trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Saving lives via bed nets is hard to beat for immediate impact
by JonahS — 2013-06-21T18:46:29.403Z

In my last post I wrote about how Peter Singer’s implicit past claim that [one can save a child’s life for the cost of a pair of shoes] is misleading.

Having said that, it’s important to highlight that if one ignores indirect effects, funding bed net distribution to save lives is an extremely good opportunity for people in the developed world to increase the number of valuable years of life that people experience.

The situation is probably completely different when one considers indirect effects. I’ll postpone discussion of indirect effects to a later date.

Consider the question of what the quality of life is in the developing world. The GiveWell blog post Quality of life in the developing world reads:

When we argue that donors should give internationally, one of the most common questions we get is, “Sure, you may be able to save a life in Africa, but what type of life are you saving? If you save a child from malaria will s/he likely die from something else soon after? Will s/he suffer from other problems that significantly reduce his/her quality of life?”

[…]

People in poor countries are less satisfied with their lives (they ranked their satisfaction as 4.3 out of 10, while rich country residents ranked theirs as 6.7).

[…]

Those who live past age 5 have nea

...
240 questions for your utility function
by HumanitiesResearcher — 2013-06-21T17:56:20.450Z

A game comparing intrinsic values can approximate a person's utility function.

First joke:	An economist can answer any question phrased in terms of money.

Second joke:	An economist receives a call from his artist friend. The artist is flying in to town, would like to visit the economist, and needs to be picked up at the airport. The economist agrees, and pays a cab to pick up the artist. The artist arrives by cab and demands an explanation for this slight. The economist explains that the opportunity cost of personally performing the favor was higher than the cost of a cab. The artist then tears up a bush in the front lawn of the economist, explaining: “The whole point of being friends is to suffer together.”

Abstractions

Let's begin with the assumption that human utility is complex. Specifically, the complexity of utility seems to come from the number of intrinsic goods, summarized by M. Zimmerman and quoted by W. Frankena as:

Life, consciousness, and activity; health and strength; pleasures and satisfactions of all or certain kinds; happiness, beatitude, contentment, etc.; truth; knowledge and true opinions of various kinds, understanding and wisdom; beauty, harmony, proportion in objects contemplated; aesthetic experience; morally good dispositions or virtues; mutual affection, love, friendship, cooperation; just distribution of goods and evils; harmony and proportion in ones' own life; power and experiences of achievement; self-expression; freedom; peace, security; adventure and novelty; and good reputation, honor, esteem, etc.

This list of intrinsic goods makes intuitive sense to me, and I'll return to it throughout the post. I'm predisposed to think that decisions become agonizing only with conflicting imperatives. My experience from Judgment & Decision Making class taught me that it's relatively simple to calculate a rational choice for a complex decision like buying a car, provided an extraneous utility function.

I believe that the list of intrinsic values is the key. I believe that a human utility function can be succinctly and robustly described by 120 ratios, generated from pairwise comparisons of sixteen intrinsic values. The sixteen intrinsic values are a variation on Frankena's list. The variation includes only two changes: the merger of “truth” with “knowledge... wisdom,” and the merger of “bea...
Seeking descriptions of deciban-levels
by DataPacRat — 2013-06-21T17:35:38.193Z

As part of a small project I'm working on, I need to have at least a rough description of how a given number of decibans translates into a subjective level of confidence, described in a way that can be understood by people who've never come across the idea before.

Some previous discussion has involved the practical maximum number of decibans, that imaginary and complex decibans aren't relevant here, a quick reference table, and another reference table.

Here's my first attempt an an approach: list some of the more memorable numbers of decibans, and give a rough description of that confidence level (being applied to identity verification, where possible). I'm open to any alternate approaches, and/or ways to improve this one.

While people tend to be very bad at assigning accurate confidence levels (eg, when people claim to be 90% sure of something, they're often wrong 50% of the time), their initial estimates of their confidence levels can be used as the inputs for more sophisticated Bayesian algorithms. Until such time as more accurate estimates are available, here are some possible sample confidence levels:

0 decibans: 50%: You're not sure whether the last digit of the phone number is a 3 or a 5.

1 decibans: 55% Just slightly more likely than not; a business card handed to you by a stranger.

Up to 10 decibans: to 90%: Someone you've chatted to for an evening.

Up to 20 decibans: to 99%: A distant acquaintance, who you talk to once a year.

Up to 30 decibans: to 99.9%: A co-worker who might have been re-organized into a new email since you last heard from them.

Up to 40 decibans: to 99.99%: A family member, who you might accidentally have mis-spelled the email address of.

Around 100 decibans: Your own personal information, closely checked. (There's still a theoretical chance that you're wrong, just as there's a theoretical chance that you're the star of something like the Truman Show.)

127 decibans: Data which relies on yourself alone, thoroughly re-checked and confirmed by others.</p>
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2013-06-21T15:36:19.531Z

This summary was posted to LW main on June 14th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta LessWrong June Meetup: Effective Altruism: 15 June 2013 07:00PM
Berlin Social Meetup: 15 June 2013 05:00PM
Bratislava Meetup IV.: 24 June 2013 06:00PM
[Bristol] Second Bristol meetup & mailing list for future meetups: 16 June 2013 03:00PM
London Social - Exposure to Direct Sunlight - June 23rd: 23 June 2013 02:00PM
Washington DC projects planning meetup: 16 June 2013 03:00AM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 22 June 2019 01:30PM
[Boston/Cambridge MA] The Psychology of Marketing: 16 June 2013 02:00PM
[Melbourne] Rationalist Housewarming at Isengard (Melbourne): 15 June 2013 08:00PM
Vienna Meetup #3: 15 June 2013 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern Cali...
College Student Philanthropy and Funding Millenium Villages
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-06-21T14:52:41.818Z

One interesting idea comes from "How Students Can Support a Millennium Village?", which talks about, obviously, funding a Millenium Village: (See also the school's news report.)

Last year at Carleton University our group, Students To End Extreme Poverty, worked to get a question to referendum where students voted on whether or not they would all have to automatically pay an additional $6 in tuition fees ($5352 instead of $5346) to help support a Millennium Village. It worked. Carleton students now contribute over $110,000 annually.

Here is our hope: By getting enough universities and organizations to support Millennium Villages (aside from helping a couple communities help themselves out of extreme poverty) it would raise enough awareness, get enough media attention, engage enough people, foster enough cooperation, and generate enough civil society will to see policy changes: more and better aid, fairer trade, and debt cancellation.

Worst case scenario: thousands of people, many of whom would otherwise be dead, will have the basic tools they need to lift themselves out of extreme poverty.

Might this be a plausible thing to try and do on other college campuses?

With an additional $6 per student, at my university, Denison University, we could raise $12,792 per year in philanthropy. To reach Carleton's level, we'd need $51.80 per student per year. At $12,792, we could fund 213 people to live in a Millenium Village.

The Impact of College Philanthropy

What exactly is the impact of college philanthropy? Philanthropic dollars certainly aren't useless, and the age-old saying that "anything helps" is certainly true. But many social problems would require money on the scale of millions, if not billions, of dollars to help solve. Student giving is typically on the scale of thousands. Raise $10 from each of Denison's students, and you'll be getting $21320, assuming everyone contributes. What's that worth?

College philanthropy raises awareness. A liberal arts school, such as Denison, wants to provide training to students in recognizing (and hopefully responding to) social issues. By raising money for a cause, one is able to raise awareness for the cause by educating people about it. Hopefully this raised awareness will translate into more action around the issue further dwn the road, even if money can'...
How would not having free will feel to you?
by Shmi — 2013-06-20T20:51:33.213Z

Given the spike in free-will debates on LW recently (blame Scott Aaronson), and the usual potentially answerable meta-question "Why do we think we have free will?", I am intrigued by a sub-question, "what would it feel like to have/not have free will?". The positive version of this question is not very interesting, almost everyone feels they have free will most all the time. The negative version is more interesting and I expect the answers to be more diverse. Here are a few off the top of my head, not necessarily mutually exclusive:

Epistemic:

Knowing that someone out there already predicts my behavior perfectly

Knowing that someone out there can predict my behavior perfectly, whether or not they actually bother doing it

Knowing that it is potentially possible to perfectly predict my behavior, even if I know that no one is doing it

Knowing that I am in a simulation

Knowing that I am in a simulation where repeated runs with the same inputs give identical outcomes

...?

Psychological:

Feeling constrained by the environment to act in certain ways

Feeling constrained by the environment to act in certain unsatisfactory ways

Voices in my head compel me to do things

Voices in my head compel me to do bad things

Feeling unable to complete thoughts I would like to think through, as if someone censored them

...?

Physical:

Observing myself act in ways I never intended to act, whether beneficial to me or not

Observing my arms/legs/mouth move as if externally controlled, and being unable to interfere

...?

For me personally some of these are close to the feeling of "no free will" than others, but I am not sure if any single one crosses the boundary.

I am sure that there are different takes on the answers and on how to categorize them. I think it would be useful to collect some perspectives and maybe have a poll or several after.
Meetup : Atlanta: Self-Hacking
by Nova_Division — 2013-06-20T15:26:56.192Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta: Self-Hacking

WHEN:
23 June 2013 06:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
2388 Lawrenceville Hwy. Apt L. Decatur, GA 30033

Self-hacking - using tools from cognitive neuroscience and psychology and a generous application of rationality to make yourself more awesome.

Introductions, and meet and greet for new members.

Mini-presentation: Chris Zieman will be presenting on epistemology.

Discussions. We’ll start with a large group discussion and break into smaller groups as needed.

Games!

There's never any required homework for the Atlanta meetups, but everyone is encouraged to share their favorite self-hacking tricks.

We're always excited to see new faces. All you have to do is show up!

(Please contact me if you have allergies to cats, as our meeting space has two of the most adorable cats you’ve ever seen.)

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta: Self-Hacking
Some reservations about Singer's child-in-the-pond argument
by JonahS — 2013-06-19T23:54:58.379Z

Peter Singer is one of the most influential philosophers, and is a strong candidate for being the person who has helped the effective altruist community the most.

In the past, Peter Singer often argued that [the moral obligation to rush into a shallow pond to save a drowning child at the cost of ruining one’s shoes] is equivalent to [the moral obligation to give to charities that reduce extreme poverty]. For example, in this 2009 video he said:

Imagine that you’re walking across a shallow pond and you notice that a small child has fallen in, and is in danger of drowning […] Of course, you think you must rush in to save the child. Then you remember that you’re wearing your favorite, quite expensive, pair of shoes and they’ll get ruined if you rush into the pond. Is that a reason for not saving the child? I’m sure you’ll say no it isn’t, you just can’t compare the life of a child to the cost of a pair of shoes, no matter how expensive. […] But think about how that relates to your situation in the world today. There are children whose lives you can save […] Nearly 10 million children die every year from avoidable, poverty related causes. And it wouldn’t take a lot to save the lives of these children. We can do it. For the cost of a pair of shoes, perhaps, you could save the life of a child. […] There’s some luxury that you could do without. And with that money, you could give to an organization to reduce extreme poverty in the world, and save lives of children. […] I think that this is what we ought to be doing.

Since Singer first posed the analogy, new information and understanding has emerged, which cast doubt on the relevance of Singer’s analogy. Singer used a different analogy in his recent TED talk (in which he discussed the death of Wang Yue), but whether explicitly or implicitly, the “child in a pond” meme has caught on. In light of recent developments, it’s important to highlight the fact that the opportunities to donate to alleviate global in our present world are disanalogous to the opportunity in Singer’s “child in a pond” scenario.

The most expensive pair of shoes that I own costs ~$120, and I would guess that the average American doesn’t own a pair of shoes that costs more...
Initial Thoughts on Personally Finding a High-Impact Career
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-06-19T19:10:02.084Z

As I mentioned in my strategic plan, I have 10 months and 28 days until I graduate from Denison University and hopefully will be transitioning to a career. Careers are important because having one will not only mean that I won't starve, but that I'll have an opportunity to change the world. As the career advice organization 80,000 Hours notes you'll be spending about 80,000 hours in a career, so you might as well use it to make as big of a difference as you can? But what career should I pick?

Here are my starting thoughts and strategy...

Basic Philosophy and Strategy

My aim is to choose a career that will, taken as a whole, contribute the most to the world with regard to my utilitarian goals to increase total well-being. "Taken as a whole" means that I'm not just considering the direct good of the first career itself, but also it's interaction with the rest of my life, it's indirect good, and how it might set me up to have an even better second career.

However, there is one catch: I furthermore want the job to be at least moderately enjoyable. I would very much not like to be depressed or burnt out, and I suspect that would be bad for my utilitarian goals too. If I think I would be miserable at my chosen job even if somehow it were to maximize total well-being, I still would not take it (despite this being immoral from a utilitarian standpoint).

I also would like to have a plan in place rather soon, so I can actually act upon preparing for it. The earlier I pick a career plan, the more options will remain open. Right now, I'm stuck, for better or for worse, with a psychology and political science major and unless I do something drastic, I won't be able to take any classes outside of those two majors for the rest of my time at Denison.

As a political science and psychology double major, I think I could be very well qualified for a job that involves research and/or statistics. To get more of an idea of what I can do, feel free to look at my résumé and at my personal website. I'll speculate a bit more about my qualifications later on in this essay.

The Scope of High-Impact Careers

The way I've been categorizing it, there are essentially only two different kinds of careers that promise to do lots of good -- funneling money to effective organizations and wor...
Giving Now Currently Seems to Beat Giving Later
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-06-19T18:40:52.782Z

Abstract: There is a debate between either donating now or donating later (investing, realizing the returns of one's investment, and donating in a lumpsum upon death). While donating later may be appropriate in some circumstances, right now we have the ability to donate now in order to go meta and recruit future donors who otherwise wouldn't have donated, thus adding more money than returns on investment.

-

Introduction

Among those people interested in doing as much as they can to make the world a better place and think donating their money as effectively as possible is a good way to do that, there is a debate about whether one should either (a) donate a specific portion of one's income in small installments each year or (b) invest one's income and then donate as much as possible in one large lump sum right before death. Of course, there are other positions -- like donate every month or donate every decade, but in a very relevant sense the debate is between two options: "give now" vs. "give later".

In this essay, I will defend the "give now" camp and rebut the "give later" camp, thus explaining why I will continue to donate once a year, though think any sort of regular time period smaller than each year is probably also acceptable.

But First, Why Give Later?

The biggest champ for the "give later" crowd is Robin Hanson, who makes his view known most recently in "If More Now, Less Later":

But at the margin, a person who saves another dollar, or chooses not to borrow another dollar, must typically expect the financial returns from their investments will help them more in the future than will such indirect effects of spending today. In fact, they should expect this savings will benefit their future self more than any of these other ways of spending today. After all, why give up money today if that both gives you less to spend today, and gives you less in the future? So there wouldn’t be any savings, or less than maximal borrowing, if people didn’t expect more gains later from saving than from spending today.

This implies that unless charity recipients are saving nothing and borrowing as much as they possibly can, they must expect that you would benefit them more in the future by saving and giving them the returns of your savings later, than if you had given them the money today, even after taking into account all of the ways in whi

...
Meetup : Durham: Luminosity followup
by evand — 2013-06-19T17:32:09.517Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham: Luminosity followup

WHEN:
20 June 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Cocoa Cinnamon, 420 W Geer St., Durham NC

A month ago or so we finished going through Alicorn's Luminosity sequence on Less Wrong. So, having done that and worked on Being Luminous for a month or two (or more), what conclusions did you draw?

We'll meet for coffee and informal introductions at 7:00. On-topic conversation will run from 7:30-9:00.

Please give some thought to what you learned (or didn't learn) from the luminosity meetups, and what impact it has had in the time period since.

If you weren't around for all (or even any) of the Luminosity meetups, please feel free to come anyway! Bring some questions about it for people that were, if you like :)

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham: Luminosity followup
A Keynesian key insight 
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-06-19T14:05:13.523Z

I've always found that learning new areas always goes a lot better if you start with a key insight of what the field is about. Often this is not presented or explained at the beginning of the course, and you have to deduce it later on.

For instance, I would have better grasped the epsilon-delta definition of a limit if the instructor had started with something like:

Our intuitive definition of a limit is that as we get closer to this point, the function gets closer to this value. It has turned out to be very tricky to formalise this intuition, however. Early mathematicians used calculus without a good definition of limit, and their informal definitions led to a lot of paradoxes. The epsilon-delta definition is a bit clunky and may seem counter-intuitive, but it actually manages to capture our intuitive definition without paradoxes and problems - that's why we choose it, not for its elegance (though you will come to appreciate it). With that in mind, let's have a look at it...

Similarly, I would have made more rapid progress with Gödel's theorems if, before giving the formal definition of Gödel numbering and of the provability symbol □, someone had clarified that direct and indirect self-reference was a problem. If a formal system of a certain complexity can talk about its own structure, even without "realising" that it's doing so, problems will arise. Some of my other key insights in the field can be found in my post here.

So when I do stumble upon a key insight, I want to share it. I've found some recently in Keynesian economics, giving me a much better grasp of what makes that economic theory tick, and which would be my point of entry should I ever study the subject in detail. The two key insights are:

Keynesian models do not require irrationality. Unemployment can persist (in the model) even if every agent is completely rational.

Hence theoretical macroeconomics really is different from theoretical microeconomics.

Of course, Keynesianism makes great use of irrationality or partial rationality of the agents (such as the stickiness of wages or the irrationality of bubbles), but it was a revelation that rational models, full of Homo Economicus, could still produce excess unemployment.

This seemed intuitively very odd. After all, if there is unemployment, wages should fall, making it more attractive to hire workers. Therefore the equilibrium should...