trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[Link] Is the Endowment Effect Real?
by Matt_Simpson — 2013-02-26T22:47:23.219Z

Under fairly weak assumptions, the most a standard rational economic agent is willing to pay for an item they don't own (WTP) and the least they're willing to accept in exchange for that item if they already own it (WTA) should be identical. In experiments with humans, psychologists and economists have repeatedly found WTP-WTA gaps suggesting that humans aren't rational in at least this specific way. This has been interpreted as the endowment effect* and evidence for prospect theory. According to prospect theory, people are loss averse. Roughly this means that that, given their current ownership set, people value not losing stuff more highly than gaining stuff. Thus once someone gains ownership of something they suddenly value it much more highly. This "endowment effect"* on one's valuation of an item has been put forth as an explanation for the observed WTP - WTA gaps.

*Wikipedia confusingly defines the endowment effect as the gap itself, i.e. as the phenomena to be explained instead of the explanation. I suspect this is a difference in terminology among economists and psychologists, where psychologists use the wiki definition and economists use the definition I give here. However, calling the WTP-WTA gap an "endowment effect" is a bit misleading because a priori the gap may not have anything to endowments at all.

A paper (pdf) by Charlie Plott and Kathryn Zeiler investigates WTP-WTA gaps and it turns out that they may just be due to subjects not quite understanding the experimental protocols, particularly in the value elicitation process. Here's an important quote from their conclusion, but do read the paper for details:

The issue explored here is not whether a WTP-WTA gap can be observed. Clearly, the experiments of KKT and others show not only that gaps can be observed, but also that they are replicable. Instead, our interest lies in the interpretation of observed gaps. The primary conclusion derived from the data reported here is that observed WTP-WTA gaps do not reflect a fundamental feature of human preferences. That is, endowment effect theory does not seem to explain observed gaps. In addition, our results suggest that observed gaps should not be interpreted as support for prospect theory.

A review of the literature reveals that WTP-WTA gaps are not reliably observed across experimental designs. Given the nature of reported experimental designs,

...
Exponent of Desire
by Shmi — 2013-02-26T18:01:40.545Z

I've been mostly lying in bed with fever for the last couple of days, and one night my starved for external stimuli semi-conscious mind produced the following mathematical construct, which I decided to share. This is not intended to be scientific or even all that serious.

So, suppose you have something. Let's call it 's'. You like it, so you want to keep having it. This is a first-order want, let's call it w(s). You also want to want to have it, which is a second order want: w(w(s)), or w2(s). If you are perfectly content, this will be true for all higher order wants, as well, wn(s). Now, you don't worry nearly as much about higher orders, so let's discount their contribution to your thoughts and feelings by the factor n!. Finally, the sum total of your wants for s is

(1+w+w2/2!+...wn/n!+...)(s)=ew(s).

This is, of course, the standard way to construct functions of linear operators.

So, if you love someone wholeheartedly and without reservation, you can call them the exponent of your desire. Hopefully they are geeky enough to appreciate it.
How much do you value your current identity vs. your life?
by pinyaka — 2013-02-26T17:59:20.474Z

I was reading about the effectiveness of bicycle helmet laws (here) and wondered how worthwhile it is to save your life at the expense of some aspect key to your current identity (Note that the paper linked doesn't say that this is the situation; this was just a tangential thought).

Let's say that I perform some activity that carries a 10% chance that I will die but otherwise carries no risk of injury. There is some piece of safety gear that I can wear that cuts that risk in half, but for some reason adds a 10% chance that I will be permanently brain damaged such that I will not be "me" as I understand it now. Should I rate this as 15% fatal with the safety gear or is there some other way that this should be evaluated?
Givewell Survey - Opportunity to influence their research
by Raemon — 2013-02-26T17:20:57.126Z

Givewell's blog has recently begun a series of 5 self-evaluation posts (they are on the 4th right now) which discuss where the organization is at and where they're going. They're all worth a read. In particular, they build up to a survey for Givewell followers about how you'd like the organization to direct their research in the future, with options to emphasize existential risk and research even if the evidence is lower quality.
Self-assessment in expert AI predictions
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-02-26T16:30:10.903Z

This brief post is written on behalf of Kaj Sotala, due to deadline issues.

The results of our prior analysis suggested that there was little difference between experts and non-experts in terms of predictive accuracy. There were suggestions, though, that predictions published by self-selected experts would be different from those elicited from less selected groups, e.g. surveys at conferences.

We have no real data to confirm this, but a single datapoint suggests the idea might be worth taking seriously. Michie conducted an opinion poll of experts working in or around AI in 1973. The various experts predicted adult-level human AI in:

5 years: 0 experts

10 years: 1 expert

20 years: 16 experts

50 years: 20 experts

More than 50 years: 26 experts

On a quick visual inspection, these results look quite different from the distribution in the rest of the database giving a much more pessimistic prediction than the more self-selected experts:

But that could be an artifact from the way that the graph on page 12 breaks the predictions down to 5 year intervals while Michie breaks them down into intervals of 10, 20, 50, and 50+ years. Yet there seems to remain a clear difference once we group the predictions in a similar way [1]:

This provides some support for the argument that "the mainstream of expert opinion is reliably more pessimistic than the self-selected predictions that we keep hearing about".

[1] Assigning each prediction to the closest category, so predictions of <7½ get assigned to 5, 7½<=X<15 get assigned to 10, 15<=X<35 get assigned to 20, 35<=X<50 get assigned to 50, and 50< get assigned to over fifty.
Meetup : RTLW Thursday Meetup 
by therufs — 2013-02-26T16:23:26.859Z

Discussion article for the meetup : RTLW Thursday Meetup

WHEN:
28 February 2013 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Francesca's Dessert Caffe, 706 9th Street, Durham NC

This week is Meetup Activity Potpourri, including:

Calibration exercises

Games: The Resistance and Zendo have been mentioned

Rationality Checklist check/review (http://lesswrong.com/lw/fc3/checklist_of_rationality_habits/)

beverages

etc.?

We'll have a couple bags of Icehouse pyramids on the table (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NKLebKLBm2Q/TtqJ7aptmBI/AAAAAAAAALs/n1jMtUlh3Ws/s1600/Ice%2BDice%2BBag.jpg).

Discussion article for the meetup : RTLW Thursday Meetup
[Link] We aren't the world: Humans differ more than previously believed
by Baughn — 2013-02-26T13:07:42.902Z

I found this article last night, which I'd like to hear your thoughts on.

It explains that many behaviours which psychologists have believed are human universals turn out to be specific to western culture. As the article points out, that's likely due to having easy access to western undergraduates, and assuming everyone works the same way.

It's not the first time I've read something like this; in the context of an article on military training, some years ago, I read how the culture of a certain area of the world made it basically impossible to build a military to western standards of effectiveness. Unfortunately I don't have a link, so treat that as an anecdote.

Some topics for discussion, off the top of my head:

The article suggests that the same cultural bias that makes westerners unusual also causes us to not notice, but that's right after committing a multi-decade blooper. I'm unsure how much weight to give their negativity; western culture has been stunningly effective otherwise.

Just how different are humans, anyway? One of the assumptions of CEV is that you can reasonably predict how a people would act if they "grow up together", which presumably requires growing up in the same culture. If culture provides this much of our basic brainware, such a scenario might be completely intractable; at worst, CEV for different cultures could produce the equivalent of baby-eaters. I'm increasingly worried that Eliezer is trying to do something that's not just impossible but also undesirable.

How much of a competitive bonus does western culture provide? Is multiculturalism safe, either competitively or societally?

I don't expect these to be answerable right away, or based on this article. It's just something I'm going to keep in mind.
[LINK] Westerners may be terrible experimental psychology subjects
by David_Gerard — 2013-02-26T12:46:30.414Z

WEIRD may be weirder than you think. We Aren't The World writes of psychological experiments on non-Westerners that give vastly disparate results from results that have been assumed to be hardwired, and the implications of this:

Henrich used a “game”—along the lines of the famous prisoner’s dilemma—to see whether isolated cultures shared with the West the same basic instinct for fairness. In doing so, Henrich expected to confirm one of the foundational assumptions underlying such experiments, and indeed underpinning the entire fields of economics and psychology: that humans all share the same cognitive machinery—the same evolved rational and psychological hardwiring. The test that Henrich introduced to the Machiguenga was called the ultimatum game.

...
To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”

...
At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West.

Edit: The actual papers this article writes about are covered in this post by Ciphergoth from a few years ago.
The Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology
by ESRogs — 2013-02-26T06:55:18.542Z

Those concerned about existential risks may be interested to learn that, as of last September, the National Science Foundation is funding a Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology. Though I haven't yet seen anywhere where they explicitly characterize nanotechnology as an existential threat to humanity (they seem mostly to be concerned with the potential hazards of nanoparticle pollution, rather than any kind of grey goo scenario), I was still pleased to discover that this group exists.

Here is how they describe themselves on their main page:

The Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology is a multi-institutional partnership devoted to investigating the fundamental molecular mechanisms by which nanoparticles interact with biological systems.

...

While nanoparticles have a great potential to improve our society, relatively little is yet known about how nanoparticles interact with organisms, and how the unintentional release of nanoparticles from consumer or industrial products might impact the environment.

The goal of the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology is to develop and utilize a molecular-level understanding of nanomaterial-biological interactions to enable development of sustainable, societally beneficial nanotechnologies. In effect, we aim to understand the molecular-level chemical and physical principles that govern how nanoparticles interact with living systems, in order to provide the scientific foundations that are needed to ensure that continued developments in nanotechnology can take place with the minimal environmental footprint and maximum benefit to society.

...

Funding for the CSN comes from the National Science Foundation Division of Chemistry through the Centers for Chemical Innovation Program.

And on their public outreach website:

Our “center” is actually a group of people who care about our environment and are doing collaborative research to help ensure that our planet will be habitable hundreds of years from now – in other words, that the things we do every day as humans will be sustainable in the long run.

Now you’re probably wondering what that has to do with nanotechnology, right? Well, it turns out that nanoparticles – chunks of materials around 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair – may provide new and important solutions to many of the world’s problems

...
Memory, nutrition, motivation, and genes
by PhilGoetz — 2013-02-26T05:25:02.917Z

There are two confusing but potentially important papers in the Jan. 25 2013 Science on long-term memory (LTM) formation in fruit flies:

Pierre-Yves Placais & Thomas Preat. To favor survival under food shortage, the brain disables costly memory. 339:440-441.

Yukinori Hirano et al. Fasting launches CRTC to facilitate long-term memory formation in Drosophila. 339:443-446.

These papers categorize long-term memory formation along three axes.

Aversive vs. appetitive: Actions that the brain interprets as helping it avoid something, vs. actions that help it attain something.

Fasting-dependent (fLTM) vs. spaced training-dependent (spLTM): fLTM is formed in a single learning episode, but only at the time that an organism first obtains food after a long fast. spLTM does not require fasting but requires repeated training.

LTM vs. ARM: Memories that require protein synthesis (LTM) vs. "anesthesia-resistent memory" (ARM), which does not. (The papers don't explain what ARM might correspond to in humans.)

The relationship between these is unclear, particularly as each of these three axes is claimed at various times to determine whether memory can be learned in a single training cycle (appetitive, fLTM, and/or ARM) or not (aversive, spLTM, and/or LTM). But these things appear to be likely, or at least to be reasonable hypotheses, if these pathways are conserved in humans:

How quickly you learn something depends on how much you've eaten recently. You learn most quickly immediately after ending a long fast. Your brain thinks you just learned something that saved it from starvation. (But note that a 1-day fast for a fruit fly could be compared to a human fasting for months.)

How quickly you learn something depends on whether your brain thinks that this knowledge is to avoid something bad (slow learning) or to attain something good (fast learning).

Almost all of the mutations that extend lifespan in organisms from yeast to humans impact the FOXO3a vs. mTORc1 axis (to use the human analogs). Expressing FOXO3a inhibits mTORc1 and extends lifespan in various ways; producing and assembling more mTORc1 inhibits FOXO3a and promotes protein synthesis, growth, reproduction, tissue repair, and immune response. We already know that extending lifespan, in general, is antithetical to building muscle. It may also be antithetical to f

...
[SEQ RERUN] The Evolutionary-Cognitive Boundary
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-26T05:07:23.877Z

Today's post, The Evolutionary-Cognitive Boundary was originally published on 12 February 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It's worth drawing a sharp boundary between ideas about evolutionary reasons for behavior, and cognitive reasons for behavior.

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 Cynicism in Ev-Psych (and Econ), 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.
Asteroids and spaceships are kinetic bombs and how to prevent catastrophe
by Troshen — 2013-02-25T23:33:54.331Z

A reality of physics, and one that doesn't get much play in science fiction, is that as soon as humanity gains space travel, anyone in the asteroid mining or space travel business will have city-busting capabilities at their fingertips.

It's there in classic sci-fi, but not so much recently.

This discussion was started in the comments to:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gln/a_brief_history_of_ethically_concerned_scientists/

In the "Ethically Concerned Scientists" post, Izeinwinter commented:

, I have given some thought to this specific problem - not just asteroids, but the fact that any spaceship is potentially a weapon, and as working conditions go, extended isolation does not have the best of records on the mental stability front.

Likely solutions: Full automation and one-time-pad locked command and control - This renders it a weapon as well controlled as nuclear arsenals, except with longer lead times on any strike, so even safer from a MAD perspective. (... and no fully private actor ever gets to run them. ) Or if full automation is not workable, a good deal of effort expended on maintaining crew sanity - Psyc/political officers - called something nice, fluffy, and utterly anodyne to make people forget just how much authority they have, backed up with a remote controlled self destruct. Again, one time pad com lock. It's not going to be a libertarian free for-all as industries go, more a case of "Extremely well paid, to make up for the conditions and the sword that will take your head if you crack under the pressure" Good story potential in that, though.

A great start to a discussion here.

You've considered people going loons and some general security, but it would then become a hacker war along the lines of who could break the security and gain control of the space ships.

It doesn't address the problem of the leaders using the ships as threat weapons, since they have legitimate control, but can still make terrorist decisions.

And I'm terrified of your idea of turning spaceflight, which I see as the ultimate freedom, along the lines of Niven's Belters, into a state-controlled affair like the Soviet navy with political officers.

Now, one thing I think is a useful safety control that doesn't lead to worse problems is the destruct option. All major rockets have them right now, since if it goes out of control it's a huge hazard for a great dis...
Singularity Fiction
by shiftedShapes — 2013-02-25T22:22:39.783Z

I enjoy reading singularity themed sci-fi especially if it focuses on bootstrapping and power leveling. Most recently, I read Stross and Doctrow's Rapture of the Nerds ( http://craphound.com/rotn/download/ the third part is especially interesting), and the my little pony fanfic Friendship is Optimal ( http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal ). I happened upon a link to the latter on this site and it was a nice surprise. However, I'd prefer to be kept abreast of new releases in this genre in a more reliable way and I'm guessing many others here would as well. Accordingly I propose that we exchange recommendations in this thread, or if there is already such a thread that somebody link to it.

-sS
What Deontology gets right
by ThrustVectoring — 2013-02-25T21:00:54.674Z

Let me preface this with an acknowledgement that Deontology has blind spots and that I'm not a Deontologist. Much like Logical Positivism, however, Deontology has good things to learn from that many Consequentialist decision algorithms miss.

Social Considerations

Your decision has consequences outside of the direct results. More specifically, if you decide to tell a lie, people are more likely to view you as a liar. This portion of consequences are easy to neglect when making a decision. So while Deontology over-corrects for this (for example, if you put a gun to my head and demand that I profess belief X, I'm going to say that I believe X, which a Deontological prohibition against lying forbids), it does so in a way that is better than many people's naive consequential thinking.

Deontological arguments are also better at convincing people that you have socially valued traits. People expect truth-tellers to tell the truth, so you want to be viewed as a truth-teller. "Lying doesn't work, so I don't lie" is a more awkward and involved argument than "lying is wrong". On a related note, Deonotological reasoning is easier for other people to model. Deontology can screen off the cost-benefit analysis that someone makes when thinking about their decisions, since all you need is the rules that they are following.

Habits and Policies

Decisions aren't made in a vacuum. They also form an implicit rule that people tend to follow. In other words, people form habits. They find it easier to do the same kinds of things that they've always done. Eating one piece of cake doesn't do measurable harm to your waistline, but having a policy of eating one piece of cake whenever you want to does.

If you're familiar with set theory, it's the distinction between {x|P(x)} and {x1, x2, x3...}. If you make decisions without consulting what policy P(x) you'd like to follow, you can make mistakes. Choosing x1 means not only having done x1, but also choosing a P(x) such that P(x1) is true.

When I sign a gay marriage petition, it doesn't just increase the chance that gay marriage gets enacted. It also makes me more likely to do other things that support the gay marriage movement, as well as make me more likely to sign worthwhile-sounding petitions in general. This is part of why I avoid social movements: trying to fight rape culture or conservatives or raci...
Meetup : Sunday Meetup at Buffalo Labs
by StonesOnCanvas — 2013-02-25T18:00:42.153Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sunday Meetup at Buffalo Labs

WHEN:
03 March 2013 04:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
2727 Broadway Ave. Suite 210, Cheektowaga, NY

Hey everyone,

The next post linked in this series is "Focus you Uncertainty" ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/ia/focus_your_uncertainty/ ). It seems to be a sort of warm up for Bayes' Theorem. I think its about time we did a whole lesson on Bayesian Reasoning.

Instead of reading the next post in the series, I'd recommend you read "An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem" http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes OR "Bayes' Theorem Illustrated" http://lesswrong.com/lw/2b0/bayes_theorem_illustrated_my_way/ which both do a good job explaining Bayes' Theorem in different ways. Different people learn in different ways, so if one explanation isn't working for you, try the other post and see if that makes more sense. In any case, we'll cover it at the meetup and why its important to know.

P.S. Since Buffalo Lab is not clearly visible from the road, I recommend using google maps satellite view to make it a bit easier to find.

Discussion article for the meetup : Sunday Meetup at Buffalo Labs