trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Overcoming the Curse of Knowledge
by JesseGalef — 2011-10-18T17:39:22.428Z

[crossposted at Measure of Doubt]

What is the Curse of Knowledge, and how does it apply to science education, persuasion, and communication? No, it's not a reference to the Garden of Eden story. I'm referring to a particular psychological phenomenon that can make our messages backfire if we're not careful.

Communication isn't a solo activity; it involves both you and the audience. Writing a diary entry is a great way to sort out thoughts, but if you want to be informative and persuasive to others, you need to figure out what they'll understand and be persuaded by. A common habit is to use ourselves as a mental model - assuming that everyone else will laugh at what we find funny, agree with what we find convincing, and interpret words the way we use them. The model works to an extent - especially with people similar to us - but other times our efforts fall flat. You can present the best argument you've ever heard, only to have it fall on dumb - sorry, deaf - ears.

That's not necessarily your fault - maybe they're just dense! Maybe the argument is brilliant! But if we want to communicate successfully, pointing fingers and assigning blame is irrelevant. What matters is getting our point across, and we can't do it if we're stuck in our head, unable to see things from our audience's perspective. We need to figure out what words will work.

Unfortunately, that's where the Curse of Knowledge comes in. In 1990, Elizabeth Newton did a fascinating psychology experiment: She paired participants into teams of two: one tapper and one listener. The tappers picked one of 25 well-known songs and would tap out the rhythm on a table. Their partner - the designated listener - was asked to guess the song. How do you think they did?

Not well. Of the 120 songs tapped out on the table, the listeners only guessed 3 of them correctly - a measly 2.5 percent. But get this: before the listeners gave their answer, the tappers were asked to predict how likely their partner was to get it right. Their guess? Tappers thought their partners would get the song 50 percent of the time. You know, only overconfident by a factor of 20. What made the tappers so far off?

They lost perspective because they were "cursed" with the additional knowledge of the song title. Chip and Dan Heath use the story in their book Made to Stick to introduce the term:

"The problem is that tappers have been given knowle

...
Is quantum physics (easily?) computable?
by Solvent — 2011-10-18T08:44:12.732Z

So I've been trying to read the Quantum Physics sequence. I think I've understood about half of it- I've been rushed, and haven't really sat down and worked through the math. And so I apologize in advance for any mistakes I make here.

It seems like classical mechanics with quantized time is really easy to simulate with a computer: every step, you just calculate force, figure out where velocity is going, then add the change in position to the new position.

Then when you change to relativity, it seems like it's suddenly a lot harder to implement. Whereas classical mechanics are easy on a computer, it seems to me that you would have to set up a system where the outcomes of relativity are explicitly stated, while the classical outcomes are implicit.

The same thing seems to occur, except more, with quantum physics. Continuous wave functions seems to be far harder than discrete particles. Similarly, the whole thing about "no individual particle identity" seems more difficult, although as I think of it now, I suppose this could be because the whole concept of particles is naive.

It doesn't seem like the computation rules simply get harder as we learn more physics. After all, trying to do thermal physics got a lot easier when we started using the ideal gas model.

Also, it's not just that ever improving theories must be ever more difficult to implement on a computer. Imagine that we lived inside Conway's Game of Life. We would figure out all kinds of high level physics, which would be probably way more complex than the eventual B3/S23 which they would discover.

It feels like the actual implemented physics shouldn't much affect how computation works. After all, we live in a quantum universe and classical physics is still simpler to compute.

Is there any value to this speculation?
Meetup : Canberra Meetup Saturday November 5th
by JGWeissman — 2011-10-18T06:16:35.784Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra Meetup Saturday November 5th

WHEN:
05 November 2011 11:00:00AM (-0700)

WHERE:
CRISP G015, ANU campus, Canberra ACT 2601

(Posted on behalf of Nikita Samoylov)

This is a new meetup. We'll be mostly introducing each other. We'll
also play games on cognitive biases. We'll also talk what we want to
do in the future meetups. I'll bring tea and some snacks. You can also
bring snacks. I hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra Meetup Saturday November 5th
Students asked to defend AGI danger update in favor of AGI riskiness
by lukeprog — 2011-10-18T05:24:33.812Z

From Geoff Anders of Leverage Research:

In the Spring semester of 2011, I decided to see how effectively I could communicate the idea of a threat from AGI to my undergraduate classes. I spent three sessions on this for each of my two classes. My goal was to convince my students that all of us are going to be killed by an artificial intelligence. My strategy was to induce the students to come up with the ideas themselves. I gave out a survey before and after. An analysis of the survey responses indicates that the students underwent a statistically significant shift in their reported attitudes. After the three sessions, students reported believing that AGI would have a larger impact1 and also a worse impact2 than they originally reported believing.

Not a surprising result, perhaps, but the details of how Geoff taught AGI danger and the reactions of his students are quite interesting.
[SEQ RERUN] Beware Stephen J. Gould
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-18T02:35:33.098Z

Today's post, Beware of Stephen J. Gould was originally published on 06 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A lot of people have gotten their grasp of evolutionary theory from Stephen J. Gould, a man who committed the moral equivalent of fraud in a way that is difficult to explain. At any rate, he severely misrepresented what evolutionary biologists believe, in the course of pretending to attack certain beliefs. One needs to clear from memory, as much as possible, not just everything that Gould positively stated but everything he seemed to imply the mainstream theory believed.

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 Natural Selection's Speed Limit and Complexity Bound, 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.
Particles may not have broken light speed limit
by  — 2011-10-17T19:00:12.687Z

(Note: This is my first post in discussion, instead of just a comment. Feel free to suggest improvements.)

A few weeks ago in Less Wrong discussion, there was a discussion on whether or not we had found neutrinos traveling at superluminal velocities. That discussion can be found here:

Apparently, a paper was recently put into Arxiv from Ronald A.J. van Elburg, which has been popping up in the news as having indicated a possible explanation for the difference. To sum up the paper, instead of superluminal velocities, we may have a possible source of GPS error to compensate for.

Some of the news reports also correctly pointed out that this paper is currently as tentative as the first announcements about the Neutrinos were when OPERA made them.

Arxiv link:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1110/1110.2685v2.pdf

Link to Preprint on Author's page: (Thanks to Shminux)

http://home.kpn.nl/vanelburg30/Papers/RAJvanElburg_TimeOfFlight_Preprint.pdf
Summary:

The Michelson-Morley experiment shows that the experimental outcome of an interference
experiment does not depend on the constant velocity of the setup with respect to an inertial
frame of reference. From this, one can conclude the existence of an invariant speed of light.
However, it does not follow from their experiment that a time-of-flight is reference frame
independent. In fact, the theory of special relativity predicts that the distance between the
production location of a particle and the detection location will be changed in all reference
frames which have a velocity component parallel to the baseline separating source and detector
in a photon time-of-flight experiment. For the OPERA experiment we find that the
associated correction is approximately 32 ns. Judging from the information provided, the
correction needs to be applied twice in the OPERA experiment. Therefore the total correctiotion
to the final results is 64 ns. Thus bringing the apparent velocities of neutrino’s back
to a value not significantly different from the speed of light. We end this short letter by
suggesting an analysis of the experimental data which would illustrate the effects described.
Hypothesis to test if paper is correct:

We showed that in the OPERA experiment the baseline time-of-flight is incorrectly identified
with the Lorentz transformation corrected time-of-flight as measured from a clock in a non4
stationary orbit and in fact exceeds it by at...
A signaling theory of class x politics interaction
by Scott Alexander — 2011-10-17T18:49:09.350Z

The media, most recently The Economist and Scientific American, have been publicizing a surprising statistical finding: in the current economic climate, when more Americans than ever are poor, support for policies that redistribute wealth to the poor are at their lowest levels ever. This new-found antipathy towards aid to the poor concentrates in people who are near but not yet on the lowest rung of the social ladder. The Economist adds some related statistics: those who earn slightly more than the minimum wage are most against raising the minimum wage, and support for welfare in an area decreases as the percentage of welfare recipients in the area rises.
Both articles explain the paradoxical findings by appealing to something called "last place aversion", an observed tendency for people to overvalue not being in last place. For example, in laboratory experiments where everyone gets randomly determined amounts of money, most people are willing to help those with less money than themselves gain cash - except the person with the second to lowest amount of money, who tends to try to thwart the person in last place even if it means enriching those who already have the most.
"Last place aversion" is interesting, and certainly deserves at least a footnote in the catalogue of cognitive biases and heuristics, but I find it an unsatisfying explanation for the observations about US attitudes toward wealth redistribution. For one thing, the entire point of last place aversion is that it only affects those in last place, but in a massive country like the United States, everyone can find someone worse off than themselves (with one exception). For another, redistributive policies usually stop short of making those who need government handouts wealthier than those who do not; subsidizing more homeless shelters doesn't risk giving the homeless a nicer house than your own. Finally, many of the policies people oppose, like taxing the rich, don't directly translate to helping those in last place.
I propose a different mechanism, one based on ... wait for it ... signaling.
In a previous post, I discussed multi-level signaling and counter-signaling, where each level tries to differentiate itself from the level beneath it. For example, the nouveau riche differentiate themselves from the middle class by buying ostentatious bling, and the nobility (who are at no risk of being mistaken ...
Meetup : West LA Meetup 10-19-2011
by  — 2011-10-17T06:05:06.675Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup 10-19-2011

WHEN:
19 October 2011 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7pm - 9pm Wednesday, October 19th.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar, located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters.

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Recommended Reading:

Choose any bias from Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases. We will talk about that bias at the meeting - how to recognize it, why it happens, and how to counter it.

Whether you're a regular reader or totally new, here for the theoretical musings or the practical things, come by and say hello! The conversation is largely unstructured, and the people are awesome.

I will bring a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

See also: West LA Biweekly Meetups

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup 10-19-2011
[SEQ RERUN] Natural Selection's Speed Limit and Complexity Bound
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-17T04:43:53.556Z

Today's post, Natural Selection's Speed Limit and Complexity Bound was originally published on 04 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Tried to argue mathematically that there could be at most 25MB of meaningful information (or thereabouts) in the human genome, but computer simulations failed to bear out the mathematical argument. It does seem probably that evolution has some kind of speed limit and complexity bound - eminent evolutionary biologists seem to believe it, and in fact the Genome Project discovered only 25,000 genes in the human genome - but this particular math may not be the correct argument.

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 Evolutions Are Stupid (But Work Anyways), 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.
Curiosity, Adam Savage, and Life-Extension
by JoshuaZ — 2011-10-17T03:17:16.705Z

Tonight the Discovery Channel had on their Curiosity series a program hosted by Adam Savage (of Mythbusters) on whether or not we could live indefinitely. The program probably did have some substantial impact on some people who have not been exposed to that sort of idea before, and may have been especially good at letting people understand that there's a definite possibility that the relevant discoveries might occur in their lifetimes.

However the piece was as a whole decidedly lacking in actual information. First, the entire program was built around the conceit of Savage looking back from his thousandth birthday and talking about all the technologies that had allowed it to happen. In their hypothetical world, due to a severe car accident in 2022, Savage becomes the first person to benefit from a host of different technologies. There were zero actual interviews with scientists and although actual technological proposals were mentioned such as organ cloning and a brief segment on the SENS work of filtering blood cells, the vast majority was high-budget special effects segements of the new technologies. Also, cryonics was not mentioned at all, since in their hypothetical world, Savage had never needed that particular technology. Similarly, no mention is made of uploading, although Savage does gain cybernetic enhancements to his brain.

At a level of evaluation of narrative rather than information, the entire piece was a bit incoherent and inconsistent. For example, Savage declares at one point that at age 130, he is then the oldest person in the world. This makes no sense in context since presumably after the basic technologies have been tested out on him they could then be applied to other people, some of whom will be older than he is. In the same section of the narrative, Savage has apparently become the head-engineer of the world's first space elevator construction project. A few centuries later, Savage then has to deal with an asteroid impact obliterating much of North America. My girlfriend remarked that the program came across almost as fanfic about Savage.

Overall, I can't recommend this much but it might do a good job getting people aware of these issues who don't currently know anything.

Did anyone else see this? What did they think?
[SEQ RERUN] Evolutions Are Stupid (But Work Anyways)
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-16T02:03:45.618Z

Today's post, Evolutions Are Stupid (But Work Anyway) was originally published on 03 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Evolution, while not simple, is sufficiently simpler than organic brains that we can describe mathematically how slow and stupid it is.

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 Wonder of Evolution, 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.
Mental Rebooting: "Your Brain on Porn"... 
by Arkanj3l — 2011-10-15T17:14:25.956Z

... or "How to Operate Your Limbic System", or "A Practical Guide to Superstimulus". That's how I see it, anyway.

Your Brain on Porn is a website mainly dedicated to exposing the addictive aspects of pornography; interpreting this in light of the blind idiot god; and then forming a community around "rebooting", or prolonged abstinence that allows the brain to re-sensitize itself to, at the least, non-fetishistic sexual pleasure. By consistently NOT accessing whatever circuit is driving one's, well, drive, one sends this loop into atrophy. Eventually, one becomes able to quit. And then one finds alternatives.

Here is why I find this site so valuable: frequently during the arguments the site owner sets up, he doesn't just bring up pornography as the culprit here. To form his clauses he draws upon research on addictions to junk food, or video games, and then tries to draw parallels to porn's effects: the escalating need of novelty due to rapidly declining pleasure response.

So I don't think it stops with porn. For me, any superstimulus is a bad superstimulus, despite the fact that some sirens are more necessary to listen to than others. It could be worth reflecting on what would actually count as a superstimulus; and then asking if one would benefit from a long hiatus from that stimulus. I'm not sure how long that cycle would be, but many "rebooters" proclaim seeing effects after three weeks, up to three months. It might not be enough to simply manage akrasia, as there could still be a chronic sensitivity problem in place. That would require time.

Here's what I thought of, so far.

Superstimulus List:

Porn.

Tab explosions and social networks -- the online kind. (This could be the most challenging one: More often than not, a computer is needed for productivity. Who can afford taking a three-month break?)

Video games.

Disorganizations, mess, and clutter.

Junk food. (I'm tentative about this one, because I'm still trying to figure out what counts as "junk". As far as I've seen, this word usually gets ascribed to high calorie, high fat foods... but that possibly doesn't matter, as I see proportionally high-fat content paleo diets. Or it's a combination of fat and sugar that becomes addictive, but either/or is manageable.)

Loud music. (Shameless speculation.)

Much of advertising today seems to fo

...
[SEQ RERUN] The Wonder of Evolution
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-15T03:05:40.425Z

Today's post, The Wonder of Evolution was originally published on 02 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The wonder of the first replicator was not how amazingly well it replicated, but that a first replicator could arise, at all, by pure accident, in the primordial seas of Earth. That first replicator would undoubtedly be devoured in an instant by a sophisticated modern bacterium. Likewise, the wonder of evolution itself is not how well it works, but that a brainless, accidentally occurring optimization process can work at all. If you praise evolution for being such a wonderfully intelligent Creator, you're entirely missing the wonderful thing 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 An Alien God, 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.
Questions for the Singularity Summit
by lessdazed — 2011-10-15T00:10:48.179Z

Here is a place to talk about questions for the speakers at the Singularity Summit.

People are often afraid that they have stupid questions, and fail to ask their good questions that would have benefited many - either by increasing their understanding, showcasing the character of a speaker who admits to not knowing something, or showing by the lack of an adequate response that the speaker's argument is flawed.

This is an overblown fear that is quite irrational - irrational to the extent that their emotions lead them to think that the consequences of their asking a stupid question will be severe. People will have unpleasant emotional reactions if embarrassed, but their emotions are needlessly warning them not to risk status before the tribe lest they get cast out and die. That's unlikely to happen.

People's reluctance to ask questions is rational to the extent that many questions are, by any reasonable description, stupid.

So let's use this thread to gain confidence that our questions aren't of the latter type, or to get answers, or to get better questions.