trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
MetaMed: Evidence-Based Healthcare
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2013-03-05T13:16:45.807Z

In a world where 85% of doctors can't solve simple Bayesian word problems...

In a world where only 20.9% of reported results that a pharmaceutical company tries to investigate for development purposes, fully replicate...

In a world where "p-values" are anything the author wants them to be...

...and where there are all sorts of amazing technologies and techniques which nobody at your hospital has ever heard of...

...there's also MetaMed. Instead of just having “evidence-based medicine” in journals that doctors don't actually read, MetaMed will provide you with actual evidence-based healthcare. Their Chairman and CTO is Jaan Tallinn (cofounder of Skype, major funder of xrisk-related endeavors), one of their major VCs is Peter Thiel (major funder of MIRI), their management includes some names LWers will find familiar, and their researchers know math and stats and in many cases have also read LessWrong. If you have a sufficiently serious problem and can afford their service, MetaMed will (a) put someone on reading the relevant research literature who understands real statistics and can tell whether the paper is trustworthy; and (b) refer you to a cooperative doctor in their network who can carry out the therapies they find.

MetaMed was partially inspired by the case of a woman who had her fingertip chopped off, was told by the hospital that she was screwed, and then read through an awful lot of literature on her own until she found someone working on an advanced regenerative therapy that let her actually grow the fingertip back. The idea behind MetaMed isn't just that they will scour the literature to find how the best experimentally supported treatment differs from the average wisdom - people who regularly read LW will be aware that this is often a pretty large divergence - but that they will also look for this sort of very recent technology that most hospitals won't have heard about.

This is a new service and it has to interact with the existing medical system, so they are currently expensive, starting at $5,000 for a research report. (Keeping in mind that a basic report involves a lot of work by people who must be good at math.) If you have a sick friend who can afford it - especially if the regular system is failing them, and they want (or you want) their next step to be more science instead of "altern...
Daimons
by Douglas_Reay — 2013-03-05T11:58:11.072Z

Summary:

A daimon is a process in a distributed computing environment that has a fixed resource budget and core values that do not permit:

modifying those core values

attempting to increase the resources it uses beyond the budget allocated to it

attempting to alter the budget itself

This concept is relevant to LessWrong, because I refer to it in other posts discussing Friendly AI.

There's a concept I want to refer to in another post, but it is complex enough to deserve a post of its own.

I'm going to use the word "daimon" to refer to it.

"daimon" is an English word, whose etymology comes from the Latin "dæmon" and the Greek "δαίμων".

The original mythic meaning was a genius - a powerful tutelary spirit, tied to some location or purpose, that provides protection and guidance. However the concept I'm going to talk about is closer to the later computing meaning of "daemon" in unix, that was coined by Jerry Saltzer in 1963. In unix, a daemon is a child process; given a purpose and specific resources to use, and then forked off so it is no longer under the direct control of the originator, and may be used by multiple users if they have the correct permissions.

Let's start by looking at the current state of distributed computing (2012).

Hadoop is an open source Java implementation of a distributed file system upon which MapReduce operations can be applied.

JavaSpaces is a distributed tuple store that allows processing on remote sandboxes, based on the open source Apache River.

OceanStore is the basis for the same sort of thing, except anonymous and peer 2 peer, based upon Chimaera.

GPU is a peer 2 peer shared computing environment that allow things like climate simulation and distributed search engines.

Paxos is a family of protocols that allow the above things to be done despite nodes that are untrusted or even downright attempting subversion.

GridSwarm is the same sort of network, but set up on an ad hoc basis using moving nodes that join or drop from the network depending on proximity.

And, not least, there are the competing contenders for platform-as-a-service cloud computing.

So it is reasonable to assume that in the near future it will be technologically feasible to have a system with most (if not all) of these properties simultaneously. A system where the owner of a piece of physical computi...
[SEQ RERUN] Against Maturity
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-05T06:06:49.909Z

Today's post, Against Maturity was originally published on 18 February 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Dividing the world up into "childish" and "mature" is not a useful way to think.

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 Good Idealistic Books are Rare, 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.
LINK: Infinity, probability and disagreement
by Alejandro1 — 2013-03-05T04:36:10.320Z

I saw this conundrum at Alexander Pruss's blog and I thought LWers might enjoy discussing it:

Consider the following sequence of events:

You roll a fair die and it rolls out of sight.

An angel appears to you and informs you that you are one of a countable infinity of almost identical twins who independently rolled a fair die that rolled out of sight, and that similar angels are appearing to them all and telling them all the same thing. The twins all reason by the same principles and their past lives have been practically indistinguishable.

The angel adds that infinitely many of the twins rolled six and infinitely many didn't.

The angel then tells you that the angels have worked out a list of pairs of identifiers of you and your twins (you're not exactly alike), such that each twin who rolled six is paired with a twin who didn't roll six.

The angel then informs you that each pair of paired twins will be transported into a room for themselves. And, poof!, it is so. You are sitting across from someone who looks very much like you, and you each know that you rolled six if and only if the other did not.

Let H be the event that you did not roll six. How does the probability of H evolve?

After step 1, presumably your probability of H is 5/6. But after step 5, it would be very odd if it was still 5/6. For if it is still 5/6 after step 5, then you and your twin know that exactly one of you rolled six, and each of you assigns 5/6 to the probability that it was the other person who rolled six. But you have the same evidence, and being almost identical twins, you have the same principles of judgment. So how could you disagree like this, each thinking the other was probably the one who rolled six?

Thus, it seems that after step 5, you should either assign 1/2 or assign no probability to the hypothesis that you didn't get six. And analogously for your twin.

But at which point does the change from 5/6 to 1/2-or-no-probability happen? Surely merely physically being in the same room with the person one was paired with shouldn't have made a difference once the list was prepared. So a change didn't happen in step 5.

And given 3, that such a list was prepared doesn't seem at all relevant. Infinitely many abstract pairings are possible given 3. So it doesn't seem that a change happened in step 4. (I am not sure about this supplementary

...
Meta Decision Theory and Newcomb's Problem
by wdmacaskill — 2013-03-05T01:29:40.786Z

Hi all,

As part of my PhD I've written a paper developing a new approach to decision theory that I call Meta Decision Theory. The idea is that decision theory should take into account decision-theoretic uncertainty as well as empirical uncertainty, and that, once we acknowledge this, we can explain some puzzles to do with Newcomb problems, and can come up with new arguments to adjudicate the causal vs evidential debate. Nozick raised this idea of taking decision-theoretic uncertainty into account, but he did not defend the idea at length, and did not discuss implications of the idea.

I'm not yet happy to post this paper publicly, so I'll just write a short abstract of the paper below. However, I would appreciate written comments on the paper. If you'd like to read it and/or comment on it, please e-mail me at will dot crouch at 80000hours.org. And, of course, comments in the thread on the idea sketched below are also welcome.

Abstract

First, I show that our judgments concerning Newcomb problems are stakes-sensitive. By altering the relative amounts of value in the transparent box and the opaque box, one can construct situations in which one should clearly one-box, and one can construct situations in which one should clearly two-box. A plausible explanation of this phenomenon is that our intuitive judgments are sensitive to decision-theoretic uncertainty as well as empirical uncertainty: if the stakes are very high for evidential decision theory (EDT) but not for Causal Decision theory (CDT) then we go with EDT's recommendation, and vice-versa for CDT over EDT.

Second, I show that, if we 'go meta' and take decision-theoretic uncertainty into account, we can get the right answer in both the Smoking Lesion case and the Psychopath Button case.

Third, I distinguish Causal MDT (CMDT) and Evidential MDT (EMDT). I look at what I consider to be the two strongest arguments in favour of EDT, and show that these arguments do not work at the meta level. First, I consider the argument that EDT gets the right answer in certain cases. In response to this, I show that one only needs to have small credence in EDT in order to get the right answer in such cases. The second is the "Why Ain'cha Rich?" argument. In response to this, I give a case where EMDT recommends two-boxing, even though two-boxing has a lower average return than one-boxing.

Fourth, I respond to objections...
March 2013 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2013-03-04T22:35:33.343Z

(I decided to temporarily usurp RobertLumley's place in posting this thread. I hope he doesn't mind)

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.

If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.
Meetup : Mountain View: Rough Numbers
by fiddlemath — 2013-03-04T18:51:27.001Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Mountain View: Rough Numbers

WHEN:
05 March 2013 07:30:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
278 Castro St, Mountain View, CA

Various techniques for performing estimation in your head, how you can actually practice this on a day-to-day basis, and why you should care.
This is the first in a series of meetup topics on Actually Using Math -- a simple skill, really, that even this community rarely practices enough, given its utility. And I'll happily explain why I think this is, and what to do about it. Pure conjecture, of course, but it might be interesting.

Also, I'll start with another quick problem-solving game. :)

If you're at the Quixey door and need to be let in, you can call me at 608.698.2959.

If you're in the San Francisco Bay area and reading this, consider joining the Bay Area Less Wrong mailing list Regular meetups in Mountain View are Berkeley are announced and discussed there, and other events of interest to the local community.

Discussion article for the meetup : Mountain View: Rough Numbers
[SEQ RERUN] Good Idealistic Books are Rare
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-04T05:08:44.519Z

Today's post, Good Idealistic Books are Rare was originally published on 17 February 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Much of our culture is the official view, not the idealistic view.

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 Cynical About Cynicism, 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.
Surplus splitting strategy
by KatjaGrace — 2013-03-04T01:08:42.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

When negotiating over the price of a nice chair at a garage sale, it can be useful to demonstrate there is only twenty dollars in your wallet. When determining whether your friend will make you a separate meal or you will eat something less preferable, it can be useful to have a longterm commitment to vegetarianism. In all sorts of situations where a valuable trade is to be made, but the distribution of the net benefits between the traders is yet to be determined, it can be good to have your hands tied.

If you can’t have your hands tied, the next best thing is to have a salient place to split the benefits. The garage sale owner did this when he put a price tag on the chair. If you want to pay something other than the price on the tag, you have to come up with some kind of reason, such as a credible commitment to not paying over $20. Many buyers will just pay the asking price.

This means manipulating salient ways to split benefits could be pretty profitable. This means people should probably be doing it on purpose. I’m curious to know if and how they do.

Often the default is to keep the way the benefits naturally fall without money (or anything else ‘extra’) changing hands. For instance suppose you come to lunch at my place and we both enjoy this to some extent. The default here is to keep the happiness we got from this, rather than say me paying you $10 on top.

So in such cases manipulating the division of benefits should mostly be done by steering toward more personally favorable variations on the basic plan. e.g. my suggesting you come to my place before you suggest that I come to yours. A straightforward way to get gains here is to just race to be the first to suggest a favorable option, but this is hard because it looks domineering to try to manipulate things in your favor in such a way. Unless you have some particular advantage at suggesting things fast and smoothly, such a race seems costly in expectation.

If in general trying to manipulate a group’s choice seems like a status-move or dominance-move, subtle ways to do this are valuable. Instead of a race to suggest options, you can have a prior race to make the options that you might want to suggest seem more suggestible. For instance if you’d prefer others come to your place than you go to others’ places, you can put a pool at your place, so suggestions...
Induction; or, the rules and etiquette of reference class tennis
by paulfchristiano — 2013-03-03T23:27:56.280Z

(Cross-posted from rationalaltruist.)

Some disasters (catastrophic climate change, high-energy physics surprises) are so serious that even a small probability (say 1%) of such a disaster would have significant policy implications. Unfortunately, making predictions about such unlikely events is extremely unreliable. This makes it difficult to formally justify assigning such disasters probabilities low enough to be compatible with an intuitive policy response. So we must either reconsider our formal analyses or reconsider our intuitive responses.

Intuitively, even if we don’t have an explicit model for a system, we can reason about it inductively, relying on generalizations from historical data. Indeed, this is necessary for virtually all everyday reasoning. But we need to be much more careful about inductive reasoning if we want to use it to obtain 99%+ confidence. In practice such reasoning tends to hinge on questions like “How much should we trust the historical trend X, given that we today face unprecedented condition Y?”

For example, we might wonder: “should we confidently expect historically amiable conditions on Earth to continue in the face of historically unprecedented environmental disruptions?” Human activity is clearly unprecedented in a certain sense, but so is every event. The climate of Earth has changed many times, and probably never undergone the kind of catastrophic climate shift that could destroy human civilization. Should we infer that one more change, at the hands of humans, is similarly unlikely to cause catastrophe? Are human effects so different that we can’t reason inductively, and must resort to our formal models?

Even when we aren't aiming for confident judgments, it can be tricky to apply induction to very unfamiliar domains. Arguments hinging on inductive reasoning often end up mired in disputes about what "reference class" is appropriate in a given setting. Should we put a future war in the (huge) reference class "wars" and confidently predict a low probability of extinction? Should we put a future war in a very small reference class of "wars between nuclear powers" and rely on analytic reasoning to understand whether extinction is likely or not? Both of these approaches seem problematic: clearly a war today is much more dangerous than a war in 1500, but at the same time histori...
Giving in to small vices
by  — 2013-03-03T20:46:22.575Z

When I was in Seoul three years ago to visit a friend, I was not impressed by the city. The people there were always in a hurry, and struck me as generally unfriendly. When you apologise for accidentally bumping into someone, your apology will usually be coldly ignored. There are also very strict social rules in place. E.g., on the trains, there are seats specially reserved for small children, elderly people, and the physically disabled. If you do not fall into any of these three categories, you are not allowed to take any of those seats, even when you are travelling during the off-peak hours and there are few other passengers. Of course, there are no laws in place to forbid you to do so, but you will be met with (silent) disapproval from the South Koreans. Or so my Korean friend warned me.
Another thing that struck me was the fact that the streets were strewn with litter everywhere. It was very unpleasant. How can one go about resolving this issue? After all, the lack of civic-mindedness is something that takes time to address, but you want clean streets now. Maybe you are thinking of making the act of littering legally punishable. That will certainly teach those litterbugs to be more considerate. So you pass a law saying that those who are caught littering will have to pay a fine.
This sounds like a good idea. After all, the advantage is that fining people for littering is a quick and easy way of filling up the governmental coffers, and so you instruct policemen to strategically station themselves in busy areas. But using manpower from the police forces to ensure public cleanliness seems like a colossal waste of all the specialised training all these policemen have received in preparation for their jobs.
What to do then? Maybe during the first two weeks after the ratification of the law, you delegate the assignment of catching litterbugs to a few policemen, to send the message that you mean business. After the fear of getting caught has been sufficiently instilled in the people, you surreptitiously transfer the policemen to resume their former responsibilities. You trust that there will be little littering now, because what matters is not the actual presence of the policemen, but the belief that those policemen are present, even when they are not.
But this might not work in the long run. People are not oblivious to their surroundings -- soon they'd realis...
Risks of Genetic Publicy
by jefftk — 2013-03-03T17:30:40.409Z

When you walk around you leave your genetic information everywhere. Right now it's not worth it for anyone to do anything with it, outside of DNA profiling in forensics, but sequencing keeps getting cheaper so this may change. Long term, I don't trust genetic data to stay private.

For the near future, however, the details of your genetics probably will stay private. If you want them to. You could, however, sign up for something like the Personal Genome Project or Genomes Unzipped which would make your genetic data public, along with other medical details. If you look at this example consent form there's a long section on the risks, for example:

7.3 ... if you and your partner are both participants you may learn that both of you are carriers for recessive disease-causing variants in the same gene, suggesting a higher risk of severe disease in your children.

This is not what I would consider a risk, in that you still have the option to ignore the information and do what you would have done anyway, you just might not want to. Looking over their other listed risks, the only one that seems significant to me is:

7.1.c Whether or not it is lawful to do so, you and/or a member of your family could be subject to actual or attempted employment, insurance, financial or other forms of discrimination or negative treatment on the basis of the public disclosure of your genetic and trait information by GNZ or by a third party. Although some countries have laws that prohibit certain forms of genetic discrimination, these laws may not apply to you, may not protect against all forms of discrimination or may not stop a third party from discriminating against you even where it is prohibited by law.

The big issue here is health insurance. Economically it's run kind of like an independent insurance business but because what so many people actually want is health care for everyone with shared costs we've tangled it up in knots. So while you might expect insurance against health risks to cost in proportion to those risks, in the US we have the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) which prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage or charging different prices based on genetic data.

Another issue is employment. If it's public information that you're at high risk for an expensive disease, employers might not want to hire you because we ...
Meetup : Berlin
by blob — 2013-03-03T10:08:35.561Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin

WHEN:
06 March 2013 07:30:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
near U Leinestr., Berlin

It's the first meetup at John's place! Check the mailing list for the exact location and details.

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin