trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[SEQ RERUN] Lonely Dissent
by MinibearRex — 2011-12-07T03:32:36.765Z

Today's post, Lonely Dissent was originally published on 28 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Joining a revolution does take courage, but it is something that humans can reliably do. It is comparatively more difficult to risk death. But is is more difficult than either of these to be the first person in a rebellion. To be the only one who is saying something different. That doesn't feel like going to school in black. It feels like going to school in a clown suit.

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 On Expressing Your Concerns, 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.
Beyond the Reach of God, Abridged for Spoken Word
by Raemon — 2011-12-06T18:49:03.740Z

Previously, I posted a version of The Gift We Give Tomorrow that was designed to be read aloud. It was significantly abridged, and some portions reworded to flow better from the tongue. I recently finished another part of my project: An abridged version of Beyond the Reach of God. This one doesn’t lend itself as well to something resembling “poetry,” so it’s more a straightforward editing job. The original was 3315 words. The new one is currently 1090. I’m still trying to trim it a little more, if possible. GWGT was 1245, which was around 7 minutes of speaking time, and pushing the limit of how long the piece can be.

For those who were concerned, after paring this down into a collection of some of the most depressing sentences I've ever read, I decided it was NOT necessary to end "Gift We Give Tomorrow" on an echo of this post (although I'm leaving in the part where I reword the "Shadowy Figure" to more directly reference it). That reading will end with the original "Ever so long ago."

Beyond the Reach of God:

I remember, from distant childhood, what it's like to live in the world where God exists. Really exists, the way that children and rationalists take all their beliefs at face value.

In the world where God exists, he doesn’t intervene to optimize everything. God won’t make you a sandwich. Parents don't do everything their children ask. There are good arguments against always giving someone what they desire.

I don't want to become a simple wanting-thing, that never has to plan or act or think.

But clearly, there's some threshold of horror, awful enough that God will intervene. I remember that being true, when I believed after the fashion of a child. The God who never intervenes - that's an obvious attempt to avoid falsification, to protect a belief-in-belief. The beliefs of young children really shape their expectations - they honestly expect to see the dragon in their garage. They have no reason to imagine a loving God who never acts. No loving parents, desiring their child to grow up strong and self-reliant, would let their toddler be run over by a car.

But what if you built a simulated universe? Could you escape the reach of God? Simulate sentient minds, and torture them? If God's watching everywhere, then of course trying to build an unfair world results in the God intervening - stepping ...
[Link] Using the conjunction fallacy to reveal implicit associations
by HonoreDB — 2011-12-06T17:29:08.389Z

Via Pharyngula.

A recent set of studies by Gervais, Shariff, and Norenzayan tested whether public dislike of atheists was based more on distrust or revulsion. The first study simply asked directly, and found that American adults report a strong distrust of atheists. However, they worried that explicit answers might be more about signaling, so they did a second study with a more unusual methodology. Questions they asked included (paraphrased) "Is a person who steals money out of a lost wallet more likely to be 1) a teacher or 2) a teacher and an atheist?" and "Is a person who goes all day without noticing he has phlegm on his tie more likely to be 1) a teacher or 2) a teacher and an atheist?" Students, especially religious ones, often answered 2) to the first and 1) to the second, suggesting that it's more about mistrust.

I suspect this isn't actually a more effective way of eliciting stereotypes than asking directly. I think signaling concerns will be just as active in the second study, and there will be a skewing of results in that anyone familiar with the conjunction fallacy (or even the importance of base rates) will answer 1) even if they distrust or are disgusted by atheists. The result will inevitably underestimate dislike of atheists and evince a spurious or exaggerated correlation between such dislike and statistical innumeracy. I think a better way to look for implicit, rather than explicit, stereotyping would be to create an Implicit Association Test. That said, I think the study is still meaningful and I'm intrigued by the methodology.

Thanks to lukeprog, here's the full paper. Relevant excerpt:

Study 1 demonstrated explicit distrust of atheists, but it is possible that, instead of being representative of personal feelings, participants’ explicit responses may have instead reflected cultural norms determining which groups are fair game for criticism and which should be insulated. The varied permissibility of such criticism is itself an interesting indicator of prejudice, but it does not specifically map on to the questions of distrust at the heart of this project. As a result, in Study 2, we adapted a classic conjunction fallacy paradigm (e.g., Tversky & Kahnemann, 1983) to create an indirect measure of distrust for various groups of people.
[Link] How to Dispel Your Illusions 
by  — 2011-12-06T14:46:26.845Z

The topic and the problems associated with it are probably familiar to many of you already. But I think some may find this review by Freeman Dyson of the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman interesting.

In 1955, when Daniel Kahneman was twenty-one years old, he was a lieutenant in the Israeli Defense Forces. He was given the job of setting up a new interview system for the entire army. The purpose was to evaluate each freshly drafted recruit and put him or her into the appropriate slot in the war machine. The interviewers were supposed to predict who would do well in the infantry or the artillery or the tank corps or the various other branches of the army. The old interview system, before Kahneman arrived, was informal. The interviewers chatted with the recruit for fifteen minutes and then came to a decision based on the conversation. The system had failed miserably. When the actual performance of the recruit a few months later was compared with the performance predicted by the interviewers, the correlation between actual and predicted performance was zero.

Kahneman had a bachelor’s degree in psychology and had read a book, Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence by Paul Meehl, published only a year earlier. Meehl was an American psychologist who studied the successes and failures of predictions in many different settings. He found overwhelming evidence for a disturbing conclusion. Predictions based on simple statistical scoring were generally more accurate than predictions based on expert judgment.

A famous example confirming Meehl’s conclusion is the “Apgar score,” invented by the anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar in 1953 to guide the treatment of newborn babies. The Apgar score is a simple formula based on five vital signs that can be measured quickly: heart rate, breathing, reflexes, muscle tone, and color. It does better than the average doctor in deciding whether the baby needs immediate help. It is now used everywhere and saves the lives of thousands of babies. Another famous example of statistical prediction is the Dawes formula for the durability of marriage. The formula is “frequency of love-making minus frequency of quarrels.” Robyn Dawes was a psychologist who worked with Kahneman later. His formula does better than the average marriage counselor

...
[Link] How doctors die
by Morendil — 2011-12-06T13:22:03.229Z

I'm reposting this from HN's front page, because it brought up a non-cached thought on cryonics:

The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” [...] I’ve had hundreds of people brought to me in the emergency room after getting CPR. Exactly one, a healthy man who’d had no heart troubles (for those who want specifics, he had a “tension pneumothorax”), walked out of the hospital.

In short, end-of-life medical care is often pointless, painful and costly; doctors and ER personnel know this so well that they go to great lengths to ensure it doesn't happen to them.

It seems as if our systems and conventions around end of life are designed to not let people have a say in how they spend their final moments, even when letting them have their way would result in significant savings (note the dollar figures quoted above). I've already speculated on why that might be, but I keep seeing that turn up in unexpected ways.

I suspect that this is the bigger obstacle to cryonics, not so much e.g. the lack of scientific proof. "Freeze me cheaply instead of spending insane amounts of money on brutal attempts at keeping me alive" sounds like a sensible thing to tattoo on your chest, but the evidence suggests that it wouldn't be honored any more than "DNR" tattoos.
[SEQ RERUN] On Expressing Your Concerns
by MinibearRex — 2011-12-06T04:29:36.391Z

Today's post, On Expressing Your Concerns was originally published on 27 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A way of breaking the conformity effect in some cases

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 Asch's Conformity Experiment, 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.
Utilitarianism- WBE (uploading) > FAI
by Curiouskid — 2011-12-05T23:41:44.722Z

If you were a utilitarian, then why would you want to risk creating an AGI that had the potential to be an existential risk, when you could eliminate all suffering with the advent of WBE (whole brain emulation) and hence virtual reality (or digital alteration of your source code) and hence utopia? Wouldn't you want to try to prevent AI research and just promote WBE research? Or is it that AGI is more likely to come before WBE and so we should focus our efforts on making sure that the AGI is friendly? Or maybe uploading isn't possible for technological or philosophical reasons (substrate dependence)?
Is there a link to a discussion on this that I'm missing out on?
[SEQ RERUN] Asch's Conformity Experiment
by MinibearRex — 2011-12-05T20:01:17.538Z

Today's post, Asch's Conformity Experiment was originally published on 26 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The unanimous agreement of surrounding others can make subjects disbelieve (or at least, fail to report) what's right before their eyes. The addition of just one dissenter is enough to dramatically reduce the rates of improper conformity.

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 The Amazing Virgin Pregnancy, 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.
Seeking Collaborator for a Singularity Comic Book
by James_Miller — 2011-12-05T16:20:23.838Z

I’m currently writing a book called Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer and More Dangerous World. The book will be published in about a year by BenBella Books. This will be my third published book.

I’m thinking about also making a singularity comic book. My agent thinks the idea might work. Unfortunately my artistic abilities are well in the bottom half of mankind so I'm looking for a collaborator who would do the art. If you are interested please send samples or links to art you have created here:

EconomicProf@Gmail.com

If you know of someone who might be appropriate please email me (or leave below) his name, email address and if possible links to his artwork.

You can find out more about me here:

www.JamesDMiller.org
2011 Survey Results
by Scott Alexander — 2011-12-05T10:49:02.810Z

A big thank you to the 1090 people who took the second Less Wrong Census/Survey.
Does this mean there are 1090 people who post on Less Wrong? Not necessarily. 165 people said they had zero karma, and 406 people skipped the karma question - I assume a good number of the skippers were people with zero karma or without accounts. So we can only prove that 519 people post on Less Wrong. Which is still a lot of people.
I apologize for failing to ask who had or did not have an LW account. Because there are a number of these failures, I'm putting them all in a comment to this post so they don't clutter the survey results. Please talk about changes you want for next year's survey there.
Of our 1090 respondents, 972 (89%) were male, 92 (8.4%) female, 7 (.6%) transexual, and 19 gave various other answers or objected to the question. As abysmally male-dominated as these results are, the percent of women has tripled since the last survey in mid-2009.

We're also a little more diverse than we were in 2009; our percent non-whites has risen from 6% to just below 10%. Along with 944 whites (86%) we include 38 Hispanics (3.5%), 31 East Asians (2.8%), 26 Indian Asians (2.4%) and 4 blacks (.4%).

Age ranged from a supposed minimum of 1 (they start making rationalists early these days?) to a more plausible minimum of 14, to a maximum of 77. The mean age was 27.18 years. Quartiles (25%, 50%, 75%) were 21, 25, and 30. 90% of us are under 38, 95% of us are under 45, but there are still eleven Less Wrongers over the age of 60. The average Less Wronger has aged about one week since spring 2009 - so clearly all those anti-agathics we're taking are working!
In order of frequency, we include 366 computer scientists (32.6%), 174 people in the hard sciences (16%) 80 people in finance (7.3%), 63 people in the social sciences (5.8%), 43 people involved in AI (3.9%), 39 philosophers (3.6%), 15 mathematicians (1.5%), 14 statisticians (1.3%), 15 people involved in law (1.5%) and 5 people in medicine (.5%).
48 of us (4.4%) teach in academia, 470 (43.1%) are students, 417 (38.3%) do for-profit work, 34 (3.1%) do non-profit work, 41 (3.8%) work for the government, and 72 (6.6%) are unemployed.
418 people (38.3%) have yet to receive any degrees, 400 (36.7%) have a Bachelor's or equivalent, 175 (16.1%) have a Master's or equivalent, 65 people (6%) have a Ph.D, and 19 people (1.7%) have a professional degree ...
How is your mind different from everyone else's?
by Kaj_Sotala — 2011-12-05T08:38:48.348Z

Partially to help reduce the typical mind fallacy and partially because I'm curious, I'm thinking about writing either an essay or a book with plenty of examples about ways by which human minds differ. From commonly known and ordinary, like differences in sexual orientation, to the rare and seemingly impossible, like motion blindness.
To do this, I need to start collecting examples. In what ways does your mind differ from what you think is the norm for most people?
I'm particularly interested in differences - small or large - that you didn't realize for a long time, automatically assuming that everyone was like you in that regard. It can even be something as trivial as always having conceptualized the passing of years as a visual timeline, and then finding out that not everyone does so. I'm also interested in links to blog posts where people talk about their own mental peculiarities, even if you didn't write them yourself. Also books and academic articles that you might think could be relevant.
Some of the content that I'm thinking about including are cultural differences in various things as recounted in the WEIRD article, differences in sexual and romantic orientation (such as mono/poly), differences in the ability to recover from setbacks, extroversion vs. introversion in terms of gaining/losing energy from social activity, differences in visualization ability, various cognitive differences ranging from autism to synesthesia to an inability to hear music in particular, differences in moral intuitions, differences in the way people think (visual vs. verbal vs. conceptual vs. something that I'm not aware of yet), differences in thinking styles (social/rational, reflectivity vs. impulsiveness) and various odd brain damage cases.

If you find this project interesting, consider spreading the link to this post or resharing my Google Plus update about it. Also, if you don't want to reply in public, feel free to send me a private message.
Richard Carrier on the Singularity
by Peter Wildeford — 2011-12-05T06:14:25.171Z

Recently I stumbled upon Richard Carrier's essay "Are We Doomed" (June 5, 2009), when asked to comment about the Singularity, said the following:

I agree the Singularity stuff is often muddled nonsense. I just don't know many advocates of it. Those who do advocate it are often unrealistic about the physical limits of technology, and particularly the nature of IQ. They base their "predictions" on two implausible assumptions: that advancement of IQ is potentially unlimited (I am fairly certain it will be bounded by complexity theory: at a certain point it just won't be possible to think any faster or sounder or more creatively) and that high IQ is predictive of accelerating technological advancement. History proves otherwise: even people ten times smarter than people like me produce no more extensive or revolutionary technological or scientific output, much less invent more technologies or make more discoveries--in fact, by some accounts they often produce less in those regards than people of more modest (though still high) intelligence.

However, Singularity fans are right about two things: machines will outthink humans (and be designing better versions of themselves than we ever could) within fifty to a hundred years (if advocates predict this will happen sooner, then they are being unrealistic), and the pace of technological advancement will accelerate. However, this is already accounted for by existing models of technological advancement, e.g. Moore's Law holds that computers double in processing power every three years, Haik's Law holds that LED's double in efficiency every three years, and so on (similar laws probably hold for other technologies, these are just two that have been proven so far). Thus, that technological progress accelerates is already predicted. The Singularity simply describes one way this pace will be maintained: by the recruitment of AI.

It therefore doesn't predict anything remarkable, and certainly doesn't deserve such a pretentious name. Because there will be a limit, an end point, and it won't resemble a Singularity: there is a physical limit on how fast thoughts can be thunk and how fast manufacturing can occur, quantum mechanical limits that can never be overcome, by any technology. Once we reach that point, the pace of technological advancement will cease to be geometric and will become linear, or in some cases stop altogeth

...
Drawing Less Wrong: Technical Skill
by Raemon — 2011-12-05T05:12:57.133Z

The ability to observe is probably at least 2/3rds of what separates non-artists from amateur artists. But those 2/3rds are near-useless without the ability to move your pencil the way your eyes want to it to go. And once you've transitioned into an amateur artist, around 9,000 hours of honing your technical skill is what separates you from a professional.

"Technical Skill" is a broad term - kind of a catch all for all term for various motor skills you'll need to develop, background knowledge about how particular types of lines and shapes are perceived by most humans, and how to combine those skills and knowledge to produce particular effects with your drawing.

I can't even begin to cover all of it, and most of it isn't really appropriate for Less Wrong. But I will talk about some key motor skills that tie in with the next article, and a significant bias that plays a role in them.

This article was challenging to write - distilling a kinesthetic process into written words is difficult. This article will not be a substitute for having a teacher and a model, nor will it tell you exactly what exercises to do. But it will try to lay down some concepts that I'll further expound on later.

Holding the Pencil

For many of you this may seem basic, but at least one reader commented that they went for years without understanding this, and because it seemed basic, nobody ever noticed it and corrected them.

Holding a pencil should look approximately like this:

But its a bit more complicated that that. Many skilled artists hold the pencil in different ways. The biggest things to keep in mind are:

Don't grip the pencil too tightly. You'll hurt yourself, and it won't help.
If you hold the pencil closer to the tip, you will have more control over it, which is useful for fine details.
If you hold the pencil towards the back of the pencil, you'll have greater range of motion, and allows you to quickly draw larger lines in a single stroke. It also will be looser, which can feel hard to control but can also produce certain line qualities you may want.

(I personally tend to hold my pencil similar to the image above, but closer to the middle of the pencil)

A few examples of a pencil grip in motion:

This man's grip is similar to mine, although the technique he describes isn't something I think you should be worrying about just yet. ...