trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
You're Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2010-02-15T07:58:48.585Z

Followup to: Logical Rudeness

"Modern man is so committed to empirical knowledge, that he sets the standard for evidence higher than either side in his disputes can attain, thus suffering his disputes to be settled by philosophical arguments as to which party must be crushed under the burden of proof."
-- Alan Crowe

There's a story - in accordance with Poe's Law, I have no idea whether it's a joke or it actually happened - about a creationist who was trying to claim a "gap" in the fossil record, two species without an intermediate fossil having been discovered. When an intermediate species was discovered, the creationist responded, "Aha! Now there are two gaps."

Since I'm not a professional evolutionary biologist, I couldn't begin to rattle off all the ways that we know evolution is true; true facts tend to leave traces of themselves behind, and evolution is the hugest fact in all of biology. My specialty is the cognitive sciences, so I can tell you of my own knowledge that the human brain looks just like we'd expect it to look if it had evolved, and not at all like you'd think it would look if it'd been intelligently designed. And I'm not really going to say much more on that subject. As I once said to someone who questioned whether humans were really related to apes: "That question might have made sense when Darwin first came up with the hypothesis, but this is the twenty-first century. We can read the genes. Human beings and chimpanzees have 95% shared genetic material. It's over."

Well, it's over, unless you're crazy like a human (ironically, more evidence that the human brain was fashioned by a sloppy and alien god). If you're crazy like a human, you will engage in motivated cognition; and instead of focusing on the unthinkably huge heaps of evidence in favor of evolution, the innumerable signs by which the fact of evolution has left its heavy footprints on all of reality, the uncounted observations that discriminate between the world we'd expect to see if intelligent design ruled and the world we'd expect to see if evolution were true...

...instead you search your mind, and you pick out one form of proof that you think evolutionary biologists can't provide; and you demand, you insist upon that one form of proof; and when it is not provided, you ta...
Two Challenges
by Daniel_Burfoot — 2010-02-14T08:31:47.668Z

Followup To: Play for a Cause, Singularity Institute $100k Challenge Grant
In the spirit of informal intellectual inquiry and friendly wagering, and with an eye toward raising a bit of money for SIAI, I offer the following two challenges to the LW community.
Challenge #1 - Bayes' Nets Skeptics' Challenge
Many LWers seem to be strong believers in the family of modeling methods variously called Bayes' Nets, belief networks, or graphical models. These methods are the topic of two SIAI-recommended books by Judea Pearl: "Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems" and "Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference".
The belief network paradigm has several attractive conceptual features. One feature is the ability of the networks to encode conditional independence relationships, which are intuitively natural and therefore attractive to humans. Often a naïve investigation of the statistical relationship between variables will produce nonsensical conclusions, and the idea of conditional independence can sometimes be used to unravel the mystery. A good example would be a data set relating to traffic accidents, which shows that red cars are more likely to be involved in accidents. But it's nearly absurd to believe that red cars are intrinsically more dangerous. Rather, red cars are preferred by young men, who tend to be reckless drivers. So the color of a car is not independent of the likelihood of a collision, but it is conditionally independent given the age and sex of the person driving the car. This relationship could be expressed by the following belief network:

Where "YM" is true if the driver is a young man, "R" denotes whether the car is red, and "A" indicates an accident. The fact that there is no edge betwee "R" and "A" indicates that they are conditionally independent given the other nodes in the network, in this case "YM".
A key property of the belief network scheme of constructing probability distributions is that they can be used to achieve a good balance between expressive power and model complexity. Consider the family of probability distributions over N variables that can take on K different values. Then the most naïve model is just an N-dimensional array of numbers P(X1, X2, ... XN), requiring K^N parameters to specify. The number of parameters required for a belief network can be drastically lower, if many of the nodes are conditionally ind...
Shock Levels are Point Estimates
by Peter_de_Blanc — 2010-02-14T04:31:25.506Z

This is a post from my blog, Space and Games. Michael Vassar has requested that I repost it here. I thought about revising it to remove the mind projection fallacy, but instead I left it in for you to find.

Eliezer Yudkowsky1999 famously categorized beliefs about the future into discrete "shock levels." Michael Anissimov later wrote a nice introduction to future shock levels. Higher shock levels correspond to belief in more powerful and radical technologies, and are considered more correct than lower shock levels. Careful thinking and exposure to ideas will tend to increase one’s shock level.

If this is really true, and I think it is, shock levels are an example of human insanity. If you ask me to estimate some quantity, and track how my estimates change over time, you should expect it to look like a random walk if I’m being rational. Certainly I can’t expect that my estimate will go up in the future. And yet shock levels mostly go up, not down.

I think this is because people model the future with point estimates rather than probability distributions. If, when we try to picture the future, we actually imagine the single outcome which seems most likely, then our extrapolation will include every technology to which we assign a probability above 50%, and none of those that we assign a probability below 50%. Since most possible ideas will fail, an ignorant futurist should assign probabilities well below 50% to most future technologies. So an ignorant futurist’s point estimate of the future will indeed be much less technologically advanced than that of a more knowledgeable futurist.

For example, suppose we are considering four possible future technologies: molecular manufacturing (MM), faster-than-light travel (FTL), psychic powers (psi), and perpetual motion (PM). If we ask how likely these are to be developed in the next 100 years, the ignorant futurist might assign a 20% probability to each. A more knowledgeable futurist might assign a 70% probability to MM, 8% for FTL, and 1% for psi and PM. If we ask them to imagine a plethora of possible futures, their extrapolations might be, on average, equally radical and shocking. But if they instead generate point estimates, the ignorant futurist would round the 20% probabilities down to 0, and say that no new technologies will be invented. The knowledgeable futurist would say that we’ll have ...
How Much Should We Care What the Founding Fathers Thought About Anything?
by David_J_Balan — 2010-02-11T00:38:43.590Z

A while back I saw an interesting discussion between U.S. Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia. Scalia is well known for arguing that the way to deal with Constitutional questions is to use the plain meaning of the words in the Constitutional text as they would have been understood at the time and place they were written.* Any other approach, he argues, would amount to nothing more than an unelected judge taking his or her personal political and moral views and making them into the highest law of the land. In his view if a judge is not taking the answer out of the text, then that judge must be putting the answer into the text, and no judge should be allowed to do that.** One illustrative example that comes up in the exchange is the question of whether and when it's OK to cite foreign law in cases involving whether a particular punishment is "Cruel and Unusual" and hence unconstitutional. In Scalia's view, the right way to approach the question would be to try as best one could to figure out what was meant by the words "cruel" and "unusual" in 18th century England, and what contemporary foreign courts have to say cannot possibly inform that question. He also opposes (though somewhat less vigorously) the idea that decisions ought to take into account changes over time in what is considered cruel and unusual in America: he thinks that if people have updated their opinions about such matters, they are free to get their political representatives to pass new laws or to amend the Constitution***, but short of that it is simply not the judge's job to take that sort of thing into account.
I don't think it's an unfair caricature to describe Scalia's position as follows:

It would be a bad thing for a bunch of unaccountable, unelected judges to have their own opinions be made the supreme law of the land.

If there is no absolute rule for judges to stick to, then they end up in some sense making up the "Constitution" themselves.

Therefore absolute Originalism is not only correct, but is the only position that distinguishes between "judge" and "dictator."

Claim #1 is true and Claim #2 is sort of true, but Claim #3 is clearly not true. What we're really faced with here is nothing more than a garden variety trade-off between two important values: trying to avoid disruptive or arbitrary rule by judges on the one hand and progress on the other. There simpl...
My Fundamental Question About Omega
by MrHen — 2010-02-10T17:26:56.423Z

Omega has appeared to us inside of puzzles, games, and questions. The basic concept behind Omega is that it is (a) a perfect predictor and (b) not malevolent. The practical implications behind these points are that (a) it doesn't make mistakes and (b) you can trust its motives in the sense that it really, honestly doesn't care about you. This bugger is True Neutral and is good at it. And it doesn't lie.

A quick peek at Omega's presence on LessWrong reveals Newcomb's problem and Counterfactual Mugging as the most prominent examples. For those that missed them, other articles include Bead Jars and The Lifespan Dilemma.

Counterfactual Mugging was the most annoying for me, however, because I thought the answer was completely obvious and apparently the answer isn't obvious. Instead of going around in circles with a complicated scenario I decided to find a simpler version that reveals what I consider to my the fundamental confusion about Omega.

Suppose that Omega, as defined above, appears before you and says that it predicted you will give it $5. What do you do? If Omega is a perfect predictor, and it predicted you will give it $5... will you give it $5 dollars?

The answer to this question is probably obvious but I am curious if we all end up with the same obvious answer.

The fundamental problem behind Omega is how to resolve a claim by a perfect predictor that includes a decision you and you alone are responsible for making. This invokes all sorts of assumptions about choice and free-will, but in terms of phrasing the question these assumptions do not matter. I care about how you will act. What action will you take? However you label the source of these actions is your prerogative. The question doesn't care how you got there; it cares about the answer.

My answer is that you will give Omega $5. If you don't, Omega wouldn't have made the prediction. If Omega made the prediction AND you don't give $5 than the definition of Omega is flawed and we have to redefine Omega.

A possible objection to the scenario is that the prediction itself is impossible to make. If Omega is a perfect predictor it follows that it would never make an impossible prediction and the prediction "you will give Omega $5" is impossible. This is invalid, however, as long as you can think of at least one scenario where you have a good reason to give Omega $5. Omega would sho...
The Craigslist Revolution: a real-world application of torture vs. dust specks OR How I learned to stop worrying and create one billion dollars out of nothing
by Kevin — 2010-02-10T03:15:07.368Z

...this is the first crazy idea I've ever heard for generating a billion dollars out of nothing that could actually work. I mean, ever. -Eliezer Yudkowsky

We can reasonably debate torture vs. dust specks when it is one person being tortured versus 3^^^3 people being subjected to motes of dust.

However, there should be little debate when we are comparing the torture of one person to the minimal suffering of a mere millions of people. I propose a way to generate approximately one billion dollars for charity over five years: The Craigslist Revolution.

In 2006, Craigslist's CEO Jim Buckmaster said that if enough users told them to "raise revenue and plow it into charity" that they would consider doing it. I have more recently emailed Craig Newmark and he indicated that they remain receptive to the idea if that's what the users want.

A simple text advertising banner at the top of the Craigslist home or listing pages would generate enormous amounts of revenue. They could put a large "X" next to the ad, allowing you to permanently close it. There seems to be little objection to this idea. The optional banner is harmless, and a billion dollars could be enough to dramatically improve the lives of millions or make a serious impact in the causes we take seriously around here. As a moral calculus, the decision seems a no brainer. It's possible that some or many dollars would support bad charities, but the marginal impact of supporting some truly good charities makes the whole thing worthwhile.

I don't have access to Craigslist's detailed traffic data, but I think one billion USD over five years is a reasonable estimate for a single optional banner ad. With 20 billion pageviews a month, a Google Adwords banner would bring in about 200 million dollars a year. Over five years that will be well over a billion dollars. With employees selling the advertising rather than Google, that number could very well be multiplied. An extremely low bound for the amount of additional revenue that could be trivially generated over five years would be 100 million.

I'm very open to other ideas, but I think the best way to assemble a critical mass of Craigslist users is via a Facebook fan page. Facebook makes it very easy to advertise Facebook pages so we can do viral marketing as well as paying Facebook to direct people to our page.

50,000 users would surely count as a critical mass, meani...
Shut Up and Divide?
by Wei Dai — 2010-02-09T20:09:06.208Z

During a recent discussion with komponisto about why my fellow LWers are so interested in the Amanda Knox case, his answers made me realize that I had been asking the wrong question. After all, feeling interest or even outrage after seeing a possible case of injustice seems quite natural, so perhaps a better question to ask is why am I so uninterested in the case.

Reflecting upon that, it appears that I've been doing something like Eliezer's "Shut Up and Multiply", except in reverse. Both of us noticed the obvious craziness of scope insensitivity and tried to make our emotions work more rationally. But whereas he decided to multiply his concern for individuals human beings by the population size to an enormous concern for humanity as a whole, I did the opposite. I noticed that my concern for humanity is limited, and therefore decided that it's crazy to care much about random individuals that I happen to come across. (Although I probably haven't consciously thought about it in this way until now.)

The weird thing is that both of these emotional self-modification strategies seem to have worked, at least to a great extent. Eliezer has devoted his life to improving the lot of humanity, and I've managed to pass up news and discussions about Amanda Knox without a second thought. It can't be the case that both of these ways to change how our emotions work are the right thing to do, but the apparent symmetry between them seems hard to break.

What ethical principles can we use to decide between "Shut Up and Multiply" and "Shut Up and Divide"? Why should we derive our values from our native emotional responses to seeing individual suffering, and not from the equally human paucity of response at seeing large portions of humanity suffer in aggregate? Or should we just keep our scope insensitivity, like our boredom?

And an interesting meta-question arises here as well: how much of what we think our values are, is actually the result of not thinking things through, and not realizing the implications and symmetries that exist? And if many of our values are just the result of cognitive errors or limitations, have we lived with them long enough that they've become an essential part of us?
Common Errors in History
by PhilGoetz — 2010-02-09T19:27:22.781Z

I bought a copy of Common Errors in History, which someone mentioned recently on LW. There were no copies on Amazon or other bookselling sites, but I found a copy on Ebay. No wonder it was hard to get - it's a 24-page pamphlet that was printed once, in 1945, by "The Historical Association," London.

I tried to find some common failures of rationality underlying the "common errors" listed. This is what I concluded:

English students in the mid-20th century learned a lot of history.

This booklet is full of statements such as, "The facts relating to the Corn Laws [of 1815-1849] are more often than not mis-stated in school examination papers," and, "The blockade of Brest and Toulon [during the Napoleonic wars] is usually misunderstood." My history lessons consisted primarily of repeatedly learning about the American Revolution and making turkeys or pilgrim hats out of colored cardboard.

The English sincerely apologize for their history.

In other countries, textbook authors try to make their own countries look good. In England, that would seem gauche. The entries on "Religion in the New England Colonies", "The Causes of the American War of Independence", "The First Chinese War, 1839-42", "Gladstone and the Turks", and "The Manchurian Crisis, 1931-32" complain that British textbook accounts place all of the blame on Britain.

History is simplified in order to assign blame and credit.

In numerous of the 20 entries, notably "The Dissolution of the Monasteries and Education", "Religion in the New England Colonies", "The Enclosure Movement", "The Causes of the American War of Independence", "The Great Trek", "The First Chinese War", "The Elementary Education Act", and "The Manchurian Crisis", the tract alleges that standard accounts are simplified; and they appear to be simplified in ways that allow a simple causal summary, preferably with one person, side, or act of legislation to receive credit or blame.

Not always. "The Great Trek" says that the Boers' depart is usually explained as due to their [blameworthy] indignation that the British had freed their slaves; whereas in fact they had a variety of different, equally blameworthy, reasons for leaving. And the entry on "Bismarck's Alliances" says that the textbook account is overly-complex in that it introduces a second treaty that did not exist.

This is the only general principle I could extract from the book, so it m...
Epistemic Luck
by Alicorn — 2010-02-08T00:02:50.262Z

Who we learn from and with can profoundly influence our beliefs. There's no obvious way to compensate. Is it time to panic?

During one of my epistemology classes, my professor admitted (I can't recall the context) that his opinions on the topic would probably be different had he attended a different graduate school.

What a peculiar thing for an epistemologist to admit!

Of course, on the one hand, he's almost certainly right. Schools have their cultures, their traditional views, their favorite literature providers, their set of available teachers. These have a decided enough effect that I've heard "X was a student of Y" used to mean "X holds views basically like Y's". And everybody knows this. And people still show a distinct trend of agreeing with their teachers' views, even the most controversial - not an unbroken trend, but still an obvious one. So it's not at all unlikely that, yes, had the professor gone to a different graduate school, he'd believe something else about his subject, and he's not making a mistake in so acknowledging...

But on the other hand... but... but...

But how can he say that, and look so undubiously at the views he picked up this way? Surely the truth about knowledge and justification isn't correlated with which school you went to - even a little bit! Surely he knows that!

And he does - and so do I, and it doesn't stop it from happening. I even identified a quale associated with the inexorable slide towards a consensus position, which made for some interesting introspection, but averted no change of mind. Because what are you supposed to do - resolutely hold to whatever intuitions you walked in with, never mind the coaxing and arguing and ever-so-reasonable persuasions of the environment in which you are steeped? That won't do, and not only because it obviates the education. The truth isn't anticorrelated with the school you go to, either!

Even if everyone collectively attempted this stubbornness only to the exact degree needed to remove the statistical connection between teachers' views and their students', it's still not truth-tracking. An analogy: suppose you give a standardized English language test, determine that Hispanics are doing disproportionately well on it, figure out that this is because many speak Romance languages and do well with Latinate words, an...