to responses to Chalmers’ paper.

Launched the Research Associates program.

Brought MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark onto our advisory board, published our Singularity FAQ, and much more.

In the coming year, we plan to do the ...
exists(max(performance(pay)))
by PhilGoetz — 2011-07-29T19:52:10.862Z

US Congresspeople don't make a lot of money in salary - most make $174,000/yr. They could easily make several times that much as consultants. They do, however, have insider information giving them very large returns on the stock market. For that, or other reasons, many of our representatives care more about keeping their jobs than about not wrecking the economy.

Most discussion of incentivizing assumes that higher pay leads to higher performance. The logic is that higher pay leads to wanting more to keep the job, which leads to higher performance. But the second link in this chain is weak. Sometimes higher motivation to keep the job leads to lower performance. CEOs are motivated to hide losses with accounting tricks, military officers are motivated to deny and cover up abuse by their subordinates, teachers are motivated to inflate their students' test scores.
[SEQ RERUN] Fake Explanations
by MinibearRex — 2011-07-29T15:16:42.712Z

Title: [SEQ RERUN] Fake Explanations Tags: sequence_reruns Today's post, Fake Explanations was originally published on 20 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

People think that fake explanations use words like "magic", while real explanations use scientific words like "heat conduction". But being a real explanation isn't a matter of literary genre. Scientific-sounding words aren't enough. Real explanations constrain anticipation. Ideally, you could explain only the observations that actually happened. Fake explanations could just as well "explain" the opposite of what you observed.

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 Is Molecular Nanotechnology "Scientific"?, 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.
Global Warming News
by falenas108 — 2011-07-29T12:06:21.986Z

A new peer reviewed article came out from NASA showing that the models used to predict temperature changes, and the ecological issues as a result of these changes, greatly differ from observed data.

News Article: http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarmism-192334971.html

Actual Paper: http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/8/1603/pdf
The danger of wishful thinking
by  — 2011-07-28T23:24:08.546Z

Or "The problems inherent in making a goal maximiser with a changing world model."

No paper clips were created or destroyed in the making of this script.

*This is an experimental post to try and get this point across. I'll write something similar for the type of systems I would like to explore, if this goes down well.*

Goal maximisers are great when you have a fixed ontology and you only have limited ways of getting information about the world. These aren't the case in AGI. Remember the map is not the territory, and the map is all that the utility maximiser can look at when deciding the utility of the future of actions.

TL;DR You can't have a utility maximiser choose how to alter the world model or how the world model should progress, if the utility is derived from that world model. If you have something else derive the world model it will conflict with the utility maximiser over resources and what to do in the world. Some method of resolving the conflicts is necessary which means we must go beyond normal model based utility maximisers.

Scene 1: Beyond the reach

A group of anthropomorphic paper clips are crowded in a room. There are two machines in there with them. One connected to the window, draws paper clips on a large central map when it spies them outside. The other scans the map for paper clips, updating a big brass counter to the number of unique paper clips on the map. The paper clips send and receive messages to the outside world in pneumatic tubes.

Junior clippy: Good news everyone, we have got word that we have managed to create 100 paper clips just beyond our light cone!

Middle ranking clippy: Update the map at once! We will never see these paper clips but we should get the utilons for their creation.

Senior clippy: Belay that, only the fixed machinery is allowed to touch the paper. By all that is metallic, flattened and spiral-shaped, do you know what madness will be unleashed if we updated the map based upon what we wish?

Middle ranking clippy (aside to the junior): Ignore the old codger. Jump to it! If we can't update the map, then we will stop caring about creating paper clips that we cannot or are unlikely to see. That will not do.

Junior clippy (aside to the audience as he draws in the extra paper clips): This gives me an idea....

*The junior clippy sneakily starts to draw extra paper clips, smirking to himself as the utilon counte...
Wiki Clean-up project
by minderbinder — 2011-07-28T21:46:16.099Z

I'm a fairly new LW user, as evidenced by my so-far low karma. However, I've previously been familiar with a lot of the ideas talked about here and I've been reading the site for a few weeks. I think that the material here is amazing and often unparalleled on the rest of the web.

However, there's is one...weak point: the wiki. The sequences are a little bit formidable to beginners because of the massive tangle of hyperlinks which connect them together. When I started reading them, I routinely had 10-15 LW tabs open at once. My friends said a similar thing. Thus, I think that it would be helpful to have a reliable source of information where the recursion can sort of "bottom out," if you know what I mean. That should be the wiki.

But it's in a pretty sorry state right now. A lot of the articles are titles-only, a couple sentences long, or just a bunch of links which invariably lead to more links. Maybe I'm blowing this out of proportion, but I think that the wiki is something that could definitely be brought up to par with the (high) quality of the site.

So maybe several members should choose something they know about (or perhaps don't) and then research and write a good entry on it.

Thoughts?
Am I obligated to reread the Book of Mormon?
by  — 2011-07-28T19:10:26.870Z

In this comment thread, I stated that

I have read the Book of Mormon in the past, but I hereby precommit to reading it again and "searching in my heart" (I have a copy on my bookshelf) if you can demonstrate that my skepticism regarding your evidence is unwarranted.

In the resulting thread five evidences were given, and some back-and-forth occurred. Being myself somewhat biased, I feel unfit to judge if Arandur actually showed that a non-Mormon's skepticism is unwarranted.

So you, who wish to become stronger, I ask: please comment below whether or not you believe the proposition was satisfied.

Remember! This is not a vote on whether the evidence is factually correct or not!

Remember! This is not a chance to anonymously signal your agreement or disagreement with the LW hive mind!

Remember! If the sky is green, wish to believe that the sky is green!

I don't know what else I can say to forestall thread hijacking.
Looking speakers on ML/AI topics in NYC area
by Dr_Manhattan — 2011-07-28T17:37:53.973Z

Sorry if this is spammish, but since there are quite a few ML/AI people here I figured I'd ask.

I co-organize well-attended NYC Machine Learning Meetup and we're always looking for speakers, so if anyone is in the area and has something they'd like to present, message me.

We are specifically looking for speakers for August, but can book people for later months.

If someone wants to speak on FAI related topics, they'd be welcome as long as they are a serious researcher (vs. as an extreme example a high school student passionate about the topic).
[LINK] A proposed update model for working memory: multiple-component framework
by tetsuo55 — 2011-07-28T13:09:00.395Z

I've seen some discussion on "working memory" and "spaced repetition"

I just read this pop-science article in which a new hypothesis is presented that seems to provide better predictions and test conditions for measuring working memory. Maybe this can also be used for the SRS contest.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-07-brain-track.html
[LINK] Scientists use Bayesian reasoning to update the drake equation for the existence of ET's
by tetsuo55 — 2011-07-28T13:03:32.535Z

I found this pop-science news article where scientist are seriously trying to use Bayesian reasoning to change beliefs of the field.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-astrophysicists-logic-downplay-probability-extraterrestrial.html
[LINK] Hyperbolic discounting is rational
by twanvl — 2011-07-28T12:14:04.204Z

I just came across a paper that shows that hyperbolic discounting is the right thing to do when future discount rates are uncertain. Here is a link to the paper:

Hyperbolic discounting is rational: Valuing the far future with uncertain discount rates
by J. Doyne Farmer and John Geanakoplos

And here is a really nice writeup, which saves me from having to summarize the results myself.
[SEQ RERUN] Is Molecular Nanotechnology "Scientific"?
by MinibearRex — 2011-07-28T03:36:55.048Z

Title: [SEQ RERUN] Is Molecular Nanotechnology "Scientific"? Tags: sequence_reruns Today's post, Is Molecular Nanotechnology "Scientific"? was originally published on 20 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The belief that nanotechnology is possible is based on qualitative reasoning from scientific knowledge. But such a belief is merely rational. It will not be scientific until someone constructs a nanofactory. Yet if you claim that nanomachines are impossible because they have never been seen before, you are being irrational. To think that everything that is not science is pseudoscience is a severe mistake.

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 Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence, 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.
Looking for proof of conditional probability
by DanielLC — 2011-07-28T02:24:00.286Z

From what I understand, the Kolmogorov axioms make no mention of conditional probability. That is simply defined. If I really want to show how probability actually works, I'm not going to argue "by definition". Does anyone know a modified form that uses simpler axioms than P(A|B) = P(A∩B)/P(B)?
Meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday August 3
by JGWeissman — 2011-07-28T00:37:23.371Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday August 3

WHEN:
03 August 2011 06:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
4187 Campus Dr, University Center, Irvine, CA 92612

This continues the weekly meetups in Irvine. As always the meetup at the outdoor food court in the University Center near UCI, from 6:00 to 8:00 (or whenever we actually decide to leave). Look for the sign with naive neural classifiers for bleggs and rubes.

See also the email group and calendar for the Southern California Meetup Group

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday August 3