trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
An observation on cryocrastination
by AndrewH — 2009-07-22T20:41:41.912Z

Why do people cryocrastinate? The most common explanation I’ve heard from intelligent people for not getting cryonics is that the money is better spent on some altruistic cause. By itself there is nothing wrong with this belief, but irrationality lies near.

Before I continue, I am not here to argue that cryonics works or not. That has been done before. From this point on, I will assume cryonics derives expected utility from it giving a reasonable chance of continuing life past many currently terminal events, with life being a valuable thing.

We begin with a quick overview of the cost of cryonics. Let us break our cost analysis into two parts: acquisition of the cryonics and life insurance contracts and maintenance of these contracts.
First, acquisition. The main costs here is the time that could be invested in other activities. I would estimate a reasonably organized person could get it done with 20 hours of continuous work and $200 (all costs USD) upfront. Let us say this is $600 worth of costs. For people in the US, see rudi hoffman, he will do pretty much everything.

Second, maintenance. For myself who lives in a non-silly country like New Zealand, life insurance is $10 per month, and membership fees for e.g. Cryonics Institute is $10 a month, totaling 70 cents a day. Let us say it is $1 a day for places such as the US, as insurance costs an arm and a leg there.

So cryonics costs one dollar a day. Put this way, it doesn't seem much. This comes out to be two starbucks coffees a week. Let me repeat that: in the long term, cryonics costs TWO STARBUCKS COFFEES A WEEK. Very few people can say they cannot optimize themselves so as to have $1 a day more disposable income.

As someone once put it to Eliezer “No, really, that's ridiculous. If that's true then my decision isn't just determined, it's overdetermined.”. I agree, cryonics is cheap.

Let us now consider the following two beliefs from someone who has a favorite cause, in which donating money gives lots of positive utility. The amount we are considering to donate is exactly the amount we would think about using to get cryonics:

1: Compared to cryonics, which is almost entirely selfish spending, my cause can benefit far more from the money than spending it on cryonics.
2: Below a certain amount, the contribution I could make to my cause is not that helpful. It becomes merely a d...
It's all in your head-land
by colinmarshall — 2009-07-22T19:41:03.478Z

From David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest:

He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear... It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real... He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen... He hadn't quite gotten this before now, how it wasn't just the matter of riding out cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.

I've come to draw, or at to emphasize, a distinction separating two realms between which I divide my time: real-land and head-land. Real-land is the physical world, occupied by myself and billions of equally real others, in which my fingers strike a series of keys and a monitor displays strings of text corresponding to these keystrokes. Head-land is the world in which I construct an image of what this sentence will look like when complete, what this paragraph will look like when complete and what this entire post will look like when complete. And it doesn't stop there: in head-land, the finished post is already being read, readers are reacting, readers are (or aren't) responding and the resulting conversations are, for better or for worse, playing themselves out. In head-land, the thoughts I've translated into words and thus defined and developed in this post are already shaping the thoughts to be explored in future posts, the composition of which is going on there even now.
Head-land is the setting of our predictions. When deciding what actions to take in real-land, we don't base our choices on the possible actions' end results in real-land — by definition, we don't know what will happen in real-land until it already has — but on their end results in head-land. The obvious problem: while real-land is built out of all the information that exists every...
Fairness and Geometry
by cousin_it — 2009-07-22T10:44:39.752Z

This post was prompted by Vladimir Nesov's comments, Wei Dai's intro to cooperative games and Eliezer's decision theory problems. Prerequisite: Re-formalizing PD.

Some people here have expressed interest in how AIs that know each other's source code should play asymmetrical games, e.g. slightly asymmetrized PD. The problem is twofold: somehow assign everyone a strategy so that the overall outcome is "good and fair", then somehow force everyone to play the assigned strategies.

For now let's handwave around the second problem thus: AIs that have access to each other's code and common random bits can enforce any correlated play by using the quining trick from Re-formalizing PD. If they all agree beforehand that a certain outcome is "good and fair", the trick allows them to "mutually precommit" to this outcome without at all constraining their ability to aggressively play against those who didn't precommit. This leaves us with the problem of fairness.

(Get ready, math ahead. It sounds massive, but is actually pretty obvious.)

Pure strategy plays of an N-player game are points in the N-dimensional space of utilities. Correlated plays form the convex hull of this point set, an N-polytope. Pareto-optimal outcomes are points on the polytope's surface where the outward normal vector has all positive components. I want to somehow assign each player a "bargaining power" (by analogy with Nash bargaining solutions); collectively they will determine the slope of a hyperplane that touches the Pareto-optimal surface at a single point which we will dub "fair". Utilities of different players are classically treated as incomparable, like metres to kilograms, i.e. having different dimensionality; thus we'd like the "fair point" to be invariant under affine recalibrations of utility scales. Coefficients of tangent hyperplanes transform as covectors under such recalibrations; components of a covector should have dimensionality inverse to components of a vector for the application operation to make sense; thus the bargaining power of each player must have dimensionality 1/utility of that player.

(Whew! It'll get easier from now.)

A little mental visualization involving a sphere and a plane confirms that when a player stretches their utility scale 2x, stretching the sphere along one of the coordinate axes, the player's power (the coefficient of that coordinate in the ...
Deciding on our rationality focus
by Kaj_Sotala — 2009-07-22T06:27:56.562Z

I have a problem: I'm not sure what this community is about.

To illustrate, recently I've been experimenting with a number of tricks to overcome my akrasia. This morning, a succession of thoughts struck me:

The readers of Less Wrong have been interested in the subject of akrasia, maybe I should make a top-level post of my experiences once I see what works and what doesn't.

But wait, that would be straying into the territory of traditional self-help, and I'm sure there are already plenty of blogs and communities for that. It isn't about rationality anymore.

But then, we have already discussed akrasia several times, isn't this then also on-topical?

(Even if this was topical, wouldn't a simple recount of "what worked for me" be too Kaj-optimized to work for very many others?)

Part of the problem seems to stem from the fact that we have a two-fold definition of rationality:

Epistemic rationality: believing, and updating on evidence, so as to systematically improve the correspondence between your map and the territory. The art of obtaining beliefs that correspond to reality as closely as possible. This correspondence is commonly termed "truth" or "accuracy", and we're happy to call it that.

Instrumental rationality: achieving your values. Not necessarily "your values" in the sense of being selfish values or unshared values: "your values" means anything you care about. The art of choosing actions that steer the future toward outcomes ranked higher in your preferences. On LW we sometimes refer to this as "winning".

If this community was only about epistemic rationality, there would be no problem. Akrasia isn't related to epistemic rationality, and neither are most self-help tricks. Case closed.

However, by including instrumental rationality, we have expanded the sphere of potential topics to cover practically anything. Productivity tips, seduction techniques, the best ways for grooming your physical appearance, the most effective ways to relax (and by extension, listing the best movies / books / video games of all time), how you can most effectively combine different rebate coupons and where you can get them from... all of those can be useful in achieving your values.

Expanding our focus isn't necessarily a bad thing, by itself. It will allow us to attract a wider audience, and some of the people who then get drawn here might afterwards ...
Missing the Trees for the Forest
by Scott Alexander — 2009-07-22T03:23:33.171Z

Politics is the mind-killer. A while back, I gave an example: the government's request that Kelloggs [EDIT: General Mills, thanks CronoDAS] top making false claims about Cheerios. By the time the right-wing and left-wing blogospheres had finished with it, this became everything from part of the deliberate strangulation of the American entrepreneurial spirit by a conspiracy of bureaucrats, to a symbol of the radicalization of the political right into a fringe group obsessed with Communism, to a prelude to Obama's plan to commit genocide against all citizens who disagree with him. All because of Cheerios!

Why? What drives someone to hear about a reasonable change in cereal advertising policy and immediately think of a second Holocaust?

This reminds me of something I used to notice when reading about politics. Sometimes there would be a seemingly good idea to deregulate something that clearly needed deregulation. The idea's proponents would go on TV and say that, hey, this was obviously a good idea. Whoever by the vagary of politics had to oppose the idea would go on TV and talk about industry's plot to emasculate government safeguards. Predatory corporations! Class solidarity! Consumer safety!

Then the next day, there would be seemingly good idea to regulate something that clearly needed regulating. The idea's proponents would go on TV and say that, hey, this was obviously a good idea. Its opponents would go on TV and say that all government regulation was inherently bad. Small government! Freedom! Capitalism!

I have found a pattern: when people consider an idea in isolation, they tend to make good decisions. When they consider an idea a symbol of a vast overarching narrative, they tend to make very bad decisions.

Let me offer another example.

A white man is accused of a violent attack on a black woman. In isolation, well, either he did it or he didn't, and without any more facts there's no use discussing it.

But what if this accusation is viewed as a symbol? What if you have been saying for years that racism and sexism are endemic in this country, and that whites and males are constantly abusing blacks and females, and they're always getting away with it because the police are part of a good ole' boys network who protect their fellow privileged whites?

Well, right now, you'll probably still ask for the evidence. But if I gave you some evidence, and it was compl...
Obviousness is not what it seems
by KatjaGrace — 2009-07-21T11:34:15.000Z

Things can be obvious if they are simple. If something complicated is obvious, such as anything that anybody seriously studies, then for it to be simple you must be abstracting it a lot. When people find such things obvious, what they often mean is that the abstraction is so clear and simple its implications are unarguable. This is answering the wrong question. Most of the reasons such conclusions might be false are hidden in what you abstracted away. The question is whether you have the right abstraction for reality, not whether the abstraction has the implications it seems to.

e.g.1 I have heard that this is obvious: reality is made of optimizers, so when the optimizers optimize themselves there will be a recursive optimization explosion so something will become extremely optimized and take over the world. But to doubt this is not to doubt positive feedback works. The question is whether this captures the main dynamic taking place in the world.

e.g.2 I have thought before that it is obvious that a minimum wage would increase unemployment usually. This is probably because it’s so clear in an economic model, not because I had checked that that model fits reality well. I think it does, but it’s not obvious. It requires carefully looking at the world and at other possible abstractions.
Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-07-21T07:22:43.020Z

I suspect that the ick reaction being labeled "objectification" actually has more to do with the sense that the speaker is addressing a closed group that doesn't include you.

Suppose I wrote a story about a man named Frank, whose twin brother (Frank has learned) is in the process of being framed for murder this very night. Frank is in the middle of a complicated plot to give his brother an alibi. He's already found the cabdriver and tricked him into waiting outside a certain apartment for an hour. Now all he needs is the last ingredient of his plan - a woman to go home with him (as he poses as his brother). Frank is, with increasing desperation, propositioning ladies at the bar - any girl will do for his plan, it doesn't matter who she is or what she's about...

I'd bet I could write that story without triggering the ick reaction, because Frank is an equal-opportunity manipulator - he manipulated the cabdriver, too. The story isn't about Frank regarding women as things on the way to implementing his plan, it's about Frank regarding various people, men and women alike, as means to the end of saving his brother.

If a woman reads that story, I think, she won't get a sense of being excluded from the intended audience.

I suspect that's what the ick factor being called "objectification" is really about - the sense that someone who says "...but you'll still find women alluring" is talking to an audience that doesn't include you, a woman. It doesn't matter if you happen to be a bi woman. You still get the sense that it never crossed the writer's mind that there might be any women in the audience, and so you are excluded.

In general, starting from a perceptual reaction, it is a difficult cognitive task to say in words exactly why that reaction occurred - to accurately state the necessary and sufficient conditions for its triggering. If the reaction is affective, a good or bad reaction, there is an additional danger: You'll be tempted to zoom in on any bad (good) aspect of the situation, and say, "Ah, that must be the reason it's bad (good)!" It's wrong to treat people as means rather than ends, right? People have their own feelings and inner life, and it's wrong to forget that? Clearly, that's a problem with saying, "And this is how you get girls..." But is that exactly what went wrong originally...
Shut Up And Guess
by Scott Alexander — 2009-07-21T04:04:12.836Z

Related to: Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great

A while back, I said provocatively that the rarefied sorts of rationality we study at Less Wrong hadn't helped me in my everyday life and probably hadn't helped you either. I got a lot of controversy but not a whole lot of good clear examples of getting some use out of rationality.
Today I can share one such example.
Consider a set of final examinations based around tests with the following characteristics:

* Each test has one hundred fifty true-or-false questions.
* The test is taken on a scan-tron which allows answers of "true", "false", and "don't know".
* Students get one point for each correct answer, zero points for each "don't know", and minus one half point for each incorrect answer.
* A score of >50% is "pass", >60% is "honors", >70% is "high honors".
* The questions are correspondingly difficult, so that even a very intelligent student is not expected to get much above 70. All students are expected to encounter at least a few dozen questions which they can answer only with very low confidence, or which they can't answer at all.
At what confidence level do you guess? At what confidence level do you answer "don't know"?

I took several of these tests last month, and the first thing I did was some quick mental calculations. If I have zero knowledge of a question, my expected gain from answering is 50% probability of earning one point and 50% probability of losing one half point. Therefore, my expected gain from answering a question is .5(1)-.5(.5)= +.25 points. Compare this to an expected gain of zero from not answering the question at all. Therefore, I ought to guess on every question, even if I have zero knowledge. If I have some inkling, well, that's even better.
You look disappointed. This isn't a very exciting application of arcane Less Wrong knowledge. Anyone with basic math skills should be able to calculate that out, right?
I attend a pretty good university, and I'm in a postgraduate class where most of us have at least a bachelor's degree in a hard science, and a few have master's degrees. And yet, talking to my classmates in the cafeteria after the first test was finished, I started to realize I was the only person in the class who hadn't answered "don't know" to any questions.
I have several friends in the class who had helped me with difficult problems earlier in the year, so I figured the le...
Outside Analysis and Blind Spots
by orthonormal — 2009-07-21T01:00:18.458Z

(I originally tried to make this a comment, but it kept on growing.)

I was looking through the Google results for "Less Wrong" when I found the blog of a rather intelligent Leon Kass acolyte, who's written a critique of our community. While it's a bit of a caricature, it's not entirely off the mark. For example:

Trying to think more like a mathematician, whose empiricism resides in the realm of pure thought, does not predispose these 'rationalists' to collect evidence from the real world. Neither does the downplaying of personal experiences. Many are computer science majors, used to being in the comfortable position of being capable of testing their hypotheses without needing to leave their office. It is, then, an easy temptation for them to come up with a nice-sounding theory which appears to explain the facts, and then consider the question solved. Reason must reign supreme, must it not?

How seriously do you take this critique? Do you wonder why I'm bothering with this straw-man criticism of Less Wrong?

Actually, I've deceived you; there's no such Leon Kass devotee. The quote above is a very minor adaptation of this Kaj Sotala post, which I've changed from the first person plural to the third person plural. Read it if you like, and then reevaluate the critique. (Yes, I know it's less coherent out of its actual context.) Does it seem to be less of a caricature now that you've read a version in which you identify with the writer, rather than one in which the writer is analyzing and criticizing you from outside?

Now I hope that this little trick (which people are starting to expect around here) caught your attention. We really do seem to react differently to an outside analysis of a person or group in very different ways, depending on whether we've been primed to identify ourselves more with the author or with the object of analysis. One might say that we strongly object to being modeled as a more or less predictable agent in someone else's scheme: that we instinctively reject any out-group analysis of our own personality and cognition. (Compare people's reluctance to trust the Outside View even when they know it's more reliable.)

In fact, in some ways this is reminiscent of anosognosia: take for instance the recent study on body language, which discovered that

We can predict a stranger's extraversion

...
Chomsky, Sports Talk Radio, Media Bias, and Me
by David_J_Balan — 2009-07-21T00:57:19.823Z

Just about everyone knows that one of Noam Chomsky's big things is that he thinks the media are badly distorted away from the truth and toward the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Once a long time ago I read or heard either this quote from this interview or something like it:

"Take, say, sports -- that's another crucial example of the indoctrination system, in my view. For one thing because it -- you know, it offers people something to pay attention to that's of no importance. [audience laughs] That keeps them from worrying about -- [applause] keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And in fact it's striking to see the intelligence that's used by ordinary people in [discussions of] sports [as opposed to political and social issues]. I mean, you listen to radio stations where people call in -- they have the most exotic information [more laughter] and understanding about all kind of arcane issues. And the press undoubtedly does a lot with this."

Taking this quote along with the rest of the interview, the idea seems to be that that the default condition of most people is to have decent critical faculties unless someone takes the trouble to actively screw them up. So in contrast to their badly distorted ideas about politics, people tend to have sensible ideas about sports, since the powerful have no particular motive to distort those ideas (though they do have a motive to get people to think about sports instead of things that are important).
Leaving completely aside the merits of Chomsky's critique of the media or any of his other views, I have logged a pretty decent number of hours listening to sports talk radio and folks, I'm here to tell you that the quality of the discourse is generally mighty low. It might not be as low as on political talk radio (people aren't as hate-filled), but it's low. I sent an email to Chomsky pointing this out (which I cannot locate as it was many years ago), and to his credit he wrote me back. I don't think I am revealing any confidences by saying that, to the best of my recollection, he admitted that it had been many years since he had really paid any attention to sports or sports talk or anything like that. The point is not (or at least not mostly) to ding Chomsky for being a little loose with the facts behind his just-so story. The point ...