trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Stupidity as a mental illness
by PhilGoetz — 2017-02-10T03:57:20.182Z

It's great to make people more aware of bad mental habits and encourage better ones, as many people have done on LessWrong. The way we deal with weak thinking is, however, like how people dealt with depression before the development of effective anti-depressants:

Clinical depression was only marginally treatable.

It was seen as a crippling character flaw, weakness, or sin.

Admitting you had it could result in losing your job and/or friends.

Treatment was not covered by insurance.

Therapy was usually analytic or behavioral and not very effective.

People thus went to great mental effort not to admit, even to themselves, having depression or any other mental illness.

"Stupidity," like "depression," is a sloppy "common-sense" word that we apply to different conditions, which may be caused by genetics (for instance, mutations in the M1 or M3 pathways, or two copies of Thr92Ala), deep subconscious conditioning (e.g., religion), general health issues (like not getting enough sleep), environment (ignorance, lack of reward for intelligent behavior), or bad habits of thought.

Like depression, it may not be possible to develop effective behavioral therapy for stupidity until its causes are understood, the most severe cases may have physiological causes, and pharmaceutical interventions will probably be much more effective than behavioral interventions for such cases.

Like depression, as long as it's seen as shameful and incurable, people won't admit to having it and won't seek help for it, regardless of the type they have.

The only "anti-stupidity drugs" we have are nootropics. But the nootropics we have weren't developed as nootropics. Piracetam was, I think, developed to treat seizures. L-DOPA was developed to treat Parkinson's. No one knows who started using ginkgo biloba or what they used it for; it was used to treat asthma 5000 years ago. Adderall derives from drugs used to keep soldiers awake in World War 2.

And none of them are very good against stupidity. AFAIK, to date, not one drug has been developed by understanding and targeting the causes of different types of stupidity. We have the tools to do this--we could, for instance, sequence a lot of peoples' DNA, give them all IQ tests, and do a genome-wide association study, as a start.

We don't research these things because society doesn't want to resea...
A Quick Confidence Heuristic; Implicitly Leveraging "The Wisdom of Crowds"
by Davidmanheim — 2017-02-10T00:54:41.394Z

Let’s say you have well-informed opinions on a variety of topics. Without information about your long term accuracy in each given area, how confident should you be in those opinions?

Here’s a quick heuristic, for any area where other people have well-informed opinions about the same topics; your confidence should be a function of the distance of your estimate from the average opinion, and the standard deviation of those opinions. I’ll call this the wisdom-of-crowds-confidence level, because it can be justified based on the empirical observation that the average of even uninformed guesses is typically a better predictor than most individual predictions.

Why does this make sense?

The Aumann agreement theorem implies that rational discussants can, given enough patience and introspection, pass messages about their justifications until they eventually converge. Given that informed opinions share most evidence, the differential between the opinions is likely due to specific unshared assumptions or evidence. If that evidence were shared, unless the vast majority of the non-shared assumptions were piled up on the same side, the answer would land somewhere near the middle. (This is why I was going to call the heuristic Aumann-confidence, but I don’t think it quite fits.)

Unless you have a strong reason to assume you are a privileged observer, trading on inside information or much better calibrated than other observers, there is no reason to expect this nonshared evidence will be biased. And while this appears to contradict the conservation of expected evidence theorem, it’s actually kind-of a consequence of it, because we need to update on the knowledge that there is unshared evidence leading the other person to make their own claim.

This is where things get tricky — we need to make assumptions about joint distributions on unshared evidence. Suffice it to say that unless we have reason to believe our unshared evidence or assumptions is much stronger than theirs, we should end up near the middle. And that goes back to a different, earlier assumption - that others are also well informed.

Now that we’ve laid out the framework, though, we can sketch the argument.

We can expect that our opinion should shift towards the average, once we know what the average is, even without exploring the other people’s unshared assumptions

...
Things that want to be posts
by Zvi — 2017-02-09T22:58:24.000Z

Epistemic Status: Attempting Epistemology

Structural Status: Necessary but pretty probably terrible

I was at an unconference this past weekend. One of the things that became clear to me was that I need to be writing again, and writing more, and that I was not doing that because I was afraid of it. Which is further evidence I should probably be doing it. And it is known that the best way to do it, is to start doing it.

I also realized that real conversations are better than fake conversations, and that this distinction was actually a thing, which means I should be worried less about getting something correct and good enough exactly, or getting it ‘done’ than in actually sharing my thought process and reasoning and so forth. It is not like I didn’t know that real was better than fake or that this thing that we called real was more real than the fake but I did not have the names for the concepts so even though I did understand that this was what my best conversations had and what my Magic articles had (and was what allowed me to output so many of them) it did not properly resonate.

I suspect that is also why the sequences worked even though they choose horrible examples and have tons of things that now seem like mistakes, and when Eliezer later sat down to try and write a book, it didn’t work right.

I would sit and think: I should write something but I don’t know what and feel out of ideas which is insane because I’m Zvi Mowshowitz and I’m full of ideas, or at least curiosity and attempts to understand things, except when I’m not, and that was pretty awful and I should get on fixing that and I had help doing that and this seems way better now and hopefully I can hang on to that.

I didn’t know what to do first but I also wanted to make sure I set myself up to do a lot so I wanted to put down and make public that I had put down seeds to other things that I want to think about by writing about them. I think most of my best writing works that way: I don’t know what I am going to say not because I have not decided what to say, but because I actually don’t know the things until I start saying them, at which point I figure them out, or if those aren’t the things I am going to say, I figure out something else. That also happens.

So to motivate myself, here is a list of things in my head right now that wan...
Meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Meetup - usefulness and meaning of "truth"
by iarwain1 — 2017-02-09T20:26:17.561Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Meetup - usefulness and meaning of "truth"

WHEN:
12 February 2017 11:00:00AM (-0500)

WHERE:
Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg 4th floor, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250

This week we'll be discussing the subject of Truth - what is it, what are we aiming for exactly, why is it a useful concept to think about, etc. (Yes, this is the same subject as last week, but only one person showed up last week.)

Reading material, ordered roughly by readability:

Eliezer Yudkowsky (EY): Why Truth? And ...

EY: The Simple Truth

EY: The Useful Idea of Truth

Why I Reject the Correspondence Theory of Truth

Rationally Speaking blog, Theories of Truth

More technical reading for those who want it:

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP): Truth (or you could try the SEP or Wikipedia)

Pluralistic Theories of Truth: IEP, SEP

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Meetup - usefulness and meaning of "truth"
Meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Scientific Discovery
by Alexander230 — 2017-02-09T19:32:03.808Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Scientific Discovery

WHEN:
22 February 2017 07:40:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Moscow, B.Dorogomilovskaya, 5-2

Welcome to Moscow LW community makeshift games! In that games, some rationality skills are involved, so you can practise while you playing!

FallacyMania: it is a game where you guess logical fallacies in arguments, or practise using logical fallacies yourself (depending on team in which you will be).

Tower of Chaos: funny game with guessing the rules of human placement on a Twister mat.

Scientific Discovery: modified version of Zendo with simultaneous turns for all players.

Details about the games: http://goo.gl/Mz2i94

Come to antikafe "Kocherga", ul.B.Dorogomilovskaya, 5-2. The map is here: http://kocherga-club.ru/#contacts . Nearest metro station is Kievskaya. If you are lost, call Sasha at +7-905-527-30-82.

Games begin at 19:40, the length is 3 hours.

Discussion article for the meetup : Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Scientific Discovery
Meetup : [Metro Detroit / Ann Arbor], Michigan
by excinera — 2017-02-09T09:19:17.225Z

Discussion article for the meetup : [Metro Detroit / Ann Arbor], Michigan

WHEN:
11 February 2017 04:30:31PM (-0500)

WHERE:
1147 Freesia Court, Ann Arbor MI 48105

The Ann Arbor Area Amalgam of Rationalist-Adjacent Anthropoids is having our biweekly* meetup this Saturday (2017 February 11) at

1147 Freesia Court

Ann Arbor, MI 48105

4:30 PM - "whenevs"

"If you can read this sentence, you're invited. If someone told you about it, you're invited. If someone re-posted it somewhere else and you read it, you're invited. (Feel free to repost, mention, or link to this announcement anywhere you think people will be interested.) No level of expertise is required. Do not worry if you don't think you're interesting enough. You're much more interesting than you think you are. Even if you're not, you're invited anyway. "

(We have a community website at http://memeware.org/A4RA2 with detailed information on this meetup and a calendar of future events, as well as directions and other stuff! Wow!)

The mailing list post for this meetup is also archived on Google Groups.

In addition to the website and mailing list, we have an IRC channel at irc://irc.freenode.net/a4ra2 (click for in-browser chat), where someone is usually around and paying attention if you want to ask any questions, or see if someone can give you a ride, or shitpost, or whatever.

Once every two weeks, not twice a week

Discussion article for the meetup : [Metro Detroit / Ann Arbor], Michigan
The Social Substrate
by the gears to ascension — 2017-02-09T07:22:37.209Z

This post originally appeared on The Gears To Ascension

ABSTRACT

I present generative modeling of minds as a hypothesis for the complexities of social dynamics, and build a case for it out of pieces. My hope is that this explains social behaviors more precisely and with less handwaving than its components. I intend this to be a framework for reasoning about social dynamics more explicitly and for training intuitions. In future posts I plan to build on it to give more concrete evidence, and give examples of social dynamics that I think become more legible with the tools provided by combining these ideas.

Epistemic status: Hypothesis, currently my maximum likelihood hypothesis, of why social interaction is so weird.

INTRO: SOCIAL INTERACTION.

People talk to each other a lot. Many of them are good at it. Most people don't really have a deep understanding of why, and it's rare for people to question why it's a thing that's possible to be bad at. Many of the rules seem arbitrary at first look, and it can be quite hard to transfer skill at interaction by explanation.

Some of the rules sort of make sense, and you can understand why bad things would happen when you break them: Helping people seems to make them more willing to help you. Being rude to people makes them less willing to help you. People want to "feel heard". But what do those mean, exactly?

I've been wondering about this for a while. I wasn't naturally good at social interaction, and have had to put effort into learning it. This has been a spotty success - I often would go to people for advice, and then get things like "people want to know that you care". That advice sounded nice, but it was vague and not usable.

The more specific social advice seems to generalize quite badly. "Don't call your friends stupid", for example. Banter is an important part of some friendships! People say each other are ugly and feel cared for. Wat?

Recently, I've started to see a deeper pattern here that actually seems to have strong generalization: it's simple to describe, it correctly predicts large portions of very complicated and weird social patterns, and it reliably gives me a lens to decode what happened when something goes wrong. This blog post is my attempt to share it as a package.

I basically came up with none of this. What I'm sharing is the synthesis of things that Andrew Critch, Nate Soares, and Robin Hanson have said...
Meetup : Melbourne Rationality Dojo, February - Tai Chi & Lightning Talks
by Chriswaterguy — 2017-02-09T06:37:05.176Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Rationality Dojo, February - Tai Chi & Lightning Talks

WHEN:
12 February 2017 03:30:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
Janet Lady Clarke Memorial Rotunda, Queen Victoria Gardens, Linlithgow Ave, Melbourne

Bring warm clothes - we'll be outside (but probably under cover).

Melbourne Rationality Dojo, February - Tai Chi & Lightning Talks Our next meetup for Less Wrong Melbourne is on Sunday 12 February:

THIS MONTH:

(1) An introduction to Tai Chi from Mark. ("Dojo" has never been more appropriate.) He'll also talk about what to make of the concept of "Chi" if you don't believe in the supernatural and you're skeptical of mystical energy.

(2) Lightning talks. A number of speakers at 5 to 10 min each (including questions) on the art of rationality, or something to enlighten our understanding of the world.

(3) Trigger Action Planning: An effective way of establishing habits that you want.

BRING:

An idea or question to share.

Perhaps a snack to share. (Healthy snack choice is optional but welcome.)

WHEN:

3:30pm to 6:30pm. The meeting proper will begin at 4pm sharp.

At about 6:30pm some of us generally head for dinner in the CBD, and you are welcome to join us.

WHERE:

In or near the Janet Lady Clarke Memorial Rotunda, Queen Victoria Gardens, Linlithgow Ave, Melbourne. https://goo.gl/maps/eEs9Mi8LuYH2 This is a short walk from the NGV. If you have any trouble finding the venue on the day, please text or call Chris on 0439 471 632.

There's a chance of light rain, but we'll be pretty well protected in the rotunda. If the weather's good, we might even go out onto the grass nearby.

(If you need a toilet, there's one between the rotunda and the NGV, near King-Edward-VII-on-a-horse. It's one of those dystopian automatic loos which provides an opportunity to reflect on the potential dangers of a poorly managed transition to a robot-led society.)

WHO ARE WE AND WHY DO WE MEET?

The Less Wrong Melbourne Rationality Dojos are self-improvement sessions for those committed to the art of rationality and personal growth. We welcome new members who are interested in exploring rationality. We're "aspiring rationalists" and always open to learn.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Rationality Dojo, February - Tai Chi & Lightning Talks
Meetup : SF Meetup: Board Games
by maia — 2017-02-09T04:52:59.139Z

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Board Games

WHEN:
13 February 2017 06:15:04PM (-0800)

WHERE:
1769 15th St., SF

We’ll be meeting to play board (and other) games!

We have Dominion, Suburbia, and standard playing cards. Please feel free to bring other games you’d like to play. We'll probably print a copy of Secret Hitler to bring as well.

For help getting into the building, please call (or text, with a likely-somewhat-slower response rate): 301-458-0764.

Format:

We meet and start hanging out at 6:15, but don’t officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:45-7 to accommodate stragglers. Usually there is a food order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

About these meetups:

The mission of the SF LessWrong meetup is to provide a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations. Everyone is welcome.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don’t want them to inhibit it.

Discussion article for the meetup : SF Meetup: Board Games
Minimizing Empowerment for Safety
by IAFF-User-111 — 2017-02-09T04:45:28.000Z

I haven't put much thought into this post; it's off the cuff.

DeepMind has published a couple of papers on maximizing empowerment as a form of intrinsic motivation for Unsupervised RL / Intelligent Exploration.

I never looked at either paper in detail, but the basic idea is that you should seek to maximize mutual information between (future) outcomes and actions or policies/options. Doing so means an agent knows what strategy to follow to accomplish a given outcome.

It seems plausible that instead minimizing empowerment in the case where there is a reward function could help steer an agent away from pursuing instrumental goals which have large effects.

So that might be useful for "taskification", "limited impact", etc.
Albion’s Seed, Genotyped
by Scott Alexander — 2017-02-09T02:15:03.000Z

Last year I reviewed Albion’s Seed, historian David Fischer’s work on the four great English migrations to America (and JayMan continues the story in his series on American Nations). These early migrations help explain modern regional patterns like why Massachusetts is so liberal or why Appalachia seems so backwards. As always, there’s the lingering question of how much of these patterns are cultural versus genetic versus gene-cultural interaction.

Now Han et al take this field high-tech with the publication of Clustering Of 770,000 Genomes Reveals Post-Colonial Population Structure Of North America (h/t gwern, werttrew)

The team looked at 770,000 genomes analyzed by the AncestryDNA company and used a technique called identity-by-descent to find recent common ancestors. Then they used some other techniques to divide them into natural clusters. This is what they got:

This is the European-settler-focused map – there’s another one focusing on immigrant groups lower down here

This is kind of beautiful. While not exactly matching Albion’s Seed, it at least clearly shows its New Englander and Pennsylvania Quaker migrations (more realistically the Germans who came along with the Quakers), with less distinct signals for Borderers and Virginians. It shows how they spread directly west from their place of origin in almost exactly the way American Nations predicted. It even confirms my own conjecture that the belt of Democrat voters along southern Michigan corresponds to an area of New Englander settlement there (see part III here, or search “linear distribution of blue”). And it confirms Razib Khan’s observation that the Mormons are just displaced New Englanders and that their various unusual demographic features make sense in that context.

My biggest confusion is in the Southern/Appalachian region. I think Fischer would have predicted two distinct strains: a Tidewater/Virginian population along the coasts, and a Borderer/Appalachian population centered in West Virginia and Kentucky. Instead there are three populations, all of which start along the Atlantic Coast and continue inland in about the same way. Assuming red/”Appalachian” is the Borderers, I don’t know if Fischer has a good explanation for the purple/”upland south” vs. gold/”lower south” distinction. Nor I do get under...
Meetup : Chicago RRG - Typical Mind Fallacy
by mingyuan — 2017-02-08T20:41:48.728Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago RRG - Typical Mind Fallacy

WHEN:
12 February 2017 01:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
Harper Memorial Library Room 148, 1116 E 59th St, Chicago, IL 60637

The Chicago Rationality Reading Group meets every Sunday from 1-3 PM in Room 148 of Harper Memorial Library. Though we meet on the University of Chicago campus, anyone is welcome to attend.

This week we will be discussing typical mind fallacy! The readings are:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/

(Optional: Link to Galton’s paper http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm)

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ - the post itself and also some of the comments; there are over 900 comments, so just skip around and read the ones that look interesting.

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago RRG - Typical Mind Fallacy
Stupid Questions February 2017
by Erfeyah — 2017-02-08T19:51:22.821Z

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
Meetup : Cologne - Monthly meetup: Saturday Feb 18 2017
by caffemacchiavelli — 2017-02-08T07:12:21.298Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cologne - Monthly meetup: Saturday Feb 18 2017

WHEN:
18 February 2017 05:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Thürmchenswall 27, 50668 Cologne

Meetup can be reached easily from the Ebertplatz subway station, it's just a minute away. Ring at "Schmidt", the apartment is on the second floor (for Brits: first floor, i.e. "one above ground level").
There's no fixed schedule, we just talk, eat and occasionally play a game or two.
Feel free to join our mailing list for regular updates or any last minute announcements.

Discussion article for the meetup : Cologne - Monthly meetup: Saturday Feb 18 2017
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
by RobinZ — 2017-02-08T02:16:15.879Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games

WHEN:
12 February 2017 03:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art & Portraiture

We will be meeting in the courtyard to hang out, play games, and engage in fun conversation.

Upcoming meetups:

Feb. 19: Nonsense

Feb. 26: Create & Complete

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games