trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Hangman as analogy for Natural Selection
by Delta — 2012-10-05T12:02:26.775Z

Hi guys,

I was trying to come up with a helpful analogy to help explain natural selection in simple terms and it occurred to me that the game Hangman might make a useful analogy, albeit an imperfect and simplified one. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this and any other useful analogies or strategies for explaining in simple terms how natural selection allows complexity to arise from simplicity and how it is distinct from random chance.

The Hangman analogy I propose would read as follows:

A long word is chosen, say with a dozen letters, and a dozen blanks are drawn on the paper. Person A then guesses a letter. If the letter is present in the word a blank is filled in and the player can try another letter and so on. Their further guesses will be informed by the letters they have already discovered rather than being completely random. If the letter is not present the player loses a life (represented by the drawing of part of the gallows). If they run out of lives the game is over and a new player, Person B takes their place. Person B must start from the beginning.

In this analogy the long word is a complex adaption, requiring many seperate chance mutations to build it. Each guessed letter is a chance mutation that can be beneficial (correct answers bring you closer) or detrimental (wrong ones cost you lives). The loss of all lives represents the extinction of the species, meaning no further mutations can occur. Person B is an entirely different species that can't "compare notes" with Person A and hence must start from the beginning (though they may take a different route).

The benefit of this analogy is it's an example of random guesses still having a sense of forward progression (discovered letters are not removed, and gradually build up), and that it refers to a simple game I think most people will be familiar with. You could then go on to explain how a complex adaption takes many more than a dozen steps, that there are many more than 24 possible mutations, and that each guess takes many generations, to give a sense of the timescales involved.

The weaknesses are considerable and include the inability to go backwards (beneficial changes can be lost as well as gained) and the existence of a single specific end goal (the unknown word), rather than this being a continual process without set targets. It also ignores the possibility that a beneficial mutat...
"Hide comments in downvoted threads" is now active
by Wei Dai — 2012-10-05T07:23:56.318Z

I just found out that a new website feature was implemented 2 days ago. If a comment is voted to -4 or below, it and all replies and downstream comments from it will be hidden from Recent Comments, and further replies in that subthread will incur 5 karma points penalty. The hiding, but not karma penalty, applies retroactively to comments in that subthread posted before the -4 vote.

This seems to be worth a discussion post since most people are probably still voting things to below -3 without knowing the new consequences of doing so.
[SEQ RERUN] Belief in Intelligence
by MinibearRex — 2012-10-05T04:55:13.599Z

Today's post, Belief in Intelligence was originally published on 25 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

What does a belief that an agent is intelligent look like? What predictions does it make?

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 Expected Creative Surprises, 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.
[LINK] Different heuristics at different decision speeds
by Kawoomba — 2012-10-04T06:34:33.842Z

The "intuitive" (fast) interaction heuristic is predisposed towards selflessness, while the "calculated" (slow) decision making process favors greedier behavior: review of game studies.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22996558

Sidenote: Strange to have a Nature paper conflate a faster-payoff / 'egoistic' approach with being 'rational', and to contrast intuition with calculation, of all things. As if not being consciously aware of the calculation implicit in fast "intuitive" decision algorithms implied a lack of cognitive processing.
[SEQ RERUN] Expected Creative Surprises
by MinibearRex — 2012-10-04T04:28:38.780Z

Today's post, Expected Creative Surprises was originally published on 24 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The unpredictability of intelligence is a very special and unusual kind of surprise, which is not at all like noise or randomness. There is a weird balance between the unpredictability of actions and the predictability of outcomes.

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 Inner Goodness, 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.
Deliberate Practice for Decision Making
by wattsd — 2012-10-04T03:19:25.460Z

Much of this material is sourced/summarized from Deliberate Performance: Accelerating Expertise in Natural Settings and “The Power of Intuition”. Both contain much more than what is written here. An earlier draft/version of this was posted as "Productive Use of Heuristics and Biases". Based on feedback in the comments, much has changed. Feedback is appreciated, as are any other ideas on how deliberate practice can be applied.

How does someone incorporate something like deliberate practice into a typical job and everyday life? Deliberate practice is meant to be challenging, and because of this, it is draining. Much of the expertise literature describes a limit of a few hours of deliberate practice per day. If you can sustain more than that, you probably aren’t doing it right.
While the amount you can put in per day is limited, it still takes many hours of this intense practice, so reaching expert performance in a domain takes anywhere from years to decades. Deliberate performance is a concept related to deliberate practice, but perhaps more effective and efficient. Rather than separating practice and performance, the idea is to overlap the two as much as possible. The primary aim is to accelerate the development of expertise, while also improving the productivity of practice. Since you are practicing using normal tasks, you don’t have to set as much time aside where you aren’t working.
Deliberate performance is readily applicable to decision making. You make decisions as you normally would but also record your expectations and thinking behind the decision. What do you think will happen and why? How do you feel about the decision? When you have feedback on how the decision turned out, you can go back to see what you were thinking and how well your expectations matched reality. The idea of recording this information has been recommended by Peter Drucker, and more recently by Daniel Kahneman (Kahneman sees it as a way to reduce hindsight bias).
The term deliberate performance comes from the paper Deliberate Performance: Accelerating Expertise in Natural Settings, where the concept is elaborated into four exercises:
Estimate
One of the simplest ways to do this is to estimate how long a task you have will take. Accurately predicting how long things will take is a valuable skill on its own, but in estimating it, you form a mental model of t...
Fun fact: in medical school, we had a mini-lesson on common cognitive errors in medicine
by ancientcampus — 2012-10-04T01:57:40.791Z

Yesterday in medical school, we had a lecture on common mistakes doctors make. I saw this slide:

Attribution Errors

Confirmation Bias

Commission Bias

Omission Bias

Anchoring

-which made me smile, and thought I'd share. I'm interested in Emergency Medicine, and I realize that some of these are a real problem in that field. I.e. I know one doctor who had a typical Friday night - most of the patients are super drunk. One 30-year-old girl comes in disoriented, off-balance, with slurred speech. They suggest she sleep it off. Unfortunately, this particular patient was having a stroke, and died. So yeah. Avoiding biases.

(If anyone cares - Anchoring is basically the bias towards your first guess, or in this case, diagnosis, aka "we change our minds less likely than we think". Commission and Omission bias are, in this case, the tendency to act (in order to help) when you perhaps shouldn't, and the the tendency to inaction (to avoid harm) when you should act, respectively.)
[Link] Knowledge, not opinion, information extraction, not persuasion
by  — 2012-10-03T21:13:03.943Z

A post from Gene Expression by Razib Khan who some of you may also know from the old gnxp site or perhaps from his BHTV debate with Eliezer. Some thoughts on the problem of trying to optimize your interactions to help you be less wrong. Your time is quite limited. Expect trade-offs.

A few days ago I was having drinks with some friends, and it came up that some of them had only recently become conscious of the fact that I leaned more toward the Republican party than the Democratic (I had remarked that my wife preferred that I keep my sideburns, as otherwise I would look too much like a Republican…though I sort of was one!). More shockingly for them was that I did not consider myself a liberal. I was somewhat bemused by the whole situation because it isn’t as if I’m particularly shy about expressing my various politically-incorrect opinions on any specific topic at work or play (these are people who I have met within the past ~2 years).

I assume that the problem here is that I violated a cognitive schema: liberal people are smarter than conservative people. Since I was conservative, they were, logically, smarter than me. The reality is probably not so convenient for the theory in this case, generating some dissonance. In the course of conversation I expressed frankly what I actually do hold to be a rough & ready approximation of my attitude toward discussion: I have almost no interest in persuading anyone of the truth of my particular views on any issue. This was relevant in that context because on occasion people try and draw me out as to the details of my disagreement with the consensus on an array of topics, when I often have no interest in expending the mental energy to do any such thing. It isn’t that I’m worried about getting into any argument with everyone else in the room. My friends are mostly natural scientists so I am very confident that I can alone hold my ground on any topic having to do with history and quantitative social science. Rather, the problem is my worry as to the point of it all. Who exactly is being edified by such exchanges? I never learn anything, as I am well acquainted with the standard arsenal of conventional Left-liberal talking points, while my interlocutors are often too amazed as my incomprehensible existence (i.e., not stupid, but not right-thinking) to really take in anything I’m

...
[Link] Nobel laureate challenges psychologists to clean up their act
by mstevens — 2012-10-03T17:22:13.691Z

Nobel laureate challenges psychologists to clean up their act

Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman has issued a strongly worded call to one group of psychologists to restore the credibility of their field by creating a replication ring to check each others’ results.

Kahneman, a psychologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, addressed his open e-mail to researchers who work on social priming, the study of how subtle cues can unconsciously influence our thoughts or behaviour. For example, volunteers might walk more slowly down a corridor after seeing words related to old age1, or fare better in general-knowledge tests after writing down the attributes of a typical professor2.
[Link] The real end of science
by  — 2012-10-03T16:09:15.196Z

From Gene Expression by Razib Khan who some of you may also know from the old gnxp site or perhaps from his BHTV debate with Eliezer.

Fifteen years ago John Horgan wrote The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age. I remain skeptical as to the specific details of this book, but Carl’s write-up in The New York Times of a new paper in PNAS on the relative commonness of scientific misconduct in cases of retraction makes me mull over the genuine possibility of the end of science as we know it. This sounds ridiculous on the face of it, but you have to understand my model of and framework for what science is. In short: science is people. I accept the reality that science existed in some form among strands of pre-Socratic thought, or among late antique and medieval Muslims and Christians (not to mention among some Chinese as well). Additionally, I can accept the cognitive model whereby science and scientific curiosity is rooted in our psychology in a very deep sense, so that even small children engage in theory-building.

That is all well and good. The basic building blocks for many inventions and institutions existed long before their instantiation. But nevertheless the creation of institutions and inventions at a given moment is deeply contingent. Between 1600 and 1800 the culture of science as we know it emerged in the West. In the 19th and 20th centuries this culture became professionalized, but despite the explicit institutions and formal titles it is bound together by a common set of norms, an ethos if you will. Scientists work long hours for modest remuneration for the vain hope that they will grasp onto one fragment of reality, and pull it out of the darkness and declare to all, “behold!” That’s a rather flowery way of putting the reality that the game is about fun & fame. Most will not gain fame, but hopefully the fun will continue. Even if others may find one’s interests abstruse or esoteric, it is a special thing to be paid to reflect upon and explore what one is interested in.

Obviously this is an idealization. Science is a highly social and political enterprise, and injustice does occur. Merit and effort are not always rewarded, and on occasion machination truly pays. But overall the culture and enterprise muddle along, and are better in terms of yielding a better sense

...
Parenting and Happiness
by jefftk — 2012-10-03T13:43:58.406Z

If you're trying to decide whether to have kids it would be helpful to know whether you should expect yourself to be happier childfree or as a parent. The press reports it both ways, passing on the results of conflicting studies. I would like to find a good summary by someone who has read all the relevant research and understands which are the strong studies, but I've not found one. [1] Instead I've tried to read up on this enough that I can have an informed opinion, but there's enough research out there that I could be off. So here's what I've learned, after reading lots of abstracts, the "related work sections" of several papers, and finding two papers that I think do about as well as you can.

Summary: the research isn't that good, is all correlational, and how parenting affects your happiness varies widely by demographics (age, gender, income). Neither a simple "parenting makes people happy" nor a "parenting makes people miserable" are justified.

The most basic question in any research about happiness is "how do you know how happy people are?". While it's unsatisfying, the best we can do really is just to ask. How you ask matters, however: when parents are primed to think of their kids when asked about their happiness ("How happy are you as a parent?", "Has having kids made you happier?") they tend to say that their kids make them very happy. Some of this is probably a warm glow that comes of thinking of your kids, however, and so by first bringing up this glow and then asking about happiness you get answers that are atypically positive. Plus the social pressure to say you're happy as a parent. Studies that simply ask about happiness and parental status separately, as part of a broad survey, seem much more trustworthy to me because they should avoid this bias.

So what do they ask? I looked at two studies in depth that analyzed existing surveys. Those surveys asked:

GSS: General Social Survey (USA)

"Taken all together, how would you say things are these days?"

LSS: DDB Lifestyle Survey (USA)

"I am very satisfied with the way things are going in my life these days" ("definitely agree, generally agree, moderately agree, moderately, disagree, generally disagree, or definitely disagree").
SOEP: Socio-Economic Panel (Germany)

"How satisfied are you with your life, all things considered?" [2]

BHPS: British Household Panel Survey (UK)

"Have

...
Taking "correlation does not imply causation" back from the internet
by sixes_and_sevens — 2012-10-03T12:18:10.154Z

(An idea I had while responding to this quotes thread)

"Correlation does not imply causation" is bandied around inexpertly and inappropriately all over the internet. Lots of us hate this.

But get this: the phrase, and the most obvious follow-up phrases like "what does imply causation?" are not high-competition search terms. Up until about an hour ago, the domain name correlationdoesnotimplycausation.com was not taken. I have just bought it.

There is a correlation-does-not-imply-causation shaped space on the internet, and it's ours for the taking. I would like to fill this space with a small collection of relevant educational resources explaining what is meant by the term, why it's important, why it's often used inappropriately, and the circumstances under which one may legitimately infer causation.

At the moment the Wikipedia page is trying to do this, but it's not really optimised for the task. It also doesn't carry the undercurrent of "no, seriously, lots of smart people get this wrong; let's make sure you're not one of them", and I think it should.

The purpose of this post is two-fold:

Firstly, it lets me say "hey dudes, I've just had this idea. Does anyone have any suggestions (pragmatic/technical, content-related, pointing out why it's a terrible idea, etc.), or alternatively, would anyone like to help?"

Secondly, it raises the question of what other corners of the internet are ripe for the planting of sanity waterline-raising resources. Are there any other similar concepts that people commonly get wrong, but don't have much of a guiding explanatory web presence to them? Could we put together a simple web platform for carrying out this task in lots of different places? The LW readership seems ideally placed to collectively do this sort of work.
Meetup : Different location: Berkeley meetup
by Nisan — 2012-10-03T08:26:09.910Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Different location: Berkeley meetup

WHEN:
03 October 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Moffitt Library, Berkeley, CA

This week Zendo is unavailable for a meetup. Instead we will meet at the Free Speech Cafe in Moffitt Library on campus. Wednesday, October 3, 7pm. They have sandwiches and outdoor seating.
There will not be a Berkeley meetup on Wednesday of next week. Instead there will be a meetup party on Thursday of next week.
Map: http://goo.gl/maps/5nCVW

If you need help finding the place, call me at http://i.imgur.com/Vcafy.png

Discussion article for the meetup : Different location: Berkeley meetup
[SEQ RERUN] Inner Goodness
by MinibearRex — 2012-10-03T03:02:37.720Z

Today's post, Inner Goodness was originally published on 23 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Goodness comes from inside you. Morality is not some sort of obligation weighing you down. It's something you want.

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 Which Parts Are "Me"?, 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.
When does something stop being a “self-consistent idea” and become scientific fact?
by ancientcampus — 2012-10-02T21:00:24.136Z

Topic: When does something stop being a “useful theory” and become something we can believe?

[Preface - Hi! This is essentially my first time posting here. If I did something wrong, let me know. I've read about 1/3-1/2 of the major sequences, but feel free to reference a specific article if you think it helps answer the question]

We see something in the world that appears mysterious to us, and we come up with an idea (“idea X”) that explains it. For X to be fact, it should:

1) be internally consistent with itself, as well as with all its implications. i.e. if X, then Y, and if Y, then Z. If we know Z to be obviously false, then we know X must be false.

2) be externally consistent with reality as we know it. We can’t find something in reality that makes X clearly unture.

3) Explain things we have already observed (that’s why we’ve come up with idea X in the first place)

4) preferably, “make beliefs pay rent” – we should be able to use X to make predictions of the future, otherwise it doesn’t hold much value.

(By the way, if you disagree with 4 let me know, I’d love to hear your take. I’m not being sarcastic. Truth is still truth, even if there isn't any utility in believing it.)

So, lets say we’ve got a Generic Tribe of Primitive Peoples. They experience an earthquake. It’s the first earthquake in 50 years. They ask Wise Old Jim what all the commotion was. Jim, who is 57 and the only one who’s seen one before, thinks for a while, then says, “I’m not sure, but here’s one possibility: That’s George the Giant, who lives on the other side of the mountains, rolling over in his sleep. He does that occasionally.”

Now, this story about George is:

1) internally consistent (it makes sense that giants would sleep for a long time, and roll over occasionally.)

2) externally consistent (George is on the other side of the mountains, which is mysterious uncharted territory. He’s heavy enough to rumble the earth all the way over here. No-one can think of anything they’ve seen to make his existence unlikely.)

3) explains the earthquake

4) It lets us know that the world isn’t ending, that nothing major has changed, and that this is a natural occurrence which will probably happen again years later. All

...
Rationality Quotes October 2012
by MBlume — 2012-10-02T18:50:16.067Z

Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

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.