trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Metaethics: Where I'm Headed
by lukeprog — 2011-11-22T08:15:23.901Z

In an earlier post, I explained that Pluralistic Moral Reductionism finished my application of the basic lessons of the first four sequences to moral philosophy. I also explained that my next task was to fill in some inferential distances by summarizing lots more cognitive science for LessWrong (e.g. Neuroscience of Human Motivation, Concepts Don't Work That Way).

Progress has been slow because I'm simultaneously working on many other projects. But I might as well let ya'll know where I'm headed:

"Philosophy for Humans, 2: Living Metaphorically" (cogsci summary)

Human concepts and human thought are thoroughly metaphorical, and this has significant consequences for philosophical methodology. (A summary of the literature reviewed in chs. 4-5 of Philosophy in the Flesh.)

"Philosophy for Humans, 3: Concepts Aren't Shared That Way (cogsci summary)

Concepts are not shared between humans in the way required to justify some common philosophical practices. (A summary of the literature reviewed in several chapters of The Making of Human Concepts, Mahon & Caramazza 2009, and Kourtzi & Connor 2011.)

"The Making of a Moral Judgment" (cogsci summary)

A summary of the emerging consensus view on how moral judgments are formed (e.g. see Cushman et al. 2010).

"Habits and Goals" (cogsci summary)

A sequel to Neuroscience of Human Motivation that explains the (at least) three different systems that feed into the final choice mechanism that encodes expected utility and so on. (A summary of the literature reviewed in chapter 2 of Neuroscience of Preference and Choice.)

"Where Value Comes From" (metaethics main sequence)

The typical approach to metaethics analyzes the meanings of value terms, e.g. the meaning of "good" or the meaning of "right." Given persistent and motivated disagreement and confusion over the "meanings" of our value concepts (which are metaphorical and not shared between humans), I prefer to taboo and reduce value terms. To explain value in a naturalistic universe, I like to tell the story of where value comes from. Our universe evolved for hundreds of thousands of years before the atom was built, and it existed for billions of years before value was built. Just like the atom, value is not necessary or eternal. Like the atom, it is made of smaller parts. And as with the atom, that is what makes value real.

"The Great...
Yet another Sleeping Beauty
by DanielLC — 2011-11-22T05:00:08.722Z

leeping Beauty is put to sleep on Sunday. If the coin lands on heads, she is awakened only on Monday. If it lands on tails, she is awaken on Monday and Tuesday, and has her memory erased between them. Each time she is awoken, she is asked how likely it is the coin landed on tails.

According to the one theory, she would figure it's twice as likely to be her if the coin landed on tails, so it's now twice as likely to be tales. According to another, she would figure that the world she's in isn't eliminated by heads or tails, so it's equally likely. I'd like to use the second possibility, and add a simple modification:

The coin is tossed a second time. She's shown the result of this toss on Monday, and the opposite on Tuesday (if she's awake for it). She wakes up, and believes that there are four equally probable results: HH, HT, TH, and TT. She then is shown heads. This will happen at some point unless the coin has the result HT. In that case, she is only woken once, and is shown tails. She now spreads the probability between the remaining three outcomes: HH, TH, and TT. She is asked how likely it is that the coin landed on heads. She gives 1/3. Thanks to this modification, she got the same answer as if she had used SIA.

Now suppose that, instead of being told the result of second coin toss, she had some other observation. Perhaps she observed how tired she was when she woke up, or how long it took to open her eyes, or something else. In any case, if it's an unlikely observation, it probably won't happen twice, so she's about twice as likely to make it if she wakes up twice.

Edit: SIA and SSA don't seem to be what I thought they were. In both cases, you get approximately 1/3. As far as I can figure, the reason Wikipedia states that you get 1/2 with SIA is that it uses sleeping beauty during the course of this experiment as the entire reference class (rather than all existent observers). I've seen someone use this logic before (they only updated on the existence of such an observer). Does anyone know what it's called?
[SEQ RERUN] Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence
by MinibearRex — 2011-11-22T04:26:42.713Z

Today's post, Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence was originally published on 12 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The world's greatest fool may say the Sun is shining, but that doesn't make it dark out. Stalin also believed that 2 + 2 = 4. Stupidity or human evil do not anticorrelate with truth. Arguing against weaker advocates proves nothing, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates.

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 Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult, 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.
Where do I most obviously still need to say "oops"?
by lukeprog — 2011-11-22T01:48:16.486Z

Eliezer once told me:

The most common error I see on Less Wrong is the failure to say "Oops."

If there's one rationality skill I like to think I'm pretty good at, it's this one: the skill of saying "Oops."

In fact, I say "Oops, fixed, thanks" so often on Less Wrong I once suggested I should have a shortcut for it: "OFT."

And I don't just say "oops" for typos and mistakes in tone, but also for mistakes in my facts and arguments.

It's not that I say "oops" every time I'm challenged at length, either. I don't say "oops" until I actually think I was significantly wrong; otherwise, I stand my ground and ask for better counter-arguments.

But I'm sure I can improve.

Wanna help me debug my own mind?

Tell me: On which issues do you think I most obviously still need to say "Oops"?
[LINK] Signalling and irrationality in Software Development
by quanticle — 2011-11-21T16:24:33.744Z

Why Software Projects are terrible and how not to fix them (by Drew Crawford):

Unless you are having a meeting with the one person who is going to use the software that you’re writing, you’re not meeting with the real customer. You’re meeting with a person who has to explain to someone who can explain to someone who can explain what you’re saying to the real customer. It’s not enough to convince the person you’re sitting in the room with that Agile is a good idea. He has to convince his boss. That person has to convince his boss. That person has to convince the sales team. The sales team has to convince the customer. If the customer is b2b, your contact at the customer organization has to convince his boss. Who convinces his boss. Who convinces the real customer. Maybe. Unless that sale is also b2b. This is a very long game of telephone. If the guy you’re talking too is thinking “This sounds like a really good idea but I’m concerned I can’t sell this upstairs,” you are dead in the water. At any point in the chain, if somebody thinks that, you are dead in the water. You can’t just say “It’s objectively better,” you have to show how he can turn around and sell the idea to someone else.

Put yourself in the middle manager’s shoes. If the project goes bad, he has to “look busy”. He has to put more developers on the project, call a meeting and yell at people, and other arbitrary bad ideas. Not because he thinks those will solve the problem. In fact, managers often do this in spite of the fact that they know it’s bad. Because that’s what will convince upper management that they’re doing their best.

In other words, it's all about signaling, isn't it? Managers will take actions that actively harm the continued progress of the project if that action makes them look "decisive" and "in charge". I've seen this on many projects I've been on, and it took me a while to realize that my managers weren't stupid or ignorant. It's just that the organization I was working in put a higher priority on process than on results. My managers, therefore quite rationally did things that maximized their apparent value i...
How did you come to find LessWrong?
by quanticle — 2011-11-21T15:32:34.377Z

I was reflecting the other day about how I learned about LessWrong. As best as I can recall/retrace, I learned about LessWrong from gwern, who I met in the #wikipedia IRC channel via an essentially chance meeting. I'm wondering how typical my experience is. How did you come to LessWrong?

EDIT: Optional follow-up question: Do you think that we (the community) are doing enough to bring in new users to LessWrong? If not, what do you think could be done to increase awareness of LessWrong amongst potential rationalists?
[Link] Walking Through Doors Causes Forgetting
by khafra — 2011-11-21T14:56:47.207Z

We investigated the ability of people to retrieve information about objects as they moved through rooms in a virtual space. People were probed with object names that were either associated with the person (i.e., carried) or dissociated from the person (i.e., just set down). Also, people either did or did not shift spatial regions (i.e., go to a new room). Information about objects was less accessible when the objects were dissociated from the person. Furthermore, information about an object was also less available when there was a spatial shift. However, the spatial shift had a larger effect on memory for the currently associated object. These data are interpreted as being more supportive of a situation model explanation, following on work using narratives and film. Simpler memory-based accounts that do not take into account the context in which a person is embedded cannot adequately account for the results.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/m6lq80675m22232h/

There's probably some deep implications to this I'm not qualified to plumb. But next time I'm concentrating on something, and need to get up from the computer and walk around a bit, I'm going to try avoiding doorways.
[SEQ RERUN] Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult
by MinibearRex — 2011-11-21T05:17:33.159Z

Today's post, Every Cause Wants To Be A Cult was originally published on 12 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Simply having a good idea at the center of a group of people is not enough to prevent that group from becoming a cult. As long as the idea's adherents are human, they will be vulnerable to the flaws in reasoning that cause cults. Simply basing a group around the idea of being rational is not enough. You have to actually put in the work to oppose the slide into cultishness.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Robbers Cave Experiment, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Drawing Less Wrong: Observing Reality
by Raemon — 2011-11-21T05:10:57.685Z

To draw a city, you must walk around that city and look at it.

You can't sit in a room with the blinds closed and create a map and expect it to be accurate. You cannot draw what you cannot see. To draw things, you need to look a things. This is surprisingly hard for a few reasons.

One is that you may want to be drawing imaginary things. I'll talk about this at length in the a later post. For now, let me just say that you can't *learn* to draw realistically (even realistic fantasy) by drawing things that aren't real.

Another reason is that when people begin, they do not have very good hand-eye coordination. Your can't trust your hand to move on its own - you feel like you must be watching it the entire time, staring intently at the pen and paper and making sure they're doing what you want them to. Coupled with this is a gross overconfidence in how good your memory is.

The third, and most significant reason, is that you don't know how to see in the first place.

How you will probably draw

(even knowing this is how you will probably draw)

Inexperienced artists will take a look at their subject, create a mental map of them in their brain, and then turn back to their paper. Slowly, carefully, they draw lines corresponding to that mental representation. Occasionally they may look up - but in the moment they look up, their finger slips and they draw a line that's completely inaccurate. This reinforces the mistrust in their hand-eye coordination, so they spend more and more time focusing down on their paper.

At the same time, as their drawing takes shape, it starts to look interesting. They've already stopped looking at the reality in front of them, but now they start getting distracted from their mental model. If you're drawing a human, you might get get focused on their eyes. You spend a lot of time on them, and they become the new map from which you navigate. You draw the nose or the lips based on where you drew eyes, the chin based on the lips. Your pencil journeys through a map by following a map which was following a map. You work from one small, interesting area to another, never considering how the drawing will work as a whole. Occasionally you'll think back to the original mental model in your head, but it will have grown fuzzy by this point.

And all this time, you probably drew slowly, using small, careful lin...
Meetup : Ottawa Weekly Monday LessWrong Meetup
by amacfie — 2011-11-21T03:51:25.309Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa Weekly Monday LessWrong Meetup

WHEN:
21 November 2011 07:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Pub Italia: 434 Preston St, Ottawa, ON

We will be discussing more sections from Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity by Scott Aaronson.

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa Weekly Monday LessWrong Meetup
Meetup : Monthly Bay Area meetup
by Nisan — 2011-11-21T02:27:26.456Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Monthly Bay Area meetup

WHEN:
26 November 2011 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
Berkeley

The next monthly Less Wrong meetup will be Saturday, November 26, at
7pm, in Berkeley. We'll gather in the Starbucks at 2128 Oxford Street,
and then walk to the Free Speech Cafe on campus. See you there!

-Nisan

Discussion article for the meetup : Monthly Bay Area meetup
Rare and Valuable skills worth mastering?
by Goobahman — 2011-11-21T01:46:47.798Z

Hey everyone I just read this, which in turn lead me to this and I'm curious as to what are some skills and fields of study that people think fit the category of 'rare and valuable'.

Not just in white collar environments either, but also considering the entertainment industry, hospitality, trades and so forth.
I've noticed anything that involves interfacing tends to have good dividends, especially if you can freelance.
Would love to hear your thoughts.
Practical debiasing
by crazy88 — 2011-11-20T09:45:47.784Z

Some of this post is an expansion of topics covered by Lukeprog here
1. Knowing about biases (doesn't stop you being biased)
Imagine you had to teach a course that would help people to become less biased. What would you teach? A natural idea, tempting enough in theory, might be that you should teach the students about all of the biases that influence their decision making. Once someone knows that they suffer from overconfidence in their ability to predict future events, surely they will adjust their confidence accordingly.
Readers of Less Wrong will be aware that it's more complicated than that.
There is a mass of research showing that knowing about cognitive biases does not stop someone from being biased. Quattrone et. al. (1981) showed that anchoring effects are not decreased by instructing subjects to avoid the bias. Similarly, Pohl et. al. (1996) demonstrate that the same applies to the hindsight bias. Finally, Arzy et al (2009) showed that including a misleading detail in a description of a medical case significantly decreased diagnostic accuracy. Accuracy does not improve if doctors are warned that such information may be present.
2. Consider the opposite (but not too much)
So what does lead to debiasing? As Lukeprog mentioned one well supported tactic is that of "consider the opposite", which involves simply considering some reasons that an initial judgment might be incorrect. This has been shown to help counter overconfidence and hindsight bias as well as anchoring. See, for example, Arkes (1991) or Mussweiler et. al. (2000) for studies along this line.
There are two more things worth noting about this tactic. The first is that Soll and Klayman (2004) have demonstrated that a related tactic has positive results in relation to overconfidence. In their experiment, Soll and Klayman asked subjects to give an interval such that they are 80% sure that the answer to a question lay within this interval. So they asked for predictions of things like the birth year of Oliver Cromwell and the subjects would need to provide an early year and a late year such that they were 80% sure that Cromwell was born somewhere between there two years. These subjects exhibited substantial overconfidence - they were right far less than 80% of the time.
However, another group of subjects were asked two questions. For the first, they were asked to pick a year such that they were 90% sur...
Connecting Your Beliefs (a call for help)
by lukeprog — 2011-11-20T05:18:08.193Z

A couple weeks after meeting me, Will Newsome gave me one of the best compliments I’ve ever received. He said: “Luke seems to have two copies of the Take Ideas Seriously gene.”

What did Will mean? To take an idea seriously is “to update a belief and then accurately and completely propagate that belief update through the entire web of beliefs in which it is embedded,” as in a Bayesian belief network (see right).

Belief propagation is what happened, for example, when I first encountered that thundering paragraph from I.J. Good (1965):

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind... Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

Good’s paragraph ran me over like a train. Not because it was absurd, but because it was clearly true. Intelligence explosion was a direct consequence of things I already believed, I just hadn’t noticed! Humans do not automatically propagate their beliefs, so I hadn’t noticed that my worldview already implied intelligence explosion.

I spent a week looking for counterarguments, to check whether I was missing something, and then accepted intelligence explosion to be likely (so long as scientific progress continued). And though I hadn’t read Eliezer on the complexity of value, I had read David Hume and Joshua Greene. So I already understood that an arbitrary artificial intelligence would almost certainly not share our values.

Accepting my belief update about intelligence explosion, I propagated its implications throughout my web of beliefs. I realized that:

Things can go very wrong, for we live in a world beyond the reach of God.

Scientific progress can destroy the world.

Strong technological determinism is true; purely social factors will be swamped by technology.

Writing about philosophy of religion was not important enough to consume any more of my time.

My highest-utility actions are either those that work toward reducing AI risk, or those that work toward making lots of money so I can donate to AI risk reduct

...
[SEQ RERUN] The Robbers Cave Experiment
by MinibearRex — 2011-11-20T04:36:27.959Z

Today's post, The Robbers Cave Experiment was originally published on 10 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The Robbers Cave Experiment, by Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, and Sherif (1954/1961), was designed to investigate the causes and remedies of problems between groups. Twenty-two middle school aged boys were divided into two groups and placed in a summer camp. From the first time the groups learned of each other's existence, a brutal rivalry was started. The only way the counselors managed to bring the groups together was by giving the two groups a common enemy. Any resemblance to modern politics is just your imagination.

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 When None Dare Urge Restraint, 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.
How to write a mathematical formula on the fear of death?
by TheatreAddict — 2011-11-20T04:23:44.233Z

I was reading the Methods of Rationality, and I was reading the part about how it's irrational to fear death. Well I came across "All x: Die(x) = Not Exist x: Not Die(x)" I really don't get this.. I'm sorry, I'm not good at math. But does "x" here represent an unknown variable? If so, is it being like, multiplied when it's put in parenthesis? Could this be put into a simpler equation?

Because I totally get the part where you either have to want to keep living, because I want to live right now, I'll want to live tomorrow, so therefore I'll want to live forever. And then if I want to not live forever, it would mean that I don't really want to live very much.. Right?

This is what happens when someone who hasn't a clue about math and science reads a smart fanfiction. But if someone could either verify the part about "All x: Die(x) = Not Exist x: Not Die(x)" being the correct formula, and then explaining why, that would be like, really cool.

Thanks! :D
Meetup : Next Atlanta Less Wrong Meetup
by hankx7787 — 2011-11-20T03:21:16.068Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Next Atlanta Less Wrong Meetup

WHEN:
10 December 2011 06:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
2094 North Decatur Road, Decatur, GA 30033-5367

Our first Atlanta Less Wrong meetup was a great success... everyone who came was really cool, and we had twice as many people show up as expected.

Our next meetup is Saturday, December 10th at 6pm at Chocolate' Coffee in Decatur:

http://www.mychocolatecoffee.com/
2094 North Decatur Road, Decatur, GA 30033-5367
(404) 982-0790

There is no RSVP, so feel free to come by if you are interested, and feel free to send me a message if you have any questions/suggestions.

Also, do sign up for our mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/atlanta-less-wrong-meetup-group

Discussion article for the meetup : Next Atlanta Less Wrong Meetup