trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[Question] What's your Elevator Pitch For Rationality?
by atucker — 2011-09-06T21:43:21.967Z

You're talking with someone you like, and they ask you what you mean by rationality, or why you keep going to LessWrong meetups. Or you meet someone who might be interested in the site.

What do you say to them? If you had to explain to someone what LW-style rationality is in 30 seconds, how would you do it? What's your elevator pitch? Has anyone had any success with a particular pitch?

My Current Pitch:

My current best one, made up on the spot, lacking any foreplanning, basically consists of:

"Basically, our brains are pretty bad at forming accurate beliefs, and bad in fairly systematic ways. I could show you one, if you want."

Playing the triplet game with them, then revealing that the numbers just need to be ascending

Upon failure, "Basically, your brain just doesn't look for examples that disprove your hypothesis, so you didn't notice that it could have a been a more general rule. There are a bunch of others, and I'm interested in learning about them so that I can correct for them."

My Thoughts on That:

It's massively effective at convincing people that cognitive biases exist (when they're in the 80% that fails, which has always been the case for me so far), but pretty much entirely useless as a rationality pitch. It doesn't explain at all why people should care about having accurate beliefs, and takes it as a given that that would be important.

It's also far too dry and unfun (compared to say, Methods), and has the unfortunate side effect of making people feel like they've gotten tricked. It makes it look non-cultish though.

I suspect that other people can do better, and I'll comment later with one that I actually put thought into. There's a pretty good chance that I'll use a few of the more upvoted ones and see how they go over.
Free research help, editing and article downloads for LessWrong
by jsalvatier — 2011-09-06T21:13:05.226Z

Update: Please use the most recent thread.

The LW Public Goods Team wants to encourage useful research projects (as well other kinds of projects) for the LW community. If you're interested in doing this kind of work, you might run into a problem that is best solved by good outside assistance. Without assistance you might get discouraged and stop working on the project or never even start it. We want to help you avoid that. Do you

Not know how to interpret a finding and want help figuring it out?

Need access to a particular paper and need someone with a library subscription to download it for you?

Need someone to edit your writing?

Not even know what you're having trouble with, but you know is that you're stuck and need someone to troubleshoot you?

Then, we want to help!

How do you request such help? For now, I think the best way is to post to the discussion section about your problem. That way other interested people can also provide help and be interested in your research. If you feel uncomfortable doing this, you may post to the public goods team mailing list (lw-public-goods-team@googlegroups.com) or if it's not too long after this was posted, post in the comments.

I personally commit to doing at least 3 hours a week of tasks like these for people doing LessWrong related projects (assuming demand for it; I'll be keeping a log) for at least the next month. Morendil has committed to doing at least an hour of this and atucker has promised to some as well.

Our goal is to find out whether this kind of help is effective and encourages people. If this kind of assistance turns out to be valuable, we'll continue to offer it.

If you would like to volunteer some time (a little or a lot), say so in the comments!
Another 'prize' suggestion.
by Dr_Manhattan — 2011-09-06T19:53:47.934Z

Following this http://lesswrong.com/lw/7f5/what_are_good_topics_for_literature_review_prizes/ methodology and applying it to http://lesswrong.com/lw/7fv/hacking_on_lesswrong_just_got_easier/
it would seem like a good idea to create a prize for a tutorial on LW website hacking: e.g. what do you need to learn (Pylons, some Jquery (just a guess)), how to work with the repository, style guide, etc.. We'd get more people helping the site a bit. What do you think?
Meetup : Houston Meetup 9/11
by Cog — 2011-09-06T17:37:16.931Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Houston Meetup 9/11

WHEN:
11 September 2011 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
2010 Commerce St, Houston, Tx. 77002

After a short break (I was on vacation and then catching up from being on vacation), the Houston hackerspace meetup will be meeting again this Sunday at 2 PM. I will be giving a presentation on the history of psychology, where it has been, and where it is going. Some type of board game will follow.

Discussion article for the meetup : Houston Meetup 9/11
Case Study: Reading Edge's financial filings
by gwern — 2011-09-06T03:46:35.252Z

1 The problem

2 The solution

2.1 Which charity?

2.1.1 The filings

2.1.2 Overview

2.1.3 Income

2.1.4 Expenses

3 Final thoughts

4 Other examples

Abstract: an example of how to read charity filings, using Edge.org

1 The problem

Recently, on #lesswrong:

epitron> and you're right, Edge was a bit better back when people wrote essays, and the mailing list of smart people critiqued them
epitron> i guess we can chalk this up to the fall of journalism. or more likely, the way the financial system broke (which Lanier talks about)
gwern> Edge seems quite profitable, publishing prestigious pop intellectual books
epitron> o_O edge doesn't look very profitable to me. they just redesigned their website, after like 15 years
gwern> the videos, the dinners, the books...
epitron> I think advertising pop-science books by contributors is the only way to bribe them to contribute
epitron> hmm apparently Brockman has a thing for videotaping conversations with smart people. he's been doing it since the 60's
epitron> and publishing books is not a very profitable venture
epitron> maybe it's somewhat lucrative if you already have an audience who's waiting to buy up the next book... so that you don't have to advertise it
epitron> actually, Edge is a nonprofit. They have to publish quarterly reports, don't they?

Yes! That’s quite true - Edge Foundation, Inc. is in fact a non-profit, and a 501(c)(3) charity to boot. So we can answer these questions.

2 The solution

But how are we to do this?

As in previous examples, we have to know where such filings can be found. We ask the great Google: “501c3 filing”, and it tells us: GuideStar.org. To quote Wikipedia:

“Anyone who is interested in reviewing a nonprofit’s recent Forms 990 can register at Guidestar.org and download them for free.”

We register (it’s the normal signup form), and now we can search and look at the Form 990s.

2.1 Which charity?

‘Edge’ turns up 5,933 results; ‘Edge.org’ turns up 0; ‘Edge Foundation’ turns up 354. We’ll start with that last one. There turn out to be 4 or 5 ‘Edge Foundation Inc’ on the first page, so here we have to either look at every one or apply some outside knowledge.

In this case, as Epitron mentioned, the Foundation is powered by book agent Brockman, and where is...
[SEQ RERUN] The Lens That Sees Its Flaws
by MinibearRex — 2011-09-06T02:21:43.451Z

Today's post, The Lens That Sees Its Flaws was originally published on 23 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Part of what makes humans different from other animals is our own ability to reason about our reasoning. Mice do not think about the cognitive algorithms that generate their belief that the cat is hunting them. Our ability to think about what sort of thought processes would lead to correct beliefs is what gave rise to Science. This ability makes our admittedly flawed minds much more powerful.

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 What is Evidence?, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
[LINK] People are biased against creativity
by minderbinder — 2011-09-06T01:12:25.235Z

A lot of people probably saw this on hacker news but I thought I'd share it anyway - People are biased against creative ideas, studies find

To sum up, most people dislike uncertainty so much that they'll reject pretty much anything new, good or not. The article states that "Anti-creativity bias can be so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea." By "creative idea," I of course mean lawful creativity - the article seems to suggest that at a certain point, every creative suggestion starts to sound about as useful as "let's put pictures of purple unicorns on the wall to help ourselves be more productive," if you're biased enough.

What's a good way to fight this? Obviously solving the problem of being creative is a totally different matter. But I would suggest the usual "if you were a different person injected into your own life to improve things" approach and start by taking every single suggestion seriously and thinking it through as if you were only dealing with the issue for the very first time, and then as time went on, improve at making quick unbiased evaluations of creative ideas.
Prisoner's Dilemma Tournament Results
by prase — 2011-09-06T00:46:35.112Z

About two weeks ago I announced an open competition for LessWrong readers inspired by Robert Axelrod's famous tournaments. The competitors had to submit a strategy which would play an iterated prisoner's dilemma of fixed length: first in the round-robin tournament where the strategy plays a hundred-turn match against each of its competitors exactly once, and second in the evolutionary tournament where the strategies are randomly paired against each other and their gain is translated in number of their copies present in next generation; the strategy with the highest number of copies after generation 100 wins. More details about the rules were described in the announcement. This post summarises the results.

The Zoo of Strategies

I have received 25 contest entries containing 21 distinct strategies. Those I have divided into six classes based on superficial similarities (except the last class, which is a catch-all category for everything which doesn't belong anywhere else, something like adverbs within the classification of parts of speech or now defunct vermes in the animal kingdom). The first class is formed by Tit-for-tat variants, probably the most obvious choice for a potentially successful strategy. Apparently so obvious that at least one commenter declared high confidence that tit-for-tat will make more than half of the strategy pool. That was actually a good example of misplaced confidence, since the number of received tit-for-tat variants (where I put anything which behaves like tit-for-tat except for isolated deviations) was only six, two of them being identical and thus counted as one. Moreover there wasn't a single true tit-for-tatter among the contestants; the closest we got was

A (-, -): On the first turn of each match, cooperate. On every other turn, with probability 0.0000004839, cooperate; otherwise play the move that the opponent played on the immediately preceding turn.

(In the presentation of strategies, the letter in bold serves as a unique identificator. The following parentheses include the name of the strategy — if the author has provided one — and the name of the author. I use the author's original description of the strategy when possible. If that's too long, an abbreviated paraphrase is given. If I found the original description ambiguous, I may give a slightly reformulated version based on subsequent clarifications with the au...
Decision Theory Paradox: Answer Key
by orthonormal — 2011-09-05T23:13:33.256Z

As promised, I'm posting the answers to the exercises I wrote in the decision theory post.

Exercise 1: Prove that if the population consists of TDT agents and DefectBots, then a TDT agent will cooperate precisely when at least one of the other agents is also TDT. (Difficulty: 1 star.)

With the utility function specified (i.e. the shortsighted one that only cares about immediate children), the TDT agent's decision can be deduced from simple superrationality concerns; that is, if any other TDT agents are present with analogous utility functions, then their decisions will be identical. Thus if a TDT faces off against 2 DefectBots, it chooses between 0 children (for C) and 2 children (for D), and thus it defects. If it faces off against a TDT and a DefectBot, it chooses between 3 children (for C) and 2 children (for D), so it cooperates. And if it faces off against two other TDTs, it chooses between 6 children (for C) and 2 children (for D), so it cooperates. (EDIT: It's actually not that simple after all- see Douglas Knight's comment and the ensuing discussion.)

Exercise 2: Prove that if a very large population starts with equal numbers of TDTs and DefectBots, then the expected population growth in TDTs and DefectBots is practically equal. (If Omega samples with replacement– assuming that the agents don't care about their exact copy's children– then the expected population growth is precisely equal.) (Difficulty: 2 stars.)

For the sake of simplicity, we'll consider only the parenthetical case. (The interested reader can see that if sampled without replacement, the figures will differ by a factor on the order of one divided by the population.) There are four cases to consider when Omega picks a trio: it includes 0, 1, 2 or 3 TDT agents, with probability 1/8, 3/8, 3/8 and 1/8 respectively. The first case results in 6 DefectBots being returned; the second results in 4 DefectBots and 2 TDTs; the third results in 8 DefectBots and 6 TDTs; the last results in 18 TDTs. Weighting and adding the cases, each "side" has expected population growth of 5.25 agents in that round.

Exercise 3: Prove that if the initial population consists of TDTs and DefectBots, then the ratio of the two will (with probability 1) tend to 1 over time. (Difficulty: 3 stars.)

This is a bit tricky; note that the expected population growth is higher for the more populous side!...
Meetup : UMD, Social Effectiveness and Calibration Exercises
by atucker — 2011-09-05T19:47:02.012Z

Discussion article for the meetup : UMD, Social Effectiveness and Calibration Exercises

WHEN:
09 September 2011 06:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
University of Maryland, Anne Arundel Building

The DC Meetup group is starting to run meetups at the University of Maryland!

We'll be meeting in the basement of the Anne Arundel building at 6:00, then will probably move to a dorm room, outside, or to a food place.

At the first one we plan to do some quick calibration exercises, then move on to practicing social skills, like eye contact. If we're feeling brave, rejection therapy might ensue.

Discussion article for the meetup : UMD, Social Effectiveness and Calibration Exercises
[SEQ RERUN] What is Evidence?
by MinibearRex — 2011-09-05T05:57:27.291Z

Today's post, What is Evidence? was originally published on 22 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Evidence is an event connected by a chain of causes and effects to whatever it is you want to learn about. It also has to be an event that is more likely if reality is one way, than if reality is another. If a belief is not formed this way, it cannot be trusted.

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 Burdensome Details, 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 Direct Instruction is
by  — 2011-09-04T23:03:01.531Z

A couple of days ago, prompted by several recent posts by Owen_Richardson, I checked out the book "Theory of Instruction" (Engelmann and Carnine, 1982) from my university library and promised to read it this weekend and write a post about Direct Instruction. This is that post.

Learning through examples

Direct Instruction is based on a theory of learning that assumes the learner capable of extracting a concept inductively through examples of that concept. I may not know what a blegg is, but after you show me several examples of bleggs and rubes, I will be able to figure it out. The principle of DI is to use the same basic procedure of giving examples to teach every concept imaginable. Naturally, in some cases, the process might be sped up by giving an explanation first; furthermore, there are some things in every subject you just have to memorize, and DI doesn't magically change that. However, it is assumed that the examples are where the real learning occurs.

The meat of the theory is using experimental data and cognitive science to establish rules for how examples ought to be given. Here are a few of the more basic ones:

It is impossible to demonstrate a concept using positive examples alone. Here I am reminded of the 2-4-6 game, in which subjects fail to test triplets that disconfirm their hypothesis. A teacher has control over the examples presented, so it is important to disconfirm the hypotheses that the learners (consciously or unconsciously) generate.

To successfully teach a quality, it is important that all positive examples only share that one quality. Imagine that you are being taught what a blegg is by a sequence of examples that include blue eggs and red cubes. By the end, you will not be certain whether the defining feature of a blegg is that it's blue, or that it's an egg, or both at once, or if the critical factor is the vanadium ore content of an object.

The way the example is presented is also a quality that must be controlled in this fashion. This is because inductive learning is not entirely a deliberate process on the part of the learner. For instance, if positive and negative examples alternate, the learner may extract the rule that "every other object is a blegg". There are multiple ways this can become a real problem: I've encountered calculus students who were confused by a problem that asked them to integrate with respect to a

...
Podcast on Cryonics by 'Stuff you should know'
by FiftyTwo — 2011-09-04T22:36:35.194Z

The podcast 'Stuff you should know' has done an episode on cryonics.

Available here:

http://podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2011-08-30-sysk-cryonics.mp3?_kip_ipx=862998473-1315175433

I don't know much about the subject, but what do people think of it as a depiction of cryonics in popular culture?
[Link] “How to seem good at everything: Stop doing stupid shit”
by kpreid — 2011-09-04T17:37:20.280Z

Possibly interesting article on winning: How to seem good at everything: Stop doing stupid shit

Summary, as I interpreted it: In practicing a skill, focus on increasing the minimum of the quality of the individual actions comprising performing the skill (because that is the greatest marginal benefit).

[This article previously posted as an open thread comment.]
Make evidence charts, not review papers? [Link]
by XiXiDu — 2011-09-04T13:26:57.261Z

How do you get on top of the literature associated with a controversial scientific topic? For many empirical issues, the science gives a conflicted picture. Like the role of sleep in memory consolidation, the effect of caffeine on cognitive function, or the best theory of a particular visual illusion. To form your own opinion, you’ll need to become familiar with many studies in the area.

You might start by reading the latest review article on the topic. Review articles provide descriptions of many relevant studies. Also, they usually provide a nice tidy story that seems to bring the literature all together into a common thread- that the author’s theory is correct! Because of this bias, a review article may not help you much to make an independent evaluation of the evidence. And the evidence usually isn’t all there. Review articles very rarely describe, or even cite, all the relevant studies. Unfortunately, if you’re just getting started, you can’t recognize which relevant studies the author didn’t cite.

[...]

Hal Pashler and I have created, together with Chris Simon of the Scotney Group who did the actual programming, a tool that addresses these problems. It allows one to create systematic reviews of a topic, without having to write many thousands of words, and without having to weave all the studies together with a narrative unified by a single theory. You do it all in a tabular form called an ‘evidence chart’. Evidence charts are an old idea, closely related to the “analysis of competing hypotheses” technique. Our evidencechart.com website is fully functioning and free to all, but it’s in beta and we’d love any feedback.

More: alexholcombe.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/make-evidence-charts-not-review-papers/

Example: What is the role of sleep on hippocampus-dependent memory consolidation?

I thought this was an interesting idea. Do you think it would be possible and useful to create an evidence chart for risks from AI, existential risks in general and other topics on lesswrong?
Hacking on LessWrong Just Got Easier
by atucker — 2011-09-04T06:59:39.443Z

TrikeApps has done a great job running LessWrong and adding new features, but they could use a little help. Have you thought about improving the LessWrong website but haven't done it because you weren't sure how? Or had installation issues? Well, now is a great time to start, because hacking on LessWrong just got much easier!

On behalf of the LessWrong Public Goods Team, I have built a Virtual Machine Image which hosts its own version of the LessWrong website. This eliminates the need to figure out how to host LessWrong yourself. To hack on LessWrong you simply:

Install VirtualBox

Download and use the VM image

Edit LessWrong's code

Test

Submit pull request

Detailed instructions and download link here.
Interested, but not sure what to work on? The LessWrong issue tracker is here. Run into trouble with the code? Ask questions on the dev list.

Many thanks to Matt, Jon and David at TrikeApps for helping me do this, and John Salvatier for initiating this project.