trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Why Don't People Help Others More?
by Peter Wildeford — 2012-08-13T23:34:43.406Z

As Peter Singer writes in his book The Life You Can Save: "[t]he world would be a much simpler place if one could bring about social change merely by making a logically consistent moral argument". Many people one encounters might agree that a social change movement is noble yet not want to do anything to promote it, or want to give more money to a charity yet refrain from doing so. Additional moralizing doesn't seem to do the trick. ...So what does?

Motivating people to altruism is relevant for the optimal philanthropy movement. For a start on the answer, like many things, I turn to psychology. Specifically, the psychology Peter Singer catalogues in his book.

A Single, Identifiable Victim

One of the most well-known motivations behind helping others is a personal connection, which triggers empathy. When psychologists researching generosity paid participants to join a psychological experiment and then later gave these participants the opportunity to donate to a global poverty fighting organization Save the Children, two different kinds of information were given.

One random group of participants were told "Food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than three million children" and some additional information about how the need for donations was very strong, and these donations could help stop the food shortages.

Another random group of participants were instead shown the photo of Rokia, a seven-year-old Malawian girl who is desperately poor. The participants were told that "her life will be changed for the better by your gift".

Furthermore, a third random group of participants were shown the photo of Rokia, told about who she is and that "her life will be changed for the better", but ALSO told about the general information about the famine and told the same "food shortages [...] are affecting more than three million" -- a combination of both the previous groups.

Lastly, a fourth random group was shown the photo of Rokia, informed about her the same as the other groups, and then given information about another child, identified by name, and told that their donation would also affect this child too for the better.

It's All About the Person

Interestingly, the group who was told ONLY about Rokia gave the most money. The group who was told about both children reported feeling less overal emotion than those who only saw Rokia, and gave less money. The group who...
Meetup : Longmont Colorado Meetup
by EvelynM — 2012-08-13T23:13:04.545Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Longmont Colorado Meetup

WHEN:
16 August 2012 07:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
Ziggis, 400 Main Street, Longmont, CO

The move south worked well, so we're planning on cycling back and forth for a while. Next week, back to Fort Collins.

I listened to this podcast this week:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/01/david_rose_on_t.html

Humans are primed for making ethical decisions based on the impact on small groups.

How do we change our decision making to scale with much larger groups, and more complexity?

Discussion article for the meetup : Longmont Colorado Meetup
Meetup : Meetup: Southwestern Ohio
by dugancm — 2012-08-13T22:27:35.875Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup: Southwestern Ohio

WHEN:
09 September 2012 04:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
21 Greene Boulevard, Beavercreek, Ohio 45440, USA

New location! Dinner at The Wine Loft near Dayton, Ohio. Reservation is under Dugan.
After dinner activities may include:

Presentation and discussion of preliminary material for a "Rational Mattress Buying" article (inspired by Rational Toothpaste: A Case Study).

Exploring and appraising The Greene as a location to hold future meetups.

Splitting off into small groups for rejection therapy in unfamiliar surroundings.

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup: Southwestern Ohio
Cynical explanations of FAI critics (including myself)
by Wei Dai — 2012-08-13T21:19:06.671Z

Related Posts: A cynical explanation for why rationalists worry about FAI, A belief propagation graph

Lately I've been pondering the fact that while there are many critics of SIAI and its plan to form a team to build FAI, few of us seem to agree on what SIAI or we should do instead. Here are some of the alternative suggestions offered so far:

work on computer security

work to improve laws and institutions

work on mind uploading

work on intelligence amplification

work on non-autonomous AI (e.g., Oracle AI, "Tool AI", automated formal reasoning systems, etc.)

work on academically "mainstream" AGI approaches or trust that those researchers know what they are doing

stop worrying about the Singularity and work on more mundane goals

Given that ideal reasoners are not supposed to disagree, it seems likely that most if not all of these alternative suggestions can also be explained by their proponents being less than rational. Looking at myself and my suggestion to work on IA or uploading, I've noticed that I have a tendency to be initially over-optimistic about some technology and then become gradually more pessimistic as I learn more details about it, so that I end up being more optimistic about technologies that I'm less familiar with than the ones that I've studied in detail. (Another example of this is me being initially enamoured with Cypherpunk ideas and then giving up on them after inventing some key pieces of the necessary technology and seeing in more detail how it would actually have to work.)

I'll skip giving explanations for other critics to avoid offending them, but it shouldn't be too hard for the reader to come up with their own explanations. It seems that I can't trust any of the FAI critics, including myself, nor do I think Eliezer and company are much better at reasoning or intuiting their way to a correct conclusion about how we should face the apparent threat and opportunity that is the Singularity. What useful implications can I draw from this? I don't know, but it seems like it can't hurt to pose the question to LessWrong.
Bayes for Schizophrenics: Reasoning in Delusional Disorders
by Scott Alexander — 2012-08-13T19:22:21.097Z

Related to: The Apologist and the Revolutionary, Dreams with Damaged Priors

Several years ago, I posted about V.S. Ramachandran's 1996 theory explaining anosognosia through an "apologist" and a "revolutionary".
Anosognosia, a condition in which extremely sick patients mysteriously deny their sickness, occurs during right-sided brain injury but not left-sided brain injury. It can be extraordinarily strange: for example, in one case, a woman whose left arm was paralyzed insisted she could move her left arm just fine, and when her doctor pointed out her immobile arm, she claimed that was her daughter's arm even though it was obviously attached to her own shoulder. Anosognosia can be temporarily alleviated by squirting cold water into the patient's left ear canal, after which the patient suddenly realizes her condition but later loses awareness again and reverts back to the bizarre excuses and confabulations.
Ramachandran suggested that the left brain is an "apologist", trying to justify existing theories, and the right brain is a "revolutionary" which changes existing theories when conditions warrant. If the right brain is damaged, patients are unable to change their beliefs; so when a patient's arm works fine until a right-brain stroke, the patient cannot discard the hypothesis that their arm is functional, and can only use the left brain to try to fit the facts to their belief.
In the almost twenty years since Ramachandran's theory was published, new research has kept some of the general outline while changing many of the specifics in the hopes of explaining a wider range of delusions in neurological and psychiatric patients. The newer model acknowledges the left-brain/right-brain divide, but adds some new twists based on the Mind Projection Fallacy and the brain as a Bayesian reasoner.

INTRODUCTION TO DELUSIONS
Strange as anosognosia is, it's only one of several types of delusions, which are broadly categorized into polythematic and monothematic. Patients with polythematic delusions have multiple unconnected odd ideas: for example, the famous schizophrenic game theorist John Nash believed that he was defending the Earth from alien attack, that he was the Emperor of Antarctica, and that he was the left foot of God. A patient with a monothematic delusion, on the other hand, usually only has one odd idea. Monothematic delusions vary less than polythematic ones: ther...
[Link] The perils of “reason”
by GLaDOS — 2012-08-13T06:37:08.609Z

Post by fellow LW reader Razib Khan, who many here probably know from the gnxp site or perhaps from his debate with Eliezer. Somewhat related to a post we also seem to have discussed.

In my post below in regards to Sam Harris’ recent interactions on the web I reasserted by suspicion of reason. This naturally elicited curiosity, or hostility, from some. I’ve talked about this before, but the illustration to the left gets at my primary issue. When individuals are reasoning alone they often have a high degree of uncertainty as to their conclusions. But when individuals are reasoning together they seem to converge very rapidly and with great confidence upon a particular position. What’s going on here? In the second case it isn’t reason at all, but our natural human predisposition toward group conformity. There’s a huge psychological literature on this, so I won’t belabor the point. When people brandish “reason” and “rationality” explicitly I’m somewhat skeptical. If rational conclusions are so plain and self-evident why are we even asserting the primacy of reason? If something really is so clearly reasonable you usually don’t go around trumpeting how reasonable it is.

Another pitfall of reason is that it lulls use into the delusion that we have a transparent understanding of our own motivations and logic, as well as the motivation and logic of others. In my post below I explicitly stated that I disagreed with Harris on the substance of much of what he asserted and assumes in the first paragraph, but multiple people simply imputed to me his views as if they were mine! Even though I declaimed this position very early on, they simply could not generate an coherent framework where I did not agree with either them or Harris. There were only two options conceivable for them which the “reason” engine could operate upon. As I clearly did not agree with them (or so they thought), they simply injected in the axioms which would be appropriate for Sam Harris into my own box, and then began firing the appropriate propositions.

Here we have the problem that reasonable arguments and the self-evident truth of rationality is often only clear among people who already agree on everything of substance. People who agree can confidently assert the rationality and reasonableness of their

...
[SEQ RERUN] Magical Categories
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-13T05:19:40.459Z

Today's post, Magical Categories was originally published on 24 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

We underestimate the complexity of our own unnatural categories. This doesn't work when you're trying to build a FAI.

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 Unnatural Categories, 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.
What are your questions about making a difference?
by Benjamin_Todd — 2012-08-12T23:14:51.247Z

How can you best use your time to make a difference?

80,000 Hours now has several people working full time on research, and they would like your questions!

We’re happy to consider any questions about how to effectively make a difference, in whatever sphere of your life – volunteering, career or donations. These questions could be at the conceptual or ethical level, or they could concern nitty-gritty practicalities.

We’re particularly interested in questions that are not already well addressed by other groups, and where there's significant opportunity for progress.

The most popular questions will receive the attention of our research team, and their findings will feature in our new careers guide.

Either post your questions below, or send them to careers@80000hours.org
The Fallacy of Large Numbers
by dspeyer — 2012-08-12T18:39:47.894Z

I've been seeing this a lot lately, and I don't think it's been written about here before

Let's start with a motivating example. Suppose you have a fleet of 100 cars (or horses, or people, or whatever). For any given car, on any given day, there's a 3% chance that it'll be out for repairs (or sick, or attending grandmothers' funerals, or whatever). For simplicity's sake, assume all failures are uncorrelated. How many cars can you afford to offer to customers each day? Take a moment to think of a number.

Well, 3% failure means 97% success. So we expect 97 to be available and can afford to offer 97. Does that sound good? Take a moment to answer.

Well, maybe not so good. Sometimes we'll get unlucky. And not being able to deliver on a contract is painful. Maybe we should reserve 4 and only offer 96. Or maybe we'll play it very safe and reserve twice the needed number. 6 in reserve, 94 for customers. But is that overkill? Take note of what you're thinking now.

The likelihood of having more than 4 unavailable is 18%. The likelihood of having more than 6 unavailable is 3.1%. About once a month. Even reserving 8, requiring 9 failures to get you in trouble, gets you in trouble 0.3% of the time. More than once a year. Reserving 9 -- three times the expected -- gets the risk down to 0.087% or a little less than every three years. A number we can finally feel safe with.

So much for expected values. What happened to the Law of Large Numbers? Short answer: 100 isn't large.

The Law of Large Numbers states that for sufficiently large samples, the results look like the expected value (for any reasonable definition of like).

The Fallacy of Large Numbers states that your numbers are sufficiently large.

This doesn't just apply to expected values. It also applies to looking at a noisy signal and handwaving that the noise will average away with repeated measurements. Before you can say something like that, you need to look at how many measurements, and how much noise, and crank out a lot of calculations. This variant is particularly tricky because you often don't have numbers on how much noise there is, making it hard to do the calculation. When the calculation is hard, the handwave is more tempting. That doesn't ma

...
[SEQ RERUN] Unnatural Categories
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-12T05:27:17.885Z

Today's post, Unnatural Categories was originally published on 24 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

There are some mental categories we draw that are relatively simple and straightforward. Others get trickier, because they are primarily drawn in such a way that whether or not something fits into that category is important information to our utility function. Deciding whether someone is "alive", for instance. Is someone like Terry Schaivo alive? This issue is why, in part, technology creates new moral dilemmas, and why teaching morality to a computer is so hard.

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 Mirrors and Paintings, 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.
What is moral foundation theory good for?
by novalis — 2012-08-12T05:03:29.457Z

I've seen Jonathan Haidt mentioned on Less Wrong a few times, and so when I saw an article about (in part) Haidt's new book elsewhere, I thought it would be an interesting read. It was, but not for the reasons I expected. Perhaps it is unfair to judge Haidt before I have read the book, but the quotes in the article reveal some seriously sloppy thinking.

Haidt believes that there are at least six sources of moral values; the first five are harm/caring, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity/disgust. Liberty was recently added to the list, but doesn't seem to have made it into this article. He claims that liberals (in the American sense), care mostly (or only) only about the harm and fairness values, while conservatives care about all five. I myself am a one-foundation person, since I consider unfairness either a special case of harm, or a good heuristic for where harm is likely to occur; my views are apparently so rare that they haven't come up on Haidt's survey, and I haven't met anyone else who has reported a score like mine.

While Haidt describes himself as a "centrist", he argues that "you need loyalty, authority and sanctity to run a decent society." There are at least three ways that this claim can be read:

(1) Haidt's personal moral foundations actually include all five bases, so this is a tautology; of course someone who thinks loyalty is fundamental will think a society without loyalty is not decent. From the tenor of the article, this is at least psychologically plausible.

(2) The three non-universal values can be justified in terms of the common values. This is the interpretation that seems to be supported by some parts of the article, but it has its own issues.

(3) Haidt cannot tell the difference between (1) and (2). Most of the article makes this claim entirely plausible.

Here's one example of Haidt's moral confusion:

"In India, where he performed field studies early in his professional career, he encountered a society in some ways patriarchal, sexist and illiberal. Yet it worked and the people were lovely."

First, was Haidt surprised to find people with different politics than his to be personable? Had he literally never met a conservative before?

Second, what does it mean to say that the society "worked", or that the people were "lovely"? Indian society privileges men and certain castes over women and other castes. I say this not to denigrate India spe...
Magical Healing Powers
by jefftk — 2012-08-12T03:19:50.062Z

Imagine you had magical healing powers. Sitting quietly with someone and holding their hand you could restore them to health. While this would be a wonderful ability to have, it would also be a hard one: any time you spent on something other than healing people would mean unnecessary suffering. How could you justify a pleasant dinner with your family or a relaxing weekend at the beach when that meant more people living in pain?

But you already have these powers. Through the magic of effective charity you can donate money to help people right now. The tradeoff remains: time you give yourself when you could be working means money you don't earn which then can't go to help the people who would most benefit from it.

(I don't think this means you should try for complete selflessness; you need to balance your needs against others'. But the balance should probably be a lot further towards others' than it currently is.)

Update 2012-08-12: this is a response to hearing people offline saying that if they had magical "help other people" powers then they should spend lots of time using them, without having considered that they already have non-magical "help other people" powers.

I also posted this on my blog
Meetup : NYC. Joint Meetup With Another Rationality Community
by Raemon — 2012-08-11T15:25:51.807Z

Discussion article for the meetup : NYC. Joint Meetup With Another Rationality Community

WHEN:
16 August 2012 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
NYC, 26th Street, Madison Avenue

There are, in fact, two rationality-centered communities in NYC. The other is called Ergo. While not officially affiliated with Less Wrong, many of the people there are familiar with material here. But some reason there's not a whole lot of cross pollination between the two groups.
We think this is a little silly. So organizers from the two groups have arranged a joint public meetup this week, at Madison Square Park. Come on down this Thursday, August 16th at 7 PM. (We'll be just south of 26th street, at the Admiral David Farragut monument)
Come down to meet, greet and swap rationalist origin stories!

Discussion article for the meetup : NYC. Joint Meetup With Another Rationality Community
Meetup : Berlin Meetup
by blob — 2012-08-11T09:59:26.150Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin Meetup

WHEN:
04 September 2012 07:30:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Spreegold, Hufelandstraße 20, 10407 Berlin

We're meeting for dinner at http://www.spreegold.com . There'll be a sign. Please leave a comment if you're planning to attend.

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin Meetup
[SEQ RERUN] Mirrors and Paintings
by MinibearRex — 2012-08-11T05:17:45.237Z

Today's post, Mirrors and Paintings was originally published on 23 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

There is a proposal for programming a friendly AI, called CEV. Essentially, this strategy consists of teaching a computer to look at human brains and deduce, from that, morality. This should work better than trying to program morality "by hand", since we really aren't smart enough to solve that problem with an acceptable degree of accuracy.

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 Invisible Frameworks, 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.
A rationalist My Little Pony fanfic
by DataPacRat — 2012-08-10T20:53:59.060Z

For the past two months, I've been writing, and posting, roughly two thousand words a day of "Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me", a story set in a "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" fanfic universe, "Chess Game of the Gods". Outside of the sheer NaNoWriMo-like exercise of pushing out near-daily chapters, I've also been trying to keep in mind the various principles I've learned from Yudkowsky and LessWrong, and to try to present them in a way that people who like reading MLP fanfics might be able to appreciate.

I've just come to something of a minor climax with chapter 60, and while I'll definitely be continuing the story, this seems like a good time to mention it here, for whatever feedback and constructive criticism anyone cares to offer.