trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A Mathematical Explanation of Why Charity Donations Shouldn't Be Diversified
by Vladimir_Nesov — 2012-09-20T11:03:48.603Z

There is a standard argument against diversification of donations, popularly explained by Steven Landsburg in the essay Giving Your All. This post is an attempt to communicate a narrow special case of that argument in a form that resists misinterpretation better, for the benefit of people with a bit of mathematical training. Understanding this special case in detail might be useful as a stepping stone to the understanding of the more general argument. (If you already agree that one should donate only to the charity that provides the greatest marginal value, and that it makes sense to talk about the comparison of marginal value of different charities, there is probably no point in reading this post.)1

Suppose you are considering two charities, one that accomplishes the saving of antelopes, and the other the saving of babies. Depending on how much funding these charities secure, they are able to save respectively A antelopes and B babies, so the outcome can be described by a point (A,B) that specifies both pieces of data.

Let's say you have a complete transitive preference over possible values of (A,B), that is you can make a comparison between any two points, and if you prefer (A1,B1) over (A2,B2) and also (A2,B2) over (A3,B3), then you prefer (A1,B1) over (A3,B3). Let's further suppose that this preference can be represented by a sufficiently smooth real-valued function U(A,B), such that U(A1,B1)>U(A2,B2) precisely when you prefer (A1,B1) to (A2,B2). U doesn't need to be a utility function in the standard sense, since we won't be considering uncertainty, it only needs to represent ordering over individual points, so let's call it "preference level".

Let A(Ma) be the dependence of the number of antelopes saved by the Antelopes charity if it attains the level of funding Ma, and B(Mb) the corresponding function for the Babies charity. (For simplicity, let's work with U, A, B, Ma and Mb as variables that depend on each other in specified ways.)

You are considering a decision to donate, and at the moment the charities have already secured Ma and Mb amounts of money, sufficient to save A antelopes and B babies, which would result in your preference level U. You have a relatively small amount of money dM that you want to distribute between these charities. dM is such that it's small compared to Ma and Mb, and if donated to either charity, it will result in changes o...
[SEQ RERUN] Crisis of Faith
by MinibearRex — 2012-09-20T04:43:11.062Z

Today's post, Crisis of Faith was originally published on 10 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When an idea has become deeply entrenched in your mind, it requires an awful lot of work to doubt that idea properly.

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 Shut up and do the impossible!, 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.
A Critique of Leverage Research's Connection Theory
by Peter Wildeford — 2012-09-20T04:28:37.011Z

Leverage Research is a recently formed New York-based research group "dedicate[d] to making the world a better place by the best and most effective means possible". I personally empathize and connect with this mission statement a lot, and I myself have made more or less an identical dedication personally, and through my involvement with the organizations GivingWhatWeCan and 80000 Hours.

One of the pieces of research developed by Leverage Research founder Geoff Anders (and presumably tested and developed by Leverage Research) is Connection Theory. Broadly, Connection Theory (CT) is a theory of mind that proports to explain and predict nearly all mental phenomena -- such as why people believe, desire, think, and act the way they do.

CT, if true, would be an amazing and profound success for psychology as a discipline. However, I don't think CT is true. Or rather, even if CT is true, I don't think the case made for CT is persuasive. In this essay, I intend to articulate my case against CT.

Disclaimer

I don't write this essay with the intent to "hurt" Leverage Research or Geoff Anders, but rather with the intent to either:
(1) be persuaded for the truth of CT and understand how to use it to better make the world a better place, or
(2) successfully criticize CT and help an organization with a very laudable mission better accomplish it by correcting the errors they've made.

In many ways, I expect my criticism to "miss the mark" and misunderstand CT. In doing so, I hope to allow Leverage Research to clarify their theory in light of my objections to make it less misunderstood. In other ways, I expect my criticism to reveal flaws in CT that require revision and reassessment.

(Lastly, I make this essay with the disclaimer that I have no specialized knowledge or formal training in psychology, beyond pursuing an undergraduate degree in the field. I am currently in my Junior Year at Denison University.)

Connection Theory in More Detail

Connection Theory is a combination of the following four premises:

1. Everything a mind is aware of is (a) a sensation, (b) a spatial relation between sensations, (c) a representation, (d) an awareness of something, or (e) a combination of these.

2. Every mind is such that its representational content at a moment is determined entirely by it updating its representational content in the most elegant possible way on the basis of its r

...
Cooperative Surplus Splitting
by SarahNibs — 2012-09-19T23:56:52.149Z

Often we cooperate to extract surplus value from the government, hotels, the physics that makes operating cars cost money, or other sources - value that we could not extract individually. When I notice such a surplus I often wonder how the surplus should be split. What is fair? Purely cooperatively, without anyone trying to game the surplus-allocation-function, and assuming the stated coalitions are fixed rather than negotiable, how much of the surplus should be attributed to each contributing party?

Some concrete examples that have come up recently in real life*:

1. Matching donations. The company I work for will match donations to charity, dollar for dollar, up to a certain maximum. Viscerally, how should I feel about donating $100 to puppies**? More than $100, since puppies get $200, certainly. But less than $200, since my employer should feel puppy-love too, and presumably there's a conservation of visceral feeling law that should apply here. Further suppose that my employer's matching offer caused me to donate $100 instead of, say, $50. What math should be done and why?

2. Exemption splitting. An amicable divorce leaves two parents wondering who should claim their student daughter as a dependent. As a purely "what is fair?" financial question, how much of the tax savings from that exemption should be distributed to the father, mother, and daughter? Suppose the father's marginal tax rate is 25% and overall tax rate is 18%, and the mother's marginal rate is 15% and overall is 12%. What math should be done and why?

3. Refinancing. My friend has a debt at 12% and for silly reasons is obviously able to pay it off but cannot this year. I can pay it off, though, and so could several other people***. Assume there are 3 people including me who could pay it off, and our current expected returns on invested money are (say) 2%, 3.5%, and 6%, and for simplicity she will repay the loan plus any surplus due in one year. Who should pay off how much of the loan (say it's $5000)? I assume the 2% person should pay all of it. That's a 10% surplus - how much do each of the four of us get? What math should be done and why?

As in The Bedrock of Fairness, are there qualities of the solutions we have strong opinions on, even if we do not know the procedure which would generate solutions with those qualities?

*Details changed.
**I do not donate to puppies.
***Assume default ris...
Meetup : Research Triangle Less Wrong
by evand — 2012-09-19T20:03:21.463Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Research Triangle Less Wrong

WHEN:
20 September 2012 06:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Bryan Center Plaza at Duke, Durham, NC

From Gordon's announcement email:

So, Madeleine and I have been thinking over when is best for the group to meet.

Until we can figure out better times and places, the two of us are going to pre-commit to spending the 3 hours from 6pm to 9pm on the Bryan Center Plaza every Thursday Evening.

I hope we might see some of you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Research Triangle Less Wrong
The utility-maximizing complexity of conscious beings
by snowball — 2012-09-19T18:44:39.338Z

An AI that runs conscious beings has finite resources. Complex conscious beings consume more of these resources than do simpler conscious beings. Suppose, for purposes of discussion, that a friendly AI would maximize the aggregate utility of the beings it runs by modulating their level of complexity.

The utility-maximizing level of complexity would depend on the natural laws that govern the relation between the complexity of a being and the magnitude of the utility that it can experience.

When you are uploaded to the AI, then, one of three things will happen, depending on the result above:

1. You may wake up to discover that most of your mind, memory, and identity had disappeared, because most of your computational resources had been stolen in order to create a set of new, simple beings who, in total, would enjoy more utility than you had thereby lost. You may even be much less happy than you now are.

2. You may not wake up at all, because the totality of your computational resources had been stolen from you and given to a superbeing who was capable, because of some economy of scale in utility consumption, of extracting more utility from them than you could.

3. You may wake up to discover that you are much smarter and happier than you now are, because the utility-maximizing level of complexity is larger than your own, but not so large that, if all people were to upload, it would exhaust the AI's resources, thus making rationing necessary.
Thinking in another language could reduce biases
by  — 2012-09-19T17:31:20.733Z

From Wired:

The experiments themselves relied on classic paradigms borrowed from prospect theory, in which people are asked to make decisions under varying conditions of uncertainty and risk. For instance, native English speakers in Chicago who had learned Spanish in the classroom were given a $15 stake. Then, they were asked to make various bets based on a coin toss: If they correctly picked heads or tails, they would win $1.50, while an incorrect guess would cost them $1. From a rational perspective, these bets are a smart wager – a subject who chooses to bet on all 15 trials would most likely come out far ahead.

But people aren’t rational creatures. When thinking in English, students only chose to bet 54 percent of their time; their fear of losses kept them from properly assessing the situation. However, when the same options were described in Spanish, subjects made significantly better decisions, choosing to place bets 71 percent of the time.

When faced with mathematically identical but differently-worded decisions about whether to take a 'risky' or 'safe' option in saving people:

When 121 American students were given a version of the scenario above, nearly 80 percent chose the safe option, just like those doctors. However, when the same situation was placed in a loss frame, that number plummeted to 47 percent. So far, so obvious: we are consistently inconsistent creatures.

But when native English speakers were presented with the same problem in Japanese, the inconsistency vanished. In both frames, the number of people choosing the safer option was just over 40 percent.

Their interpretation:

Instead, the psychologists found that the reduced emotional valence of a second language – the words aren’t so weighted with feeling – made it easier to resist the tug of loss aversion. (Similar results have been achieved with neurological patients who, after suffering a serious brain injury, are unable to experience any emotion at all.) The scientists argue that second-language thinking can systematically improve decision-making: “People who routinely make decisions in a foreign language might be less biased in their savings, investment and retirement decisions,” they write. “Over a long time horizon, this might very well be beneficial.” Given the known costs of loss aversion among financial traders –

...
Meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Thursday 7pm
by EvelynM — 2012-09-19T16:56:17.676Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Thursday 7pm

WHEN:
20 September 2012 07:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
Mugs, 306 West Laurel, Fort Collins CO

Trying another new place. Not much parking nearby, but within walking distance of campus.

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Thursday 7pm
Less Wrong Polls in Comments
by jimrandomh — 2012-09-19T16:19:36.221Z

You can now write Less Wrong comments that contain polls! John Simon picked up and finished some code I had written back in 2010 but never finished, and our admins Wesley Moore and Matt Fallshaw have deployed it. You can use it right now, so let's give it some testing here in this thread.

The polls work through the existing Markdown comment formatting, similar to the syntax used for links. Full documentation is in the wiki; the short version is that you can write comments like this:

What is your favorite color? [poll]{Red}{Green}{Blue}{Other}

How long has it been your favorite color, in years? [poll:number]

Red is a nice color [poll:Agree....Disagree]

Will your favorite color change? [poll:probability]

To see the results of the poll, you have to vote (you can leave questions blank if you want). The results include a link to the raw poll data, including the usernames of people who submitted votes with the "Vote anonymously" box unchecked. After you submit the comment, if you go back and edit your comment all those poll tags will have turned into [pollid:123]. You can edit the rest of the comment without resetting the poll, but you can't change the options.

It works right now, but it's also new and could be buggy. Let's give it some testing; what have you always wanted to know about Less Wrongers?
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign, IL
by Manfred — 2012-09-19T16:15:30.213Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign, IL

WHEN:
22 September 2012 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
The Bread Company, 706 South Goodwin, Urbana, IL

Now that we're all here for the school year, let's get the meetup ball a-rolling. I'll claim a few tables at the Bread Company, buy some appetizers, and teach everyone who comes how to play Blank White Cards.

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign, IL
Group rationality diary, 9/17/12
by cata — 2012-09-19T11:08:39.965Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of September 17th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to everyone who contributes!

Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.

(Sorry for being late, I don't even have an excuse at all! Oh well.)
Brief Question about FAI approaches
by Dolores1984 — 2012-09-19T06:05:18.882Z

I've been reading through this to get a sense of the state of the art at the moment:
http://lukeprog.com/SaveTheWorld.html
Near the bottom, when discussing safe utility functions, the discussion seems to center on analyzing human values and extracting from them some sort of clean, mathematical utility function that is universal across humans. This seems like an enormously difficult (potentially impossible) way of solving the problem, due to all the problems mentioned there.
Why shouldn't we just try to design an average bounded utility maximizer? You'd build models of all your agents (if you can't model arbitrary ordered information systems, you haven't got an AI), run them through your model of the future resulting from a choice, take the summation of their utility over time, and take the average across all the people all the time. To measure the utility (or at least approximate it), you could just ask the models. The number this spits out is the output of your utility function. It'd probably also be wise to add a reflexive consistency criteria, such that the original state of your model must consider all future states to be 'the same person.' -- and I acknowledge that that last one is going to be a bitch to formalize. When you've got this utility function, you just... maximize it.
Something like this approach seems much more robust. Even if human values are inconsistent, we still end up in a universe where most (possibly all) people are happy with their lives, and nobody gets wireheaded. Because it's bounded, you're even protected against utility monsters. Has something like this been considered? Is there an obvious reason it won't work, or would produce undesirable results?
Thanks,

Dolores
[SEQ RERUN] Shut up and do the impossible!
by MinibearRex — 2012-09-19T06:04:20.655Z

Today's post, Shut up and do the impossible! was originally published on 08 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The ultimate level of attacking a problem is the point at which you simply shut up and solve the impossible problem.

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 Make an Extraordinary Effort, 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.
Meetup : Berkeley meetup
by AlexMennen — 2012-09-19T03:21:52.634Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup

WHEN:
19 September 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Berkeley, CA

This week's meetup will be at Zendo, as usual. See the mailing list, or contact me, for directions, see the mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/bayarealesswrong or call me at four-zero-eight-nine-six-six-nine-two-seven-four.

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup
Modifying Universal Intelligence Measure
by Alex_Altair — 2012-09-18T23:44:08.864Z

In 2007, Legg and Hutter wrote a paper using the AIXI model to define a measure of intelligence. It's pretty great, but I can think of some directions of improvement.

Reinforcement learning. I think this term and formalism are historically from much simpler agent models which actually depended on being reinforced to learn. In its present form (Hutter 2005 section 4.1) it seems arbitrarily general, but it still feels kinda gross to me. Can we formalize AIXI and the intelligence measure in terms of utility functions, instead? And perhaps prove them equivalent?

Choice of Horizon. AIXI discounts the future by requiring that total future reward is bounded, and therefore so does the intelligence measure. This seems to me like a constraint that does not reflect reality, and possibly an infinitely important one. How could we remove this requirement? (Much discussion on the "Choice of the Horizon" in Hutter 2005 section 5.7).

Unknown utility function. When we reformulate it in terms of utility functions, let's make sure we can measure its intelligence/optimization power without having to know its utility function. Perhaps by using an average of utility functions weighted by their K-complexity.

AI orientation. Finally, and least importantly, it tests agents across all possible programs, even those which are known to be inconsistent with our universe. This might okay if your agent is a playing arbitrary games on a computer, but if you are trying to determine how powerful an agent will be in this universe, you probably want to replace the Solomonoff prior with the posterior resulting from updating the Solomonoff prior with data from our universe.

Any thought or research on this by others? I imagine lots of discussion has occurred over these topics; any referencing would be appreciated.
A Less Mysterious Mindfulness Exercise
by  — 2012-09-18T23:33:36.967Z

At the beginning of the year, I stumbled upon a self-help book based on the ideas of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). I assimilated it insights and started practicing a simple exercise and quickly noticed its effectiveness, to the point of becoming convinced that I had found a fully general mindhack that would help me deal with all psychological issues that I had or could have in the future. I even still believe it now, after eight months. I want to share this newfound knowledge in the hope that it will help others but I don't feel competent to write a comprehensive introduction to ACT. So I'll focus on describing my experience and hope for the best. I start with some conceptual background and the exercise follows.

A one-sentence summary of acceptance and commitment therapy could look like this: in order to live effectively, we have to accept our negative emotional states and commit ourselves to acting according to our values. The alternative to acceptance is emotional avoidance — trying to make bad thoughts and emotions go away — and it doesn't work. Trying to suppress thoughts or emotions backfires as everyone can see by failing to not think about a pink elephant for the next five minutes. Less direct attempts at experiential avoidance fail too. For example, not engaging in social interactions in order to avoid social anxiety until you eventually start feeling really anxious all the time about being a friendless loser or maybe procrastinating to avoid the unpleasantness of work until eventually you have to go through a lot of unpleasantness very quickly if you want to meet your deadline.

Nevertheless, emotional avoidance seems to be the default mode of operation for most people. The very phrase 'overcoming social anxiety' seems to imply that the way to do it is to figure out how to make anxiety go away and then proceed to have a stress-free social life. It's really tricky to stop trying to do this and maybe even impossible to verbally argue yourself out of it. If someone with the habit of experiential avoidance decides to give acceptance a try, they might end up thinking 'well, trying to destroy emotions directly doesn't seem to work but I can destroy them by pretending that I don't want to' which completely misses the point. And if they decide to try really, really hard, they might end up trying to suppress their dislike of particular em...