trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Andrew Gelman on "the rhetorical power of anecdotes"
by  — 2012-04-23T17:04:19.599Z

Andrew Gelman has a post up today discussing a particularly illustrative instance of narrative fallacy involving the recent plagiarism discussion surrounding Karl Weick. I think there are also some interesting lessons in there about generalizing from fictional evidence.
In particular, Gelman says, "Setting aside [any] issues of plagiarism and rulebreaking, I argue that by hiding the source of the story and changing its form, Weick and his management-science audience are losing their ability to get anything out of it beyond empty confirmation."
I am wondering if anyone has explicitly looked into connections between generalizing from fictional evidence and confirmation bias. It sounds intuitively plausible that if you are going to manipulate fictional evidence for your purposes, you'll almost always come out believing the evidence has confirmed your existing beliefs. I would be highly interested in documented accounts where the opposite has happened and fictional evidence actually served as a correction factor.
For what it's worth, I personally enjoy a watered-down version of the moral that Weick attempts to manipulate from the story that's discussed in Gelman's post. My high school math teacher used to always say to us, "When you don't know what to do, do something." I think he said it because he was constantly pissed about questions left completely blank on his math exams, and wanted students to write down scribblings or ideas so he could at least give them some partial credit, but it has been more motivational than that for me.
The Craft And The Community: Wealth And Power And Tsuyoku Naritai
by  — 2012-04-23T16:06:48.727Z

In this post, I'll try to tackle the question of whether this community and its members should focus more efforts and resources on improving their strength as individuals and as a community, than on directly tackling the problem of singularity. I'll start off with a personal anecdote, because, while I know it's not indispensable, I think anecdotes help the reader to think in near rather than far mode, and this post's topic is already too easily thought of in far mode in the first place.

The other day, I was in an idle conversation with a cab driver when he asked me: What would you do if you won the lottery? Is there some particular dream you have, such as travelling the world or something? I said (and I apologize in advance for the grandiosity and egotism of what follows, mostly because it might show a poor appraisal of my own competence and ability)

Well, it's not like I would ever play at the lottery, but if I did, and somehow won, I would

Pay myself the very best tutors and the very best education (I'm thinking Master's Degrees, PhD, and so on, that's all pretty damned expensive depending on where you take it) in my chosen speciality.

Pay myself the best aid in achieving peak sustainable physical, mental, and emotional condition (as optimized for the struggles and stresses of a daily life of extreme academic exertion, not for, say, performing in the battlefield, the olympics, or competitive chess). Coaches, gurus, chemicals, whatever it takes.

Spend one or two or even three years around the world learning as many "important" languages as I can. Not in order of ease or priority: Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, and Turkish and Arabic and Hebrew and their Ancient variants, because of all the doors these could open... and Basque and Navajo (those two would be just for the hell of it). (I already know English, Spanish, French, and a fair amount of German and Arabic).

With the acquired technical knowledge and skills, and the help of the contact network and the better understanding of human nature that learning so many languages and exploring so many cultures and travelling so much will have netted me, use the remaining money to start a business, one that involves as many people as possible in a way such that I can train them to be a Chaos Legion.

Hopefully, once I have achieved enough profits to make the growt

...
To like each other, sing and dance in synchrony
by Kaj_Sotala — 2012-04-23T13:30:25.386Z

For the How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup booklet, I'm looking for information about how to better build a social group and foster a feeling of community. Since this bit is probably of general interest, I'm posting it here.

If you want to make the members of the group like each other more and feel more like a group, synchronized actions may be one of the easiest ways of achieving this goal. Anthropologists have long known the community-building effect of dancing:

As the dancer loses himself in the dance, as he becomes absorbed in the unified community, he reaches a state of elation in which he feels himself filled with an energy of force immensely beyond his ordinary state . . . finding himself in complete and ecstatic harmony with all the fellow-members of his community, experiences a great increase in his feelings of amity and attachment towards them. (Radcliffe-Brown 1933/1948, quoted in Kesebir 2011)

Armies around the world utilize the same effect to foster a feeling of unison through repeated drills:

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual. (McNeill 1995, quoted in Kesebir 2011)

Wiltermuth & Heath (2009) summarize some of the research on the topic:

The idea that synchronous movement improves group cohesion has old roots. As historian William H. McNeill suggests, armies, churches, and communities may have all benefited, intentionally or unintentionally, from cultural practices that draw on ‘‘muscular bonding,’’ or physical synchrony, to solidify ties between members (McNeill, 1995). This physical synchrony, which occurs when people move in time with one another, has been argued to produce positive emotions that weaken the boundaries between the self and the group (Ehrenreich, 2006; Hannah, 1977), leading to feelings of collective effervescence that enable groups to remain cohesive (Durkheim, 1915/1965; Haidt, Seder, & Kesebir, in press; Turner, 1969/1995). Andaman Islanders have been said to become ‘‘absorbed in the unified community’’ through dance (Radcliffe-Brown, 1922, p. 252). Similar observations have been m

...
[SEQ RERUN] Decoherence as Projection
by MinibearRex — 2012-04-23T05:11:16.526Z

Today's post, Decoherence as Projection was originally published on 02 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Since quantum evolution is linear and unitary, decoherence can be seen as projecting a wavefunction onto orthogonal subspaces. This can be neatly illustrated using polarized photons and the angle of the polarized sheet that will absorb or transmit them.

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 Born Probabilities, 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.
Too obvious to say
by KatjaGrace — 2012-04-23T02:24:34.000Z

I’m in favor of living for an indefinitely long time. Pointing this out seems similar to pointing out that I’m in favor of not putting my hands in blenders while they are running. Same goes for ‘there probably isn’t a God’, ‘freezing one’s head is a good idea (under certain circumstances)’, and a lot of the other apparently controversial topics. I rarely state these opinions unless asked because it’s embarrassing to point out obvious things. If there seemed to be a sincere discussion of whether forty nine is the square of seven, I’d be embarrassed to join it, despite my strong views on the topic.

From the perspective of someone who’s not sure whether life extension is a good idea, I look like I don’t have a strong opinion. They see a small number of people who visibly like it, and a small number who visibly don’t. Yet if most people behave like me in the above respect, almost everyone they don’t hear from could be one one side or the other, and it would look the same.

Do many people act similarly to me in this regard? I’m not sure. Why would saying obvious things be embarrassing? It suggests that you don’t think they are obvious. So if you belong to a social group where it is embarrassing to believe X, all things equal I’d expect it to be embarrassing to point out ‘not X’. But some social groups are defined by debating issues that they claim to be very confident about one way or the other. So something else is going on too. For instance members of a pro-life group don’t seem to signal any uncertainty about the issue to other members by engaging pro-choice people.

This could be a matter of how the other side is behaving. If I went out and found the people arguing about 49, and joined in, that would look worse than me pitching in if I were just sitting at home and my housemates got into an argument about it. In the first case it would be embarrassing in front of my current friends, but if I got so involved as to make new friends with the pro side in the 49 debate, I guess it would be less embarrassing in front of them. So maybe people who have strong views, but are around people with other views still find it ok to say the others are wrong, while those who only spend time with likeminded folks more likely feel silly claiming that the other side ...
Muehlhauser-Wang Dialogue
by lukeprog — 2012-04-22T22:40:51.710Z

Part of the Muehlhauser interview series on AGI.

Luke Muehlhauser is Executive Director of the Singularity Institute, a non-profit research institute studying AGI safety.

Pei Wang is an AGI researcher at Temple University, and Chief Executive Editor of Journal of Artificial General Intelligence.

Luke Muehlhauser

[Apr. 7, 2012]

Pei, I'm glad you agreed to discuss artificial general intelligence (AGI) with me. I hope our dialogue will be informative to many readers, and to us!

On what do we agree? Ben Goertzel and I agreed on the statements below (well, I cleaned up the wording a bit for our conversation):

Involuntary death is bad, and can be avoided with the right technology.

Humans can be enhanced by merging with technology.

Humans are on a risky course in general, because powerful technologies can destroy us, humans are often stupid, and we are unlikely to voluntarily halt technological progress.

AGI is likely this century.

AGI will greatly transform the world. It is a potential existential risk, but could also be the best thing that ever happens to us if we do it right.

Careful effort will be required to ensure that AGI results in good things rather than bad things for humanity.

You stated in private communication that you agree with these statements, depending on what is meant by "AGI." So, I'll ask: What do you mean by "AGI"?

I'd also be curious to learn what you think about AGI safety. If you agree that AGI is an existential risk that will arrive this century, and if you value humanity, one might expect you to think it's very important that we accelerate AI safety research and decelerate AI capabilities research so that we develop safe superhuman AGI first, rather than arbitrary superhuman AGI. (This is what Anna Salamon and I recommend in Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import.) What are your thoughts on the matter?

Pei Wang:

[Apr. 8, 2012]

By “AGI” I mean computer systems that follow roughly the same principles as the human mind. Concretely, to me “intelligence” is the ability to adapt to the environment under insufficient knowledge and resources, or to follow the “Laws of Thought” that realize a relative rationality that allows the system to apply its available knowledge and resources as much as possible. See [1, 2] for detailed descriptions and comparisons to other definitions of intelligence.

Su...
Learn a foreign language to reduce bias?
by AShepard — 2012-04-22T15:37:09.300Z

Interesting new paper (anyone have a link to an ungated version). Abstract (emphasis added):

Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.

Speakers of multiple languages: have you noticed a similar pattern in your own lives?
[SEQ RERUN] The Born Probabilities
by MinibearRex — 2012-04-22T02:57:21.142Z

Today's post, The Born Probabilities was originally published on 01 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The last serious mysterious question left in quantum physics: When a quantum world splits in two, why do we seem to have a greater probability of ending up in the larger blob, exactly proportional to the integral of the squared modulus? It's an open problem, but non-mysterious answers have been proposed. Try not to go funny in the head about it.

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 Decoherent Essences, 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.
[SEQ RERUN] Decoherent Essences
by MinibearRex — 2012-04-21T18:32:53.900Z

Today's post, Decoherent Essences was originally published on 30 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Decoherence is implicit within physics, not an extra law on top of it. You can choose representations that make decoherence harder to see, just like you can choose representations that make apples harder to see, but exactly the same physical process still goes on; the apple doesn't disappear and neither does decoherence. If you could make decoherence magically go away by choosing the right representation, we wouldn't need to shield quantum computers from the environment.

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 Decoherence is Pointless, 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.
Hofstadter's Superrationality
by gwern — 2012-04-21T13:33:36.025Z

Possibly the main and original inspiration for Yudkowsky's various musings on what advanced game theories should do (eg. cooperate in the Prisoner's Dilemma) is a set of essays penned by Douglas Hofstadter (of Godel, Escher, Bach) 1983. Unfortunately, they were not online and only available as part of a dead-tree collection. This is unfortunate. Fortunately the collection is available through the usual pirates as a scan, and I took the liberty of transcribing by hand the relevant essays with images, correcting errors, annotating with links, etc: http://www.gwern.net/docs/1985-hofstadter

The 3 essays:

discuss the Prisoner's dilemma, the misfortune of defection, what sort of cooperative reasoning would maximize returns in a souped-up Prisoner's dilemma, and then offers a public contest

then we learn the results of the contest, and a discussion of ecology and the tragedy of the commons

finally, Hofstadter gives an extended parable about cooperation in the face of nuclear warfare; it is fortunate for us that it applies to most existential threats as well

I hope you find them educational. I am not 100% confident of the math transcriptions since the original ebook messed some of them up; if you find any apparent mistakes or typos, please leave comments.
Against the Bottom Line
by gRR — 2012-04-21T10:20:04.861Z

In the spirit of contrarianism, I'd like to argue against The Bottom Line.

As I understand the post, its idea is that a rationalist should never "start with a bottom line and then fill out the arguments".

It sounds neat, but I think it is not psychologically feasible. I find that whenever I actually argue, I always have the conclusion already written. Without it, it is impossible to have any direction, and an argument without any direction does not go anywhere.

What actually happens is:

I arrive at a conclusion, intuitively, as a result of a process which is usually closed to introspection.

I write the bottom line, and look for a chain of reasoning that supports it.

I check the argument and modify/discard it or parts of it if any are found defective.

It is at the point 3 that the biases really struck. Motivated Stopping makes me stop checking too early, and Motivated Continuation makes me look for better arguments when defective ones are found for the conclusion I seek, but not for alternatives, resulting in Straw Men.
Prisoner's Dilemma on game show Golden Balls
by atorm — 2012-04-21T00:31:48.741Z

I found this to be a very interesting method of dealing with a modified Prisoner's Dilemma. In this situation, if both players cooperate they split a cash prize, but if one defects he gets the entire prize. The difference from the normal prisoner's dilemma is that if both defect, neither gets anything, so a player gains nothing by defecting if he knows his opponent will defect; he merely has the option to hurt him out of spite. Watch and see how one player deals with this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qjK3TWZE8
Meetup : Madison Monday Meetup
by fiddlemath — 2012-04-20T23:15:13.623Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Madison Monday Meetup

WHEN:
23 April 2012 06:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
1831 Monroe St., Madison, WI

Last week, we discussed the first half-or-so of the Human's Guide to Words, going so far as to brainstorm some methods and habits that'd be useful to learn to handle these and similar failures.

I'll take the notes that we made and attempt to form actual exercises and games out of them. At the meetup, we'll try some of these, and, perhaps, refine them until they're fun, useful-seeming, or both.

Discussion article for the meetup : Madison Monday Meetup
Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 2
by OpenThreadGuy — 2012-04-20T19:38:25.958Z

From Costanza's original thread (entire text):

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Meta:

How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.

Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.
Meetup : Atlanta - Game night!
by hankx7787 — 2012-04-20T15:12:13.257Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta - Game night!

WHEN:
22 April 2012 06:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
marietta, ga

Our LessWrong meetup group will be getting together to play a variety of games (rationality-related or not) at a private residence in Marietta, this Sunday April 22nd at 6:30pm.

Anyone is welcome to join in.

Please send me a message, or better yet an email to my username at gmail for details.

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta - Game night!
Weekly LW Meetups: Brussels, Chicago, Dorset, Fort Lauderdale, London, Melbourne, Pittsburgh, Shanghai, Sydney, Twin Cities
by FrankAdamek — 2012-04-20T14:56:45.121Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Brussels meetup: 14 April 2012 11:00AM
First Dorset UK Meetup: 14 April 2012 03:00PM
Fort Lauderdale: 14 April 2012 06:00PM
Shanghai Less Wrong Meetup: 15 April 2012 10:36PM
Twin Cities, MN (for real this time): 15 April 2012 01:00PM
Sydney meetup - Biased pandemic and other games: 17 April 2012 07:30PM
Pittsburgh - Presentation on Anthropics: 20 April 2012 06:00PM
Rome LessWrong Meetup: 21 April 2012 07:00PM
Longmont Sparkfun Soldering Competition Field Trip: 28 April 2012 11:00AM
Graz Meetup: 28 April 2012 11:21PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Weekly Chicago Meetups: 14 April 2012 01:00PM
London: 15 April 2012 02:00PM
Melbourne social meetup: 20 April 2012 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Chicago, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup has a...