trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Secure Your Beliefs
by lukeprog — 2011-02-12T16:53:24.060Z

When I was 12, my cousin Salina was 15. She was sitting in the back seat of a car with the rest of her family when a truck carrying concrete pipes came around the turn. The trucker had failed to secure his load properly, and the pipes broke loose. One of them smashed into Salina's head. My family has never wept as deeply as we did during the slideshow at her funeral.

The trucker didn't want to kill Salina. We can't condemn him for murder. Instead, we condemn him for negligence. We condemn him for failing to care enough for others' safety to properly secure his load. We give out the same condemnation to the aircraft safety inspector who skips important tests on his checklist because it's cold outside. That kind of negligence can kill people, and people who don't want their loved ones harmed have strong reasons to condemn such a careless attitude.

Social tools like praise and condemnation can change people's attitudes and desires. I was still a fundamentalist Christian when I went to college, but well-placed condemnation from people I respected changed my attitude toward gay marriage pretty quickly. Most humans care what their peers think of them. That's why public praise for those who promote a good level of safety, along with public condemnation for those who are negligent, can help save lives.

Failure to secure a truck load can be deadly. But failure to secure one's beliefs can be even worse.

Again and again, people who choose to trust intuition and anecdote instead of the replicated scientific evidence about vaccines have caused reductions in vaccination rates, which are then followed by deadly epidemics of easily preventable disease. Anti-vaccination activists are negligent with their beliefs. They fail to secure their beliefs in an obvious and clear-cut case. People who don't want their loved ones to catch polio or diphtheria from a neighbor who didn't vaccinate their children have reasons to condemn - and thereby decrease - such negligence.

People often say of false or delusional beliefs: "What's the harm?" The answer is "lots." WhatsTheHarm.com collects incidents of harm from obvious products of epistemic negligence like AIDS denial, homeopathy, exorcism, and faith healing. As of today they've counted up more than 300,000 injuries, 300,000 deaths, and $2 billion in economic damages due to intellectual recklessness. Ve...
Are Intuitions Good Evidence? [Link]
by XiXiDu — 2011-02-12T14:57:43.474Z

Ethics leans especially heavily on appeals to intuition, with a whole school of ethicists (“intuitionists”) maintaining that a person can see the truth of general ethical principles not through reason, but because he “just sees without argument that they are and must be true.”6 Intuitions are also called upon to rebut ethical theories such as utilitarianism: maximizing overall utility would require you to kill one innocent person if, in so doing, you could harvest her organs and save five people in need of transplants. Such a conclusion is taken as a reductio ad absurdum, requiring utilitarianism to be either abandoned or radically revised – not because the conclusion is logically wrong, but because it strikes nearly everyone as intuitively wrong.

[...]

One central concern for the critics is that a single question can inspire totally different, and mutually contradictory, intuitions in different people. Personally, I’ve often been amazed at how completely I disagree with what a philosopher claims is “intuitively” the case. For example, I disagree with Moore’s intuition that it would be better for a beautiful planet to exist than an ugly one even if there were no one around to see it. I can’t understand what the words “better” and “worse,” let alone “beautiful” and “ugly,” could possibly mean outside the domain of the experiences of conscious beings. I know I’m not alone in my disagreement with Moore, yet I’ve also talked to other well-respected professional philosophers who claim to share his intuition.

Link: rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2011/01/are-intuitions-good-evidence.html

I think the article provides some interesting insights into philosophy. It is also food for thought when it comes to metaethics, the psychological diversity of mankind and intuitively wrong versus rationally right.

via Luke Muehlhauser
What's the single best introduction to evolution to give to a creationist?
by Raemon — 2011-02-12T05:00:48.832Z

I have a creationist friend with no particular rationalist or scientific training. She recently asked me to send her a "list of evidence for evolution that persuaded me." After some prodding, it was revealed that she's getting into an argument with another friend of hers who believes in evolution. I'm assuming that she wants the experience of arguing with someone who's on level footing with her. It seems like a good opportunity to broaden someone's mind in a more general way that'll benefit them in the long term. I don't particularly care whether she believes in evolution (it probably will not impact her or the world in general if she changes her mind about it). But I'd like to phrase my e-mail in a way that's most likely to cause her to re-evaluate her worldview.

Subgoals related to this:

1. Point out that "losing" an argument can allow you to learn things, and if you honestly care about truth you'll try your best to evaluate ideas from other points of view and consider what it would mean if they were true. Do this without sounding condescending.

2. Give her a line of retreat by proposing that evolution is compatible with the Original Sin interpretation of genesis (which is very important to her and I would never attempt to argue against).

3. Give as much background as possible on the scientific method.

4. Still manage to focus the bulk of the e-mail on the most persuasive facts supporting evolution, otherwise I'm obviously not satisfying the criteria she actually gave me. I don't mind taking advantage of her request for my own purposes, but only if I'm actually helping her with her stated goal.

5. Specifically show why macroevolution is not only possibly but likely. (I'm pretty sure she either already believes or could be easily persuaded to believe in microevolution)

6. DON'T focus too much on why creationist arguments are flawed (she hasn't even used any yet, and it sends the wrong message about trying to actually figure out what the truth is)

7. Accomplish everything in approximately 3000 words, without using jargon, designed to be read by someone who's mental architecture isn't particularly adapted to rationalist thinking. (Most people aren't.)

I believe I can do a decent job myself. But it'll be a fair amount of work, and I want to know if anyone had a recommendation for a particularly good essay that I can either link her to or...
Make your training useful
by AnnaSalamon — 2011-02-12T02:14:03.597Z

As Tom slips on the ice puddle, his arm automatically pulls back to slap the ground. He’s been taking Jiu-Jitsu for only a month, but, already, he’s practiced falling hundreds of times. Tom’s training keeps him from getting hurt.

By contrast, Sandra is in her second year of university mathematics. She got an “A” in calculus and in several more advanced courses, and she can easily recite that “derivatives” are “rates of change”. But when she goes on her afternoon walk and stares at the local businesses, she doesn’t see derivatives.

For many of us, rationality is more like Sandra’s calculus than Tom’s martial arts. You may think “overconfidence” when you hear an explicit probability (“It’s 99% likely I’ll make it to Boston on Tuesday”). But when no probability is mentioned -- or, worse, when you act on a belief without noticing that belief at all -- your training has little impact.

Learn error patterns ahead of time

If you want to notice errors while you’re making them, think ahead of time about what your errors might look like. List the circumstances in which to watch out and the alternative action to try then.

Here's an example of what your lists might look like. A bunch of visiting fellows generated this list at one of our rationality trainings last summer; I’m including their list here (with some edits) because I found the specific suggestions useful, and because you may be able to use it as a model for your own lists.

Action ideas, for three related biases:

A. How does it help to know about overconfidence[1]? What can you do differently, once you know your impressions are unreliable?

Action ideas:

Try many things, including things you “know” won’t work. Try cheap ones.

Don’t be so sure you can’t do things.

Don’t be so sure that the things you are doing, are working:

If a given “necessary” task is using a large portion of your week, test what happens if you skip that task.

Ask others whether your efforts are working, and what you might try instead. Test their suggestions.

Ask how you’ll know if you hit your goal: what specific observables will be different? (Not “I’ll know calculus” but “I&

...
An Abortion Dialogue
by gwern — 2011-02-12T01:20:59.826Z

A few years ago, I wrote a little dialogue I imagined between 2 materialists, one of whom was for and one against abortion, centering on the personal identity question. I recently cleaned it up and added a number of references for the biological claims.

You can read it at An Abortion Dialogue.

Early feedback from #lesswrong is that it's a 'nicely enjoyable read' and 'quite good'. I hope everyone likes it, even if it doesn't exactly break new philosophical ground.
Comprehensible Improvments: Things you Could Do.
by Armok_GoB — 2011-02-11T23:15:03.455Z

Edit2: reactions to the edit made me reconsider, partially. I might get around to making more posts here.

EDIT: Because this and all my comments on it is getting downvoted already, I won't bother finish this and wish I'd never posted anything on it. Should I delete this thread or leave it as a monument to my own pathetic failure?

The topic of what you'd do if you found yourself as an upload and were to self improve is dangerous to think about for many reasons. It's unlikely to happen before the singularity and if it happens afterwards you'll have knowledge and a community that renders current speculation moot. As a human you almost certainly can't reach superintelegence without becoming Unfriendly. You can't think about any that improve intelligence beyond the first iteration because thatd be trying to predict somehting smarter than you. Etc.

However, even if you can only think about the very start of it, and the actual predictions or plans that you generate neither will or should have any reason to happen, there can be less direct benefits. The dominant one is it's damn fun; thinking about things you could do to your mind is way more interesting than what you could do with that hot guy/gal sitting in front of you on the bus or what you'd do with a billion dollars. More importantly thou, it serves to provide a LOWER BOUND, helping against failures of imagination and providing more salient and near mode motivation for a friendly singularity in establishing life after it will be at least this good and the only reason you wont do these awesome things is that you'll be provided by even better alternatives. Lastly, the chance is infinitesimal, but maybe you really will at some time have to boot the singularity from only your own upload and then a repository of the least unsafe upgrades LW could think of might come in handy. Just don't fool yourself the first one isn't the real cause of doing this thou. :p

Now, it happens to appear that all these 3 goals actually have the same most important heuristic: Keep it comprehensible to a vanilla human. There is a limited amount of fun to be gained from thinking of just a change to do without your brain being able to respond with what it'd feel like afterwards. Likewise, in the second goal the abstract "somehting really good but i don't know how good or in what exact way" is what we're trying to get away from. And ...
Madison Less Wrong Meetup: Wednesday, 16 Feb
by fiddlemath — 2011-02-11T22:06:55.313Z

It's been a while since we Madisonians have assembled! Let's do it again.

Where: The first floor lobby of the WID

When: 6:00 pm, Wednesday, 16 February

The first floor of the WID is open to the public, and has plenty of seats around tables, and couches, and whatnot. It's an unreasonably pleasant space convenient to campus. It's open until 8pm; I presume we'll retire thence to dinner when they threaten to close.

I'll be there with some obvious Less Wrong sign.

Please post here if you plan to show up, just so everyone else has some idea that people will be there.
Thinking Outside The Sphere
by sixes_and_sevens — 2011-02-11T17:20:04.740Z

I think this has the makings of a potential top level post, but at the moment it seems to lack any kind of real conclusion.

A lot of satire has been raised on the subject of "thinking outside the box", but if I were to describe a habit-of-mind common to the most instrumentally competent people I can think of, I'd have to call it "thinking outside the sphere".

A sphere is a minimum surface solid; it has the smallest possible surface area of any shape with the same volume. This seems like an innocuous fact until you remember that we live on a sphere which is running out of usable surface area. The Earth is only spherical because of an accident of gravity, not because it's useful. In a lot of ways living on the outside surface of a solid sphere is actively undesirable, and if we were to design a new habitat for human life, we could be a lot more creative.
In computer security there is a concept known as the attack surface, and it's comprised of everything a potential attacker could have access to. The most potentially worrying attacks are the ones you can't predict or plan for, and the only way to defend against them is to minimise the total attack surface of the system by giving potential attackers as little to work with as possible. Could an attacker exploit this unused service? No idea, but if you take it away it's one less thing to worry about.
I regularly work on (admittedly quite menial) real-world problems with no immediate solution but well-defined success criteria, and something that I've realised is that they all have an attack surface. The size of that surface is dependent on their shape, and the shape of a problem is determined by how you think about it. Especially powerful techniques for dealing with a type of problem force them into a shape with a larger attack surface, and make them vulnerable to more potential solutions.
The trouble is that simply describing a problem can give it a certain shape. If you describe (as a completely non-controversial example) climate change in the context of collective personal energy consumption, it becomes a messy social and political problem with a highly fragmented attack surface. If you describe it in the context of the distribution of carbon in the biosphere, all of a sudden it's an engineering problem, and you have a whole host of additional tools at your disposal. The overall volum...
Subjective Relativity, Time Dilation and Divergence
by jacob_cannell — 2011-02-11T07:50:44.489Z

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass . . .they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children built. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build . . .

Genesis 11: 1-9

Some elementary physical quantitative properties of systems compactly describe a wide spectrum of macroscopic configurations. Take for example the concept of temperature: given a basic understanding of physics this single parameter compactly encodes a powerful conceptual mapping of state-space.

It is easy for your mind to visualize how a large change in temperature would effect everything from your toast to a planetary ecosystem. It is one of the key factors which divides habitable planets such as Earth from inhospitably cold worlds like Mars or burning infernos such as Venus. You can imagine the Earth growing hotter and visualize an entire set of complex consequences: melting ice caps, rising water levels, climate changes, eventual loss of surface water, runaway greenhouse effect and a scorched planet.

Here is an unconsidered physical parameter that could determine much of the future of civilization: the speed of thought and the derived subjective speed of light.

The speed of thought is not something we are accustomed to pondering because we all share the same underlying neurological substrate which operates at a maximum frequency of around a kilohertz, and appears to have minor and major decision update cycles at rates in the vicinity of 33hz to 3hz.1

On the other hand the communication delay has changed significantly over the last ten thousand years as we evolved from hunter-gatherer tribes to a global civilization.

For much of early human history, the normal instantaneous communication distance limit would be the audible range of about 100 f...
Suggestions for a presentation on FAI?
by ShardPhoenix — 2011-02-11T06:09:27.227Z

Next week I'm going to be doing a 10-15 minute presentation on Friendly AI to a local group of programmers. They're already familiar with concepts such as the singularity. My basic plan is to cover what FAI is, why it's important, and why it's a hard problem, based on the material on this site.

Does anyone have any specific suggestions of things that should be included, questions that I might need to answer, etc?
Rationality for Other People
by atucker — 2011-02-11T05:41:08.486Z

I'm putting this through discussion because I’ve never written a main section post before… If you have helpful criticism please comment with it, and if it does well I’ll post it in the main section when I get back from school tomorrow.

Things between the bars are intended to be in the final post, the rest are comments

There’s lots of things which can end the world. There’s even more things which can help improve or save the world. Having more people working more effectively on these things will make the world progress and improve faster, or better fight existential risks, respectively.

And yet for all of my intention to help do those things, I haven’t gotten a single other person to do it as well. Convincing someone else to work towards something is like devoting another lifetime to it, or doubling your efforts. And you only need to convince them once.

So there’s two things I want to learn how to do:

Convince people to try and save the world

Convince people to use more effective methodologies (especially with regards to world-saving)

I think that the rationalist community as a whole isn’t particularly good at doing these. Small efforts are made by individuals, but I think that most of the people who do try to do these run into the same problems.

I propose that we do more to centralize and document the solutions to these problems in order for our individual efforts to be more effective. This thread is for people who encounter problems and solutions for convincing other people.

I think that the activity of convincing people to try and save the world and using more effective methodologies should have a word or phrase. Suggestions?

Should it just be a thread? I feel like some of the particularly good comments would make good independent posts. Just link to the post version from in the thread?

I’m a bit worried that this sounds a bit culty… If you disagree please mention, and if you agree please tell me why.

This is a bit prompted by Alicorn's post , and some things which have recently happened in my life.
Time Magazine has an article about the Singularity...
by Raemon — 2011-02-11T02:20:29.655Z

...and it is surprisingly positive.

Here is the Cover

Here is the article online

The money quote, IMO, given how mainstream a publication this is:

"The difficult thing to keep sight of when you're talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn't, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It's not a fringe idea; it's a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There's an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it's an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation."
Toronto Less Wrong Meetup - Thursday Feb 17
by Skatche — 2011-02-10T18:29:29.574Z

Hello Torontonian LessWrong members! My friend and I thought it would be fun to get you all in one room.

When: Thu. Feb. 17, 8:30 PM
Where: Duke of York Pub, 39 Prince Arthur Ave

Note the time has been changed - I was only able to get a reservation for 8:30.
Poll: What do you look for in a relationship?
by Desrtopa — 2011-02-10T01:15:29.593Z

Open to anyone, single or otherwise. What do you look for in a relationship?

A few questions to narrow down the responses:

1: What traits are most important to you in a prospective partner?

2: What kind of role would you want your partner(s) to play in your life?

3: How much time would you spend together, ideally?

4: How important is it to you that you share similar tastes?

5: How important is it that you be ideologically similar?

6: What, if anything, are your dealbreakers?
A rationalist's guide to psychoactive drugs
by Skatche — 2011-02-10T01:01:16.712Z

This is a first draft. Over the next few days I'll add citations and that sort of thing, but I'm posting it as-is in order to solicit feedback. Also, I wasn't able to find any specific policy regarding mention of illicit substances, so I'm going to assume this is okay, but if not please let me know.

Disclaimer: This is a work of postmodern fiction about two irredeemable junkies named Alice and Bob and their cat Fido. The views contained herein are not medical or legal advice, they are not my views, and they are not the views of LessWrong.com or any of its members. In fact they are not views at all: they are transnarrative flows in alterity-space, or that's what my lit prof tells me. I do not condone any illegal activity whatsoever, except jaywalking.

Introduction

Today, says Alice, I'm going to talk to you about drugs. I'll be covering several nutritional supplements, some stimulants and nootropics, and - as some of you have probably guessed - I'll also be talking briefly about recreational drugs, particularly psychedelics. Now, I don't have any sense of what the popular perception is of drugs around here, but I presume that at least some of you will be a little put off at the suggestion of recreational drug use. If that is how you feel, please bear with me. To partake or not partake of prohibited substances is a choice that must be made individually, and for many the payoffs may not be worth the risks; but I hope to convince you that, at least for some people, responsible drug use is a very reasonable and beneficial activity.

Well, hold on, says Bob - who takes a permissive but detached view of these things - hold on, now. It may be true (as cursory research will show) that drug use is far less dangerous than it's made out to be, and it may be true that some people get a lot of enjoyment out of them. But if you value knowledge and reason over hedonic pleasure, it seems better to cut them out entirely. After all, it's your brain on the line if anything goes wrong!

As a matter of fact, says Alice, drugs are good for more than just hedonism. First of all, they give you a handle on your own neurochemistry. It's unlikely that your brain is optimally tuned for the things you want to accomplish, so if you can tweak it the right way, you might be able to improve your functioning. ...