trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
One Sided Policy Debate - The Science of Literature
by kremlin — 2013-12-25T20:48:58.648Z

On HackerNews, this article was linked. The general idea is that companies are studying what people like to read, to help authors produce books that people like to read.

Now, for me, when I look at this idea, I see some down sides, but I certainly see some benefits as well.

Almost none of the commenters on NYTimes seemed to see any benefit whatsoever to studying reader behaviour. There were a few who saw the downsides as more mild than the other commenters. But most of the commenters basically saw this technology as some sort of 1984-esque idea that will turn all books into uninteresting, unimaginative pieces of paper that would better serve as a door stopper than as something for literary consumption. Out of 50 comments that I've read, only one person has said something along the lines of, 'This technology can possibly offer something to help authors improve their books'.

Is this just technophobia? Or am I missing something, and this really is a horrible, evil technology that should be avoided at all costs? [That's a rhetorical question -- I'd be surprised if even one LWian held that position]

I guess what I'm asking is, what are the psychological roots for the almost-unanimous aversion to this attempt at gathering and using information about what people want?
How the Grinch Ought to Have Stolen Christmas
by Quirinus_Quirrell — 2013-12-25T20:00:51.640Z

On Dec. 24, 1957, a Mr. T. Grinch attempted to disrupt Christmas by stealing associated gifts and decorations. His plan failed, the occupants of Dr. Suess' narrative remained festive, and Mr. Grinch himself succumbed to cardiac hypertrophy. To help others avoid repeating his mistakes, I've written a brief guide to properly disrupting holidays. Holiday-positive readers should read this with the orthogonality thesis in mind. Fighting Christmas is tricky, because the obvious strategy - making a big demoralizing catastrophe - doesn't work. No matter what happens, the media will put the word Christmas in front of it and convert your scheme into even more free advertising for the holiday. It'll be a Christmas tragedy, a Christmas earthquake, a Christmas wave of foreclosures. That's no good; attacking Christmas takes more finesse.

The first thing to remember is that, whether you're stealing a holiday or a magical artifact of immense power, it's almost always a good idea to leave a decoy in its place. When people notice that something important is missing, they'll go looking to find or replace it. This rule can be generalized from physical objects to abstractions like sense of community. T. Grinch tried to prevent community gatherings by vandalizing the spaces where they would've taken place. A better strategy would've been to promise to organize a Christmas party, then skip the actual organizing and leave people to sit at home by themselves. Unfortunately, this solution is not scalable, but someone came up with a very clever solution: encourage people to watch Christmas-themed films instead of talking to each other, achieving almost as much erosion of community without the backlash.

I'd like to particularly applaud Raymond Arnold, for inventing a vaguely-Christmas-like holiday in December, with no gifts, and death (rather than cheer) as its central theme [1]. I really wish it didn't involve so much singing and community, though. I recommend raising the musical standards; people who can't sing at studio-recording quality should not be allowed to sing at all.

Gift-giving traditions are particularly important to stamp out, but stealing gifts is ineffective because they're usually cheap and replaceable. A better approach would've been to promote giving undesirable gifts, such as religious sculptures and fruitcake. Even better would be to convince the Mayor of Whoville to ...
Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 1: Mainstream Nutrition Science on Obesity
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-12-25T18:27:32.219Z

Related: Trusting Expert Consensus

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about whether we can find any clear exceptions to the general "trust the experts (when they agree)" heuristic. One example that keeps coming up—at least on LessWrong and related blogs—is Gary Taubes' claims about mainstream nutrition experts allegedly getting obesity horribly wrong.

Taubes is probably best-known for his book Good Calories, Bad Calories. I'd previously had a mildly negative impression of him from discussion of him on Yvain's old blog, particularly some of other posts Yvain and other people linked from there, such as this discussion of Taubes' "carbohydrate hypothesis" and especially this discussion of Taubes' attempt to refute the standard calories-in/calories-out model of weight.

But I figured maybe the criticism of Taubes I'd read hadn't been fair to him, so I decided to read him for myself... and holy crap, Taubes turned out to be far worse than I expected. I decided to write a post explaining why, and then realized that, even if I were somewhat selective about the issues I focused on, I had enough material for a whole series of posts, which I'll be posting over the course of the next week.

The problem with Taubes is not that everything he says is wrong. Much of it is ludicrously wrong, but that's only one half of the problem. The other half is that he says a fair number of things mainstream nutrition science would agree with, but then hides this fact, and instead pretends those things are a refutation of mainstream nutrition science. So it's worth starting with a brief in-a-nutshell version of what mainstream nutrition science actually says about obesity.

(The following summary is drawn from a number of sources, including this, this, and this. Everything I'm about to say will be discussed in much greater detail in subsequent posts.)

Here it goes: people gain weight when they consume more calories than they burn. But both calorie intake and calorie expenditure are regulated by complicated mechanisms we don't fully understand yet. This means the causes of overweight and obesity* are also complicated and not fully understood. It is, however, worth watching out for foods with lots of added fat and sugar, if only because they're an easy way to consume way too many calories.

We currently don't have any great solutions to the problem of overweight and obesity. If ...
Thinking Fast and Slow for Kindle $3 at Amazon
by buybuydandavis — 2013-12-24T19:53:38.907Z

Santa delivers for LessWrong! Electronically, of course.

Merry Christmas.

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman-ebook/dp/B00555X8OA/ref=la_B001ILFNQG_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1387914703&sr=1-1
Review of Scott Adams’ “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big”
by James_Miller — 2013-12-23T20:48:12.469Z

Dilbert creator and bestselling author Scott Adams recently wrote a LessWrong compatible advice book that even contains a long list of cognitive biases. Adams told me in a phone interview that he is a lifelong consumer of academic studies, which perhaps accounts for why his book jibes so well with LessWrong teachings. Along with HPMOR, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big should be among your first choices when recommending books to novice rationalists. Below are some of the main lessons from the book, followed by a summary of my conversation with Adams about issues of particular concern to LessWrong readers.

My favorite passage describes when Adams gave a talk to a fifth-grade class and asked everyone to finish the sentence “If you play a slot machine long enough, eventually you will…” The students all shouted “WIN!” because, Adams suspects, they had the value of persistence drilled into them and confused it with success.

“WIN!” would have been the right answer if you didn’t have to pay to play but the machine still periodically gave out jackpots. Adams thinks you can develop a system to turn your life into a winning slot machine that doesn’t require money but does require “time, focus, and energy” to repeatedly pull the lever.

Adams argues that maximizing your energy level through proper diet, exercise, and sleep should take priority over everything else. Even if your only goal is to help others, be selfish with respect your energy level because it will determine your capacity for doing good. Adams has convinced me that appropriate diet, exercise, and sleep should be the starting point for effective altruists. Adams believes we have limited willpower and argues that if you make being active every single day a habit, you won’t have to consume any precious willpower to motivate yourself to exercise.

Since most pulls of the life slot machine will win you nothing, Adams argues that lack of fear of embarrassment is a key ingredient for success. Adams would undoubtedly approve of CFAR’s comfort zone expansion exercises.

Adams lists skills that increase your chances of success. These include knowledge of public speaking, psychology, business writing, accounting, design, conversation, overcoming sh...
Building Phenomenological Bridges
by Rob Bensinger — 2013-12-23T19:57:22.555Z

Naturalized induction is an open problem in Friendly Artificial Intelligence (OPFAI). The problem, in brief: Our current leading models of induction do not allow reasoners to treat their own computations as processes in the world.

The problem's roots lie in algorithmic information theory and formal epistemology, but finding answers will require us to wade into debates on everything from theoretical physics to anthropic reasoning and self-reference. This post will lay the groundwork for a sequence of posts (titled 'Artificial Naturalism') introducing different aspects of this OPFAI.

AI perception and belief: A toy model

A more concrete problem: Construct an algorithm that, given a sequence of the colors cyan, magenta, and yellow, predicts the next colored field.

Colors: CYYM CYYY CYCM CYYY ????

This is an instance of the general problem 'From an incomplete data series, how can a reasoner best make predictions about future data?'. In practice, any agent that acquires information from its environment and makes predictions about what's coming next will need to have two map-like1 subprocesses:

1. Something that generates the agent's predictions, its expectations. By analogy with human scientists, we can call this prediction-generator the agent's hypotheses or beliefs.

2. Something that transmits new information to the agent's prediction-generator so that its hypotheses can be updated. Employing another anthropomorphic analogy, we can call this process the agent's data or perceptions.

Here's an example of a hypothesis an agent could use to try to predict the next color field. I'll call the imaginary agent 'Cai'. Any reasoner will need to begin with some (perhaps provisional) assumptions about the world.2 Cai begins with the belief3 that its environment behaves like a cellular automaton: the world is a grid whose tiles change over time based on a set of stable laws. The laws are local in time and space, meaning that you can perfectly predict a tile's state based on the states of the tiles next to it a moment prior — if you know which laws are in force.

Cai believes that it lives in a closed 3x3 grid where tiles have no diagonal effects. Each tile...
[LINK] Up Vs Down is the new Left vs Right
by Stabilizer — 2013-12-23T15:33:00.840Z

This is a great article at Aeon magazine. The author argues that the new ideological dichotomy is going to be between people who have great faith in technology and human innovation (Up) and the people who believe that humans are much more tied to their biology and the Earth (Down).

LW of course is a very Up community.
In praise of pretending to really try
by KatjaGrace — 2013-12-23T00:50:30.000Z

Ben Kuhn makes some reasonable criticisms of the Effective Altruism movement. His central claim is that in the dichotomy of ‘really trying’ vs. ‘pretending to try’, EAs ‘pretend to really try’.

To be explicit, I understand these terms as follows:

‘Really trying’: directing all of your effort toward actions that you believe have the highest expected value in terms of the relevant goals

‘Pretending to try‘: choosing actions with the intention of giving observers the impression that you are trying.

‘Pretending to really try‘: choosing actions with the intention of giving observers the impression that you are trying, where the observers’ standards for identifying ‘trying’ are geared toward a ‘really trying’ model. e.g. they ask whether you are really putting in effort, and whether you are doing what should have highest expected value from your point of view.

Note the normative connotations. ‘Really trying’ is good, ‘pretending to try’ is not, and ‘pretending to really try’ is hypocritical, so better than being straight out bad, but sullied by the inconsistency.

I claim Effective Altruism should not shy away from pretending to try. It should strive to pretend to really try more convincingly, rather than striving to really try.

Why is this? Because Effective Altruism is a community, and the thing communities do well is modulating individual behavior through interactions with others in the community. Most actions a person takes as a result of being part of a community are pretty much going to be ‘pretending to try’ by construction. And such actions are worth having. If they are discouraged, the alternative will not be really trying. And pretending to try well is almost as good as really trying anyway.

Actions taken as a result of being in a community will be selected for being visible, because visible actions are the ones you will be able to pick up from others in the community. This doesn’t necessarily mean you are only pretending to try – it will just happen to look like pretending to try. But actions will also probably be visible, because by assumption you are driven to act in part by your community membership, and most ways such motivation can happen involve a possibility of others in the community being a...
[Link] Anti-ageing compound set for human trials
by Gavin — 2013-12-22T20:51:25.123Z

This seems like an advance in understanding, even if it doesn't lead directly to a treatment.

News stories:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/20/anti-ageing-human-trials?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25445748

Abstract of the paper, actual paper behind a paywall:

http://www.cell.com/retrieve/pii/S0092867413015213?cc=y

Relatively solid stories like this help raise my estimate that significant life extension is possible in our lifetimes. The likelihood seems to be that it won't be a "magic pill" but a combination of therapies.

If nothing else, it's another reason to eat healthy and stay in shape.
Meetup : Melbourne Practical Rationality
by  — 2013-12-22T02:50:55.898Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Practical Rationality

WHEN:
03 January 2014 06:30:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
Level 2, 491 King St West Melbourne 3003

Practical Rationality. This meetup repeats on the first Friday of each month and is distinct from our monthly Social Meetup. We aim to improve our thinking and decision making techniques.

The topic of this month is communication. We'll be exploring topics such as:

Storytelling - how to build an engaging narrative;

Wait vs Interrupt Culture - optimising conversations

Radical Honesty - going too far, or the ideal way to communicate?

Given and receiving feedback

Discussion can be found on our mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/melbourne-less-wrong

All are welcome from 6:30pm. If the door downstairs is locked, call the phone number on the door and we'll let you in. We aim to start structured activities at 7:30pm and continue until 9pm. Afterwards informal discussion will continue late into the night.

Please RSVP at our Meetup.com page if you are coming.
http://www.meetup.com/Melbourne-Less-Wrong/events/143167062/

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne Practical Rationality
[Meta] Post-meetup reports and discussion
by TylerJay — 2013-12-21T04:11:05.529Z

Looking at the discussion section recently, it seems like over half of the posts are meetups. I think it's really great that so many LessWrongers are able to get together and do interesting stuff. Looking at a lot of the topics, I often find myself thinking "I wonder what they ended up talking about." I looked at the meetups page and it looks like many give a description of the topic, but there is rarely any public followup. I also did a search which turned up surprisingly few post-meetup posts.

For example, this Los Angeles meetup from a few days ago about resolutions looked really interesting to me and I'm curious to hear what kinds of strategies were proposed and if there were any insights or anecdotes that came up that would be useful to share with those of us that couldn't attend.

I remember reading a meetup report back in November that told the story of the exercises they went through and it seemed to spark some good discussion. It even forced me to make a note to try some things on my own. This one was atypical in that it was very detailed and was a crosspost from a personal blog, but I feel like even short reports would give a chance for the rest of the community to chime in and give praise, suggestions, and feedback.

When I tried to think of reasons not to share what happened in meetups, I came up with a few potential factors:

It's extra work

Keeping it private increases the feeling of community within the group

Meetups are supposed to be a safe place where your actions or comments won't be broadcast to the world

Nothing really post-worthy happened

Some potential arguments in favor of having a post-meetup discussion post:

It would allow LessWrongers who weren't in attendance to get involved in the discussion

Insights would be shared with the whole community

Meetup organizers and attendees could get suggestions for ways to improve future meetups

Non-attendees could use these ideas to host their own meetups

Summarizing key points of a discussion is helpful for those involved to retain the information they discussed

Does anyone else feel like this would be useful? What is the real reason there are not very many reports?

In the spirit of putting my money where my mouth is, I pledge to attend a LessWrong meetup sometime in the next two months and do a post-meetup report to see if it is useful

...
Meetup : Washington Goals/Projects (try again!)
by rocurley — 2013-12-21T03:04:32.109Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington Goals/Projects (try again!)

WHEN:
22 December 2013 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We're going to try and get the goals meetup working again, or at least figure out why it didn't in the past. Also (very relatedly) we can talk about what we're working on now.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington Goals/Projects (try again!)
Meetup : Boston - Greens Versus Blues
by Vika — 2013-12-20T21:07:04.671Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston - Greens Versus Blues

WHEN:
22 December 2013 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Citadel, 98 Elm St Apt 1, Somerville, MA

Eloise Rosen is giving a talk, "Greens Versus Blues: Why Politics Make People Stupid, And How to Protect Yourself".

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups are every Sunday at 2pm at Citadel (98 Elm St Apt 1 Somerville, near Porter Square).

Our default schedule is as follows:

—Phase 1: Arrival, greetings, unstructured conversation, and maybe even improv games!

—Phase 2: The headline event. This starts promptly at 3pm, and lasts 30-60 minutes.

—Phase 3: Further discussion. We'll explore the ideas raised in phase 2, often in smaller groups.

—Phase 4: Dinner.

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston - Greens Versus Blues
[LINK] Meditation Can Debias The Mind
by JQuinton — 2013-12-20T17:10:12.021Z

This is interesting. Apparently, meditating for 15 minutes can reduce susceptibility to the sunk cost bias.

Across two separate experiments, the researchers tested this by giving one group of participants a 15-minute mindfulness meditation induction.

Then they were given a business scenario which was designed to test the sunk cost bias.

In comparison to a control condition, thinking mindfully doubled the number of people who could avoid the sunk cost bias.

In the control condition just over 40% of people were able to resist the bias. This shot up to almost 80% among those who were thinking mindfully.

The researchers achieved similar results in another experiment and then went on to examine exactly how mindfulness is helpful.

In a third experiment they found that mindfulness increases the focus on the present moment, as it should.

A focus on the present in turn reduced negative feelings participants had about the ‘sunk cost’–the time, money and effort that had gone to waste.

This reduction in negative emotion meant participants were much better equipped to resist the bias.

Ironically, I did a search on Less Wrong to see if something like this had been posted before and came across this comment:

Good points. The lack of scientific research discussed is certainly an issue. I did a quick literature sweep before writing this post, but decided not to include that information here.

One is a sunk cost fallacy. If you have sunk ten days into it you are less willing to ditch it because fallible humans are often unable to act like good economists and recognize that sunk costs are irrelevant.

At the dhamma.org courses I haven't found that to be the case. The management at the Massachusetts center informed me that a large majority of students never return to take a second course. Perhaps the cost needs to be larger; people may find it difficult to give up the practice (when they have good reason to) if they have done it daily for some length of time.

According to that anecdote, a large majority of students never take a second course in meditation. It might be due to the study above, where meditating itself makes people less likely to engage in sunk cost thinking.