trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
…And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes
by Scott Alexander — 2015-06-03T01:47:01.000Z

.

Seen on Tumblr, along with associated discussion:

Yellow:

People’s minds are heartbreaking. Not because people are so bad, but because they’re so good.

Nobody is the villain of their own life story. You must have read hundreds of minds by now, and it’s true. Everybody thinks of themselves as an honest guy or gal just trying to get by, constantly under assault by circumstances and The System and hundreds and hundreds of assholes. They don’t just sort of believe this. They really believe it. You almost believe it yourself, when you’re deep into a reading. You can very clearly see the structure of evidence they’ve built up to support their narrative, and even though it looks silly to you, you can see why they will never escape it from the inside. You can see how every insult, every failure, no matter how deserved, is a totally unexpected kick in the gut.

When you chose the yellow pill, you had high hopes of becoming a spy, or a gossip columnist, or just the world’s greatest saleswoman. The thought of doing any of those things sickens you now. There is too much anguish in the world already. You feel like any of those things would be a violation. You briefly try to become a therapist, but it turns out that actually knowing everything about your client’s mind is horrendously countertherapeutic. Freud can say whatever he wants against defense mechanisms, but without them, you’re defenseless. Your sessions are spent in incisive cutting into your clients’ deepest insecurities alternating with desperate reassurance that they are good people anyway.

Also, men. You knew, in a vague way, that men thought about sex all the time. But you didn’t realize the, um, content of some of their sexual fantasies. Is it even legal to fantasize about that? You want to be disgusted with them. But you realize that if you were as horny as they were all the time, you’d do much the same.

You give up. You become a forest ranger. Not the type who helps people explore the forest. The other type. The type where you hang out in a small cabin in the middle of the mountains and never talk to anybody. The only living thing you encounter is the occasional bear. It always thinks that it is a good bear, a proper bear, that a bear-hating world has it out for them in particular. You do nothing to disabuse it of this notion.

Green

The firs...
Meetup : Dallas, TX
by DubiousTwizzler — 2015-06-03T00:35:37.322Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Dallas, TX

WHEN:
14 June 2015 01:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
5026 Addison Circle, Addison, TX 75001

We will be meeting at Pastazios Pizza on Sunday, June 14th at 1 PM. Look for a sign that says "Less Wrong" on it.

Discussion article for the meetup : Dallas, TX
Social class amongst the intellectually gifted
by JonahS — 2015-06-02T23:02:47.208Z

Something that I've come to realize is that as a practical matter, intellectually gifted people who haven't developed very strong ability in a quantitative subject tend to be at a major disadvantage relative to those who have. The quantitative subjects that I have in mind as "quantitative subjects" are primarily math, physics, theoretical computer science and statistics, though others such as electrical engineering may qualify. [1]

This point is usually masked over by the fact that people who don't have very strong technical ability are often reasonable functional by the standards of mainstream society, and don't realize how far they're falling short of their genetic potential. They tend to have jobs that don't fully use their strengths, and experience cognitive dissonance around being aware on some level of far they are from utilizing their core competencies.

Consider the following:

The Google co-founders met as computer science graduate students at Stanford. Sergei Brin double majored in math and physics and was an NSF graduate fellow. He comes from a mathematical family: his father was a math professor at University of Maryland.

Bill Gates took Math 55 as a freshman at Harvard, which is the class designed for the most mathematically talented students at Harvard. During his sophomore year he did research which he later published a paper on with well known theoretical computer science professor Christos Papadimitriou.

James Simons comes close to being the only elite mathematician to leave academia for the business world. He founded the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies and made ~$12.5 billion.

Charles Munger, the Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway (net worth ~$1.3 billion) often quotes the maxim of the 19th century mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi Invert, Always Invert, and characterizes him using that concept to solve difficult business problems

I can't give a brief justification for this, but I have good reason to believe that the ~10000x+ differential in net worth comes in large part from the people having had unusually good opportunities to conducive to becoming very technically proficient, that resulted in them developing transferable reasoning abilities and having had an intellectually elite peer group to learn from.

I know a fair number of brilliant people who didn't have such advanta...
A Proposal for Defeating Moloch in the Prison Industrial Complex
by lululu — 2015-06-02T22:03:40.800Z

Summary

I'd like to increasing the well-being of those in the justice system while simultaneously reducing crime. I'm missing something here but I'm not sure what. I'm thinking this may be a worse idea than I originally thought based on comment feedback, though I'm still not 100% sure why this is the case.

Current State

While the prison system may not constitute an existential threat, At this moment more than 2,266,000 adults are incarcerated in the US alone, and I expect that being in prison greatly decreases QALYs for those incarcerated, that further QALYs are lost to victims of crime, family members of the incarcerated, and through the continuing effects of institutionalization and PTSD from sentences served in the current system, not to mention the brainpower and man-hours lost to any productive use.

If you haven't read these Meditations on Moloch, I highly recommend it. It’s long though, so the executive summary is: Moloch is the personification of the forces of competition which perverse incentives, a "race to the bottom" type situation where all human values are discarded in an effort to survive. That this can be solved with better coordination, but it is very hard to coordinate when perverse incentives also penalize the coordinators and reward dissenters. The prison industrial complex is an example of these perverse incentives. No one thinks that the current system is ideal but incentives prevent positive change and increase absolute unhappiness.

Politicians compete for electability. Convicts can’t vote, prisons make campaign contributions and jobs, and appearing “tough on crime” appeals to a large portion of the voter base.

Jails compete for money: the more prisoners they house, the more they are paid and the longer they can continue to exist. This incentive is strong for public prisons and doubly strong for private prisons.

Police compete for bonuses and promotions, both of which are given as rewards to cops who bring in and convict more criminals

Many of the inmates themselves are motivated to commit criminal acts by the small number of non-criminal opportunities available to them for financial success, besides criminal acts. After becoming a criminal, this number of opportunities is further narrowed by background checks.

The incentives have come far out of line with human values. What can be done to bri...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
by RobinZ — 2015-06-02T20:43:01.831Z

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

WHEN:
07 June 2015 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

We'll be congregating at the courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery from 3:00 - 3:30 until closing.

We'll be meeting to play games and/or just hang out and talk. Please remember to bring games!

If you want to recruit people for a specific game, such as a longer game, post about it to the list. But remember to get an early start as they'll be kicking us out a little before 7:00pm.

Upcoming meetups:

Jun. 14: Visit Museums

Jun. 21: Create and Complete

Jun. 28: Fun & Games

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
Confession Thread: Mistakes as an aspiring rationalist
by diegocaleiro — 2015-06-02T18:10:08.901Z

We looked at the cloudy night sky and thought it would be interesting to share the ways in which, in the past, we made mistakes we would have been able to overcome, if only we had been stronger as rationalists. The experience felt valuable and humbling. So why not do some more of it on Lesswrong?
An antithesis to the Bragging Thread, this is a thread to share where we made mistakes. Where we knew we could, but didn't. Where we felt we were wrong, but carried on anyway.

As with the recent group bragging thread, anything you've done wrong since the comet killed the dinosaurs is fair game, and if it happens to be a systematic mistake that over long periods of time systematically curtailed your potential, that others can try to learn avoiding, better.

This thread is an attempt to see if there are exceptions to the cached thought that life experience cannot be learned but has to be lived. Let's test this belief together!
LINK: Competition is toxic
by polymathwannabe — 2015-06-02T17:53:47.366Z

"I looked at what I think of as the food chain that led to the financial crisis, which was that you had individual consumers buying houses they couldn't afford, sold to them by realtors and property people who were competing to sell more properties at a higher price and so on. [...] I thought, hang on a second, classic economy theory tells you that a competitive marketplace is superior because competition provides a diversity of products which is good for the consumer, and it also, therefore diversifies risk. And yet, in this instance, competition has led every single one of these companies to copy each other, which had concentrated the risk. And I thought, Wow, that's interesting. That's specifically what's not supposed to happen."

More here.
Measuring open-mindedness
by cleonid — 2015-06-02T13:35:16.709Z

Recently we have opened an experimental website for Rational Discussion of Politics. A special feature of the new website is an automated recommendation system which studies user preferences based on their voting records. The purpose of this feature is to enhance the quality of discussion without using any form of censorship.

The recommendation system was previously tested with the help of 30 members of a political discussion forum. The tests have shown that most user preferences can be reasonably well described by just two parameters. The system chooses the parameters (principal vectors) independently based only on the numerical data (comment ratings), but it was easy to see that one vector corresponded to the “leftwing - rightwing” and another to the “well written – poorly written” axis.

About a month ago we started discussions on the new website. This time, all our participants were LW members and the results were very different. There was relatively little variation along “well written – poorly written” axis. There was significant variation along what seemed to be the political views axis, but it could no longer be perfectly described by the conventional “leftwing - rightwing” labels. For the moment, we adopted “populares” and “optimates” terms for the two camps (the former seems somewhat correlated with “left-wing/liberal” and the latter with “right-wing/libertarian”).

The results have shown an interesting asymmetry between the camps. In the previous tests, both left and right leaning users upvoted users from their own camp much more frequently. However, one group was several times more likely to upvote their opponents than the other. Among “populares” and “optimates” the asymmetry was a lot weaker (currently 27%), but still noticeable.

In both cases our sample sizes were small and may not be representative of the LW community or the US population. Still, it would be interesting to find an explanation for this asymmetry. One possibility is that, on average, one side presents significantly better arguments. Another possibility is that the other group is more open-minded.

Can anyone suggest a test that can objectively decide which (if any) hypothesis is correct?
Are consequentialism and deontology not even wrong?
by Kaj_Sotala — 2015-06-02T07:49:50.848Z

I was stunned to read the accounts quoted below. They're claiming that the notion of morality - in the sense of there being a special category of things that you should or should not do for the sake of the things themselves being inherently right or wrong - might not only be a recent invention, but also an incoherent one. Even when I had read debates about e.g. moral realism, I had always understood even the moral irrealists as acknowledging that there are genuine moral attitudes that are fundamentally ingrained in people. But I hadn't ran into a position claiming that it was actually possible for whole cultures to simply not have a concept of morality in the first place.

I'm amazed that I haven't heard these claims discussed more. If they're accurate, then they seem to me to provide a strong argument for both deontology and consequentialism - at least as they're usually understood here - to be not even wrong. Just rationalizations of concepts that got their origin from Judeo-Christian laws and which people held onto because they didn't know of any other way of thinking.

-----

As for morally, we must observe at once – again following Anscombe – that Plato and Aristotle, having no word for “moral,” could not even form a phrase equivalent to “morally right.” The Greek thik aret means “excellence of character,” not “moral virtue”; 2 Cicero's virtus moralis, from which the English phrase descends directly, is simply the Latin for thik aret. This is not the lexical fallacy; it is not just that the word ‘moral’ was missing. The whole idea of a special category called “the moral” was missing. Strictly speaking, the Aristotelian phrase ta thika is simply a generalizing substantive formed on th, “characteristic behaviors,” just as the Ciceronian moralia is formed on mores. To be fully correct – admittedly it would be a bit cumbersome – we should talk not of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics but of his Studies-of-our-characteristic-behaviors Edited-by-Nicomachus.

Plato and Aristotle were interested – especially Plato – in the question how the more stringent demands of a good disposition like justice or temperance or courage could be reasonable demands, demands that it made sense to obey even at extreme cost. It never occurred to them, as it natu

...
The value of learning mathematical proof
by JonahS — 2015-06-02T03:15:03.027Z

The social justice movement espouses the notion that people who are privileged are often unfairly judgmental of those who were less privileged. Until recently, what they said didn't resonate with me. I knew that I had major advantages out of virtue of having been born a white, middle class male. But I recently realized that there were other privileges that I hadn't acknowledged as having benefited enormously from. In particular, I had the unusual experience of growing up with a very intellectually curious father, which gave me a huge head start in intellectual development.

I used to get annoyed when LWers misread my posts in ways that they wouldn't have if they had been reading more carefully. I conceptualized such commenters as being undisciplined, and being unwilling to do the work necessary to maintain high epistemic standards. I now see that my reading was in many cases uncharitable, analogous to many of my teachers having misread my learning disability as reflecting laziness. Many of my readers have probably never had the opportunity to learn how to read really carefully.

How did I myself learn? I don't remember in detail, but the one factor that seems most significant is my study of the mathematical subject of real analysis. A number of strongest thinkers who I know characterized the experience as a turning point in their development as well. It's the subject where one goes through rigorous proofs of the theorems of calculus.

Consider the extreme value theorem:

If a real-valued function f is continuous in the closed and bounded interval [a,b], then f must attain a maximum and a minimum, each at least once.

The theorem may seem obvious, but almost no undergraduate math majors would be able to come up with a logically impeccable proof from scratch. This ties in with why I almost never try to present rigorous arguments. If it's not clear to you that it might be very difficult to construct a rigorous proof of the extreme value theorem, you'd probably benefit intellectually from more exposure to mathematical proof. The experience of seeing how difficult it can be to offer rigorous proofs of even relatively simple statements trains one to read very carefully, and not make any unwarranted assumptions.

If you've studied calculus, haven't yet had the experience of proving theorems from first pri...
June 2015 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2015-06-01T20:27:02.378Z

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 post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.

Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.

Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.
Salary charts & Projection tool
by Nanashi — 2015-06-01T16:37:02.229Z

Some quick background, I am putting together a non-profit whose goal is to provide objective, rational career guidance to high school/college students, with the aim to solve what I see as a pretty big problem in the American educational system: our current career guidance is more focused on how to get a job on your chosen field, rather than what field should you choose in the first place?

Mid-ranged goals involve setting up programs where students can "shadow" people who work in a field they are interested in so that they can see what those types of jobs actually entail. Short-term, the goal is to put together some informational resources that students can use to help guide their decision a little more rationally.

One of these information resources is a database that uses data pulled from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, to tell you

What range of salaries can you expect in a given career?

What salary you can expect at any given age in a career.

How many jobs are actually out there in any given career?

The beta-version of that database can be found here. First and foremost, I'm hoping that this can be helpful or useful to any of the high-school or college-aged LWers out there. Secondly, I'm looking for feedback as to how I can make the tool more useful. (Obviously the design is incredibly bare-bones). Specifically:

Is there any additional information you would find useful when trying to determine a career?

Are there any careers/categories of careers that you can't seem to find on this list?

Is any part of this information confusing or poorly explained?

Anything else you can think that might improve this.
Roadmap: Plan of Action to Prevent Human Extinction Risks
by turchin — 2015-06-01T09:58:09.898Z

Let’s do an experiment in "reverse crowdfunding”. I will pay 50 USD to anyone who can suggest a new way of X-risk prevention that is not already mentioned in this roadmap. Post your ideas as a comment to this post.

Should more than one person have the same idea, the award will be made to the person who posted it first.

The idea must be endorsed by me and included in the roadmap in order to qualify, and it must be new, rational and consistent with modern scientific data.

I may include you as a co-author in the roadmap (if you agree).

The roadmap is distributed under an open license GNU.

Payment will be made by PayPal. The total amount of the prize fund is 500 USD (total 10 prizes).

The competition is open until the end of 2015.

The roadmap can be downloaded as a pdf from:

UPDATE: I uploaded new version of the map with changes marked in blue.

http://immortality-roadmap.com/globriskeng.pdf

Email: alexei.turchin@gmail.com
Open Thread, Jun. 1 - Jun. 7, 2015
by Gondolinian — 2015-06-01T00:45:52.439Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Realistic epistemic expectations
by JonahS — 2015-05-31T22:52:30.303Z

When I state a position and offer evidence for it, people sometimes complain that the evidence that I've given doesn't suffice to establish my position. The situation is usually that I'm not trying to give a rigorous argument for my position, and I don't intend to claim that the evidence that I provide suffices to establish my position.

My goal in these cases is to offer a high-level summary of my thinking, and to provide enough evidence so that readers have reason to Bayesian update and to find the view sufficiently intriguing to investigate further.

In general, when a position is non-obvious, a single conversation is nowhere near enough time to convince a rational person that it's very likely to be true. As Burgundy recently wrote:

When you ask Carl Shulman a question on AI, and he starts giving you facts instead of a straight answer, he is revealing part of his book. The thing you are hearing from Carl Shulman is really only the tip of the iceberg because he cannot talk fast enough. His real answer to your question involves the totality of his knowledge of AI, or perhaps the totality of the contents of his brain.

If I were to restrict myself to making claims that I could substantiate in a mere ~2 hours, that would preclude the possibility of me sharing the vast majority of what I know.

In math, one can give rigorous proofs starting from very simple axioms, as Gauss described:

I mean the word proof not in the sense of lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of mathematicians, where 1/2 proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible'.

Even within math, as a practical matter, proofs that appear to be right are sometimes undercut by subtle errors. But outside of math – the only reliable tool that one has at one's disposal is Bayesian inference. In 2009, charity evaluator GiveWell made very strong efforts to apply careful reasoning to identify its top rated charity, and gave a "conservative" cost-effectiveness estimate of $545/life saved, which turned out to have been wildly optimistic. Argumentation that looks solid on the surface often breaks down on close scrutiny. This is closely related to why GiveWell emphasizes the need to look at giving opportunities from many angles, and gives more weight to robustness of evidence than to careful ...