trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Letting it go: when you shouldn't respond to someone who is wrong
by  — 2014-12-19T15:12:34.102Z

I'm requesting that people follow a simple guide when determining whether to respond to a post. This simple algorithm should raise the quality of discussion here.

If you care about the answer to a question, you will research it.

If you don't care about the answer, don't waste people's time by arguing about it, even if someone's post seems wrong.

If you don't care and still want to argue, do the research.

Why should you follow these rules?
Fairness.
It takes very little effort to post a contradictory assertion. You just have to skim a post, find an assertion (preferably one that isn't followed or preceded immediately by paragraphs of backing evidence, but that's an optional filter), and craft a sentence indicating that that assertion is wrong or flawed. Humans can do this almost by instinct. It's magical.
Refuting a contradiction takes effort. I typically spend at least five minutes of research and five minutes of writing to make a reply refuting a bare contradiction when I have already studied the issue thoroughly and know which sources I want to use. I go to this effort because I care about these statements I've made and because I care about what other people believe. I want to craft a reply that is sufficiently thorough to be convincing. And, I'll admit, I want to crush my opponents with my impeccable data. I'm a bit petty sometimes.
If I haven't researched the issue well -- if my sources are second-hand, or if I'm using personal experience -- I might spend two hours researching a simple topic and ten to fifteen minutes creating a response. This is a fair amount of time invested. I don't mind doing it; it makes me learn more. It's a time investment, though.
So, let's compare. Half a second of thought and two minutes to craft a reply containing nothing but a contradiction, versus two hours of unpaid research. This is a huge imbalance. Let's address this by trying to research people's claims before posting a contradiction, shall we?
Trust.
You are convinced that someone's argument is flawed. This means that they have not looked into the issue sufficiently, or their reasoning is wrong. As a result, you can't trust their argument to be a good example of arguments for their position. You can look for flaws of reasoning, which is easy. You can look for cases where their data is misleading or wrong -- but that requires actual effort. You have to either find a consensu...
Munchkining for Fun and Profit, Ideas, Experience, Successes, Failures
by Username — 2014-12-19T05:39:49.278Z

A munchkin is someone who follows the letter of the rules of a game while breaking their spirit, someone who wins by exploiting possibilities that others don't see, reject as impossible or unsporting, or just don't believe can possibly work.

If you have done something that everyone around you thought would not work, something that people around you didn't do after they saw it work, please share your experiences. If you tried something and failed or have ideas you want to hear critique of, likewise please share those with us.
Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable
by Scott Alexander — 2014-12-19T05:00:06.000Z

I.

Recently spotted on Tumblr:

“This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I see stuff about ppl not wanting to reblog ferguson things and awareness around the world because they do not want negativity in their life plus it will cause them to have anxiety. They come to tumblr to escape n feel happy which think is a load of bull. There r literally ppl dying who live with the fear of going outside their homes to be shot and u cant post a fucking picture because it makes u a little upset?”

“Can yall maybe take some time away from reblogging fandom or humor crap and read up and reblog pakistan because the privilege you have of a safe bubble is not one shared by others?”

Ignore the questionable stylistic choices and there’s an important point here worth considering. Something like “Yes, the feeling of constantly being outraged and mired in the latest controversy is unpleasant. And yes, it would be nice to get to avoid it and spend time with your family and look at kitten pics or something. But when the controversy is about people being murdered in cold blood, or living in fear, or something like that – then it’s your duty as a decent human being to care. In the best case scenario you’ll discharge that duty by organizing widespread protests or something – but the absolute least you can do is reblog a couple of slogans.”

I think Cliff Pervocracy is trying to say something similar in this post. Key excerpt:

When you’ve grown up with messages that you’re incompetent to make your own decisions, that you don’t deserve any of the things you have, and that you’ll never be good enough, the [conservative] fantasy of rugged individualism starts looking pretty damn good.

Intellectually, I think my current political milieu of feminism/progressivism/social justice is more correct, far better for the world in general, and more helpful to me since I don’t actually live in a perfectly isolated cabin.

But god, it’s uncomfortable. It’s intentionally uncomfortable—it’s all about getting angry at injustice and questioning the rightness of your own actions and being sad so many people still live such painful lives. Instead of looking at your cabin and declaring “I shall name it…CLIFFORDSON MANOR,” you need to look at your cabin and recognize that a long series of brutal injustices are responsible for the fact that you have a white-

...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
by RobinZ — 2014-12-19T04:56:17.895Z

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

WHEN:
21 December 2014 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

We will be meeting in the Kogod Courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery (8th and F Sts or 8th and G Sts NW, go straight past the information desk from either entrance) to hang out, play games, and engage in fun conversation.

Note: Feel free to send an email to the Google Group - lesswrong-dc - if you have a game you wish to recruit people to play in advance. This is especially useful for games that take 3+ hours, as you would want to start playing by 3:30 to be sure of finishing by 7:00.

Upcoming meetups:

Dec. 28: Tentatively canceled for the holidays. Edit: An announcement is planned on Monday, Dec. 22 whether a meetup will be scheduled after all.

Jan. 4: Meta Meetup (discuss Less Wrong DC: what you like, what you want, what you'd change, &c.)

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
[Short, Meta] Should open threads be more frequent?
by Metus — 2014-12-18T23:41:14.678Z

Currently open threads are weekly and very well received. However they tend to fill up quickly. Personally I fear that my contribution will drown unless posted early on so I tend to wait if I want to add a new top level post. Does anyone else have this impression? Someone with better coding skills than me could put this statistically by plotting the number of top level posts and total posts over time: If the curve is convex people tend to delay their posts.

So should open threads be more frequent and if so what frequency?
An explanation of the 'Many Interacting Worlds' theory of quantum mechanics (by Sean Carroll and Chip Sebens)
by Ander — 2014-12-18T23:36:48.683Z

This is the first explanation of a 'many worlds' theory of quantum mechanics that has ever made sense to me. The animations are excellent:

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/12/16/guest-post-chip-sebens-on-the-many-interacting-worlds-approach-to-quantum-mechanics/
Bayes Academy Development Report 2 - improved data visualization
by Kaj_Sotala — 2014-12-18T22:11:36.955Z

See here for the previous update if you missed / forgot it.

In this update, no new game content, but new graphics.

I wasn’t terribly happy about the graphical representation of the various nodes in the last update. Especially in the first two networks, if you didn’t read the descriptions of the nodes carefully, it was very easy to just click your way through them without really having a clue of what the network was actually doing. Needless to say, for a game that’s supposed to teach how the networks function, this is highly non-optimal.

Here’s the representation that I’m now experimenting with: the truth table of the nodes is represented graphically inside the node. The prior variable at the top doesn’t really have a truth table, it’s just true or false. The “is” variable at the bottom is true if its parent is true, and false if its parent is false.

You may remember that in the previous update, unobservable nodes were represented in grayscale. I ended up dropping that, because that would have been confusing in this representation: if the parent is unobservable, should the blobs representing its truth values in the child node be in grayscale as well? Both “yes” and “no” answers felt confusing.

Instead the observational state of a node is now represented by its border color. Black for unobservable, gray for observable, no border for observed. The metaphor is supposed to be something like, a border is a veil of ignorance blocking us from seeing the node directly, but if the veil is gray it’s weak enough to be broken, whereas a black veil is strong enough to resist a direct assault. Or something.

When you observe a node, not only does its border disappear, but the truth table entries that get reduced to a zero probability disappear, to be replaced by white boxes. I experimented with having the eliminated entries still show up in grayscale, so you could e.g. see that the “is” node used to contain the entry for (false -> false), but felt that this looked clearer.

The “or” node at the bottom is getting a little crowded, but hopefully not too crowded. Since we know that its value is “true”, the truth table entry showing (false, false -> false) shows up in all whites. It’s also already been observed, so it starts without a border.

After we obser...
Rationality Jokes Thread
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2014-12-18T16:17:41.734Z

This is an experimental thread. It is somewhat in the spirit of the Rationality Quotes Thread but without the requirements and with a focus on humorous value. You may post insightful jokes, nerd or math jokes or try out rationality jokes of your own invention.

ADDED: Apparently there has been an earlier Jokes Thread which was failry successful. Consider this another instance.
Meetup : Moscow Meetup: biology, CBT and something mysterious
by Slava Matyukhin — 2014-12-18T15:48:39.169Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow Meetup: biology, CBT and something mysterious

WHEN:
22 December 2014 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

Here's our plan:
evolutionary origins of morality
metaphilosophy, real world metaethics and some other strange things
CBT (how to kill yourself by psychology).
And maybe something about Stanovich model.
Details and schedule: https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/-21--A2k7ZUcyXyW Yudcoins, positive reinforcement and pizza will all be present. If you've been to our meetups, you know what I'm talking about, and if you didn't, the best way to find out is to come and see for yourself.
Info for newcomers: We gather in the Yandex office. This time we'll be at Extropolis building, door is on the left from the archway. Here is a guide how to get to Yandex: http://company.yandex.ru/contacts/redrose/
Try to come in time, we will allow latecomers to enter every 15 minutes. Call Slava or send him SMS at +7(926)313-96-42 if you're late or can't find the entrance. We start at 14:00 and stay until at least 19-20. Please pay attention that we only gather near the entrance and then come inside.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow Meetup: biology, CBT and something mysterious
(Very Short) PSA: Combined Main and Discussion Feed
by Gondolinian — 2014-12-18T15:46:52.195Z

For anyone who's annoyed by having to check newest submissions for Main and Discussion separately, there is a feed for combined submissions from both, in the form of Newest Submissions - All (RSS feed). (There's also Comments - All (RSS feed), but for me at least, it seems to only show comments from Main and none from Discussion.)

Thanks to RichardKennaway for bringing this to my attention, and to Unknowns for asking the question that prompted him. (If you've got the time, head over there and give them some karma.) I thought this deserved the visibility of a post in Discussion, as not everyone reads through the Open Thread, and I think there's a chance that many would benefit from this information.
How many words do we have and how many distinct concepts do we have?
by  — 2014-12-17T23:04:13.612Z

In another message, I suggested that, given how many cultures we have to borrow from, that our language may include multiple words from various sources that apply to a single concept.

An example is Reality, or Existence, or Being, or Universe, or Cosmos, or Nature, ect.

Another is Subjectivity, Mind, Consciousness, Experience, Qualia, Phenomenal, Mental, ect

Is there any problem with accepting these claims so far? Curious what case would be made to the contrary.

(Here's a bit of a contextual aside, between quantum mechanics and cosmology, the words "universe", "multiverse", and "observable universe" mean at least 10 different things, depending on who you ask. People often say the Multiverse comes from Hugh Everett. But what they are calling the multiverse, Everett called "universal wave function", or "universe". How did Everett's universe become the Multiverse? DeWitt came along and emphasized some part of the wave function branching into different worlds. So, if you're following, one Universe, many worlds. Over the next few decades, this idea was popularized as having "many parallel universes", which is obviously inaccurate. Well, a Scottish chap decided to correct this. He stated the Universe was the Universal Wave Function, where it was "a complete one", because that's what "uni" means. And that our perceived worlds of various objects is a "multiverse". One Universe, many Multiverses. Again, the "parallel universes" idea seemed cooler, so as it became more popular the Multiverse became one and the universe became many. What's my point? The use of these words is legitimate fiasco, and I suggest we abandon them altogether.)

If these claims are found to be palatable, what do they suggest?

I propose, respectfully and humbly as I can imagine there may be compelling alternatives presented here, that in the 21st century, we make a decision about which concepts are necessary, which term we will use to describe that concept, and respectfully leave the remaining terms for the domain of poetry.

Here are the words I think we need:

reality

model

absolute

relative

subjective

objective

measurement

observer

With these terms I feel we can construct a concise metaphysical framework, consistent with the great rationalists of history, and that accurately described Everett's "Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics".

Absolute reality is what is. It is relative to no obser

...
Giving What We Can - New Year drive
by Smaug123 — 2014-12-17T15:26:04.635Z

If you’ve been planning to get around to maybe thinking about Effective Altruism, we’re making your job easier. A group of UK students has set up a drive for people to sign up to the Giving What We Can pledge to donate 10% of their future income to charity. It does not specify the charities - that decision remains under your control. The pledge is not legally binding, but honour is a powerful force when it comes to promising to help. If 10% is a daunting number, or you don't want to sign away your future earnings in perpetuity, there is a Try Giving scheme in which you may donate less money for less time. I suggest five years (that is, from 2015 to 2020) of 5% as a suitable "silver" option to the 10%-until-retirement "gold medal".

We’re hoping to take advantage of the existing Schelling point of “new year” as a time for resolutions, as well as building the kind of community spirit that gets people signing up in groups. If you feel it’s a word worth spreading, please feel free to spread it. As of this writing, GWWC reported 41 new members this month, which is a record for monthly acquisitions (and we’re only halfway through the month, three days into the event).

If anyone has suggestions about how to better publicise this event (or Effective Altruism generally), please do let me know. We’re currently talking to various news outlets and high-profile philanthropists to see if they can give us a mention, but suggestions are always welcome. Likewise, comments on the effectiveness of this post itself will be gratefully noted.

About Giving What We Can: GWWC is under the umbrella of the Centre for Effective Altruism, was co-founded by a LessWronger, and in 2013 had verbal praise from lukeprog.
Entropy and Temperature
by spxtr — 2014-12-17T08:04:38.208Z

Eliezer Yudkowsky previously wrote (6 years ago!) about the second law of thermodynamics. Many commenters were skeptical about the statement, "if you know the positions and momenta of every particle in a glass of water, it is at absolute zero temperature," because they don't know what temperature is. This is a common confusion.

Entropy

To specify the precise state of a classical system, you need to know its location in phase space. For a bunch of helium atoms whizzing around in a box, phase space is the position and momentum of each helium atom. For N atoms in the box, that means 6N numbers to completely specify the system.

Lets say you know the total energy of the gas, but nothing else. It will be the case that a fantastically huge number of points in phase space will be consistent with that energy.* In the absence of any more information it is correct to assign a uniform distribution to this region of phase space. The entropy of a uniform distribution is the logarithm of the number of points, so that's that. If you also know the volume, then the number of points in phase space consistent with both the energy and volume is necessarily smaller, so the entropy is smaller.

This might be confusing to chemists, since they memorized a formula for the entropy of an ideal gas, and it's ostensibly objective. Someone with perfect knowledge of the system will calculate the same number on the right side of that equation, but to them, that number isn't the entropy. It's the entropy of the gas if you know nothing more than energy, volume, and number of particles.

Temperature

The existence of temperature follows from the zeroth and second laws of thermodynamics: thermal equilibrium is transitive, and entropy is maximum in equilibrium. Temperature is then defined as the thermodynamic quantity that is the shared by systems in equilibrium.

If two systems are in equilibrium then they cannot increase entropy by flowing energy from one to the other. That means that if we flow a tiny bit of energy from one to the other (δU1 = -δU2), the entropy change in the first must be the opposite of the entropy change of the second (δS1 = -δS2), so that the total entropy (S1 + S2) doesn't change. For systems in equilibrium, this leads to (∂S1/∂U1) = (∂S2/∂U2). Define 1/T = (∂S/∂U), and we are done.

Temperature is sometim...
Understanding Agency
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2014-12-17T06:35:15.744Z

Note: In this article I refer to "constructive developmental theory" as "constructive development theory", however the former is more common and should be used instead. I changed it in the version of this on my own blog, but because I think it would add some confusion to the comments if I changed it here, I'll leave it as is but just note it so you can use the more common terminology.

I used to get frustrated with myself. I'd say existential risk was an important problem or that I wanted to live an awesome life, but then I took no action to mitigate existential risks or make my life more awesome. For a long time I had no good way to explain this, often blaming it on things like akrasia, but in late 2011 I changed. I started acting to make the world have more of what I valued in it.
I've spent a lot of the past year trying to understand what happened and how I might tell other people about it. I would probably still be searching for the right framing if not for a party a few months ago. There, Malcolm Ocean and Ethan Dickinson introduced me to Constructive Development Theory, also known as Subject-Object Theory, a cognitive development theory first described by Robert Kegan et al.. Since then I've been ruminating on the idea, and after reading Malcolm's introduction to constructive development, I realize that constructive development is the concept I need to explain my 2011 mind-shift.
In short, in late 2011 I started to spend more of my time thinking at constructive development level 4 than 3, and level 4 thinking is the minimum required to stand a real chance of making the world the way you want it.
Since that sounds like utter nonsense without context, go read Malcolm's article on constructive development. Right now. Go do it. I'll still be here when you're done. Don't even bother trying to go any further until you have read it.
In fact, you should also read the links he links before you come back, and maybe do a little research on your own, because I'm not going to bother explaining constructive development theory here: I'm just going to use it.
Before we continue, one more warning. If you're not already doing most of your thinking at least half-way along the 3 to 4 transition (which I will hereon refer to as reaching 4/3), you will probably also not fully understand what I've written below because that's unfortunately also about how far along you have to be be...
Using machine learning to predict romantic compatibility: empirical results
by JonahS — 2014-12-17T02:54:42.900Z

Overview

For many people, having a satisfying romantic relationship is one of the most important aspects of life. Over the past 10 years, online dating websites have gained traction, and dating websites have access to large amounts of data that could be used to build predictive models to achieve this goal. Such data is seldom public, but Columbia business school professors Ray Fisman and Sheena Iyengar compiled a rich and relevant data set for their paper Gender Differences in Mate Selection: Evidence From a Speed Dating Experiment. Their main results were:

Women put greater weight on the intelligence and the race of partner, while men respond more to physical attractiveness. Moreover, men do not value women’s intelligence or ambition when it exceeds their own. Also, we find that women exhibit a preference for men who grew up in affluent neighborhoods. Finally, male selectivity is invariant to group size, while female selectivity is strongly increasing in group size.

I found the study through Andrew Gelman’s blog, where he wrote:

What I really want to do with these data is what I suggested to Ray and Sheena several years ago when they first told me about the study: a multilevel model that allows preferences to vary by person, not just by sex. Multilevel modeling would definitely be useful here, since you have something like 10 binary observations and 6 parameters to estimate for each person.

Several months ago I decided to pursue a career in data science, and with a view toward building my skills, I worked to build a model to predict when an individual participant will express interest in seeing a given partner again. Along with the goal of learning, I had the dual intent of contributing knowledge that had the potential, however slight, to help people find satisfying romantic relationships.

It’s unlikely that what I did will have practical applications (as basic research seldom does), but I did learn a great deal about many things, most having to do with data science methodology in general, but also some about human behavior.

This is the first of a series of posts where I report on my findings. A linear narrative would degenerate to a sprawling blog post that would be of little interest to anybody but me. In this post, I’ll restrict focus to the question: how much predictive power can we get by estimating the generic selectivity and desir...