trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Prize for the best introduction to the LessWrong source ($250)
by jsalvatier — 2011-10-05T00:08:33.404Z

Now that it's easy to host lesswrong and hack on the code, you may have gotten excited about adding a feature (facebook likes for articles! or expanded user pages!). So, you take a look at the code and … oh, it's kind of complicated ... You don’t know how the site works and don’t know how to learn. LessWrong lacks a good introduction to its source code.

The LW Public Goods Team and Dr_Manhattan would like the process of getting to know the code to be easier. Therefore, we’re sponsoring a prize for the best introduction to the code. The prize fund is currently $250 (ChipIn page; contributions welcome!). Submissions are due by October 25th. The prize will be judged by jsalvatier, Dr_Manhattan, and Morendil.

The submissions will be judged according to how effective the judges expect them to be at lowering the barriers to working productively on lesswrong.

One strategy we expect to use for making this judgment is to think of specific change we might want to make and then see how much the tutorial would help us understand the relevant issues. For example, we might think about trying to allow comments to be declared karma-neutral for the purposes of implementing polls or rank ordering of suggestions. We might ask ourselves:

Does this tutorial help me form an accurate mental model of what happens as a result of clicking the upvote button, in terms of how LW is implemented?

Does it help me think effectively about bringing about the desired effects?

Does it help me anticipate potentially detrimental unintended effects?

Does it help me map that (dynamic) execution model to specific bits of the (static) source code?

Does the tutorial cover enough of the major relevant aspects of LW besides the example (picked at random) of votes and karma?

We might think about linking wiki pages to users pages so that users can give more background about themselves. We might ask ourselves:

Does the tutorial give me a clear idea of where user information is stored and accessed?

Does it help me understand how wikipages are rendered on the main site?

Does it help me learn how the individual parts of existing user pages are rendered?

Does it help me know where to go answer this questions that it doesn’t answer directly?

The winner of the prize will be asked to incorporate the work of other s...
The National Institute of Theology
by PhilGoetz — 2011-10-04T18:21:44.472Z

Lots of charlatans spend lots of money advertising diets and health products that don't work. We have a National Institutes of Health that, among other things, funds studies that make more-objective pronouncements on diet and health.

Argue pro or con: It would be a good investment (payback would exceed opportunity cost) for the US government to create a National Institute of Theology, that would fund research into theological questions. For instance:

How effective is prayer?

Which religions are the most effective (at healing the sick, making their adherents rich, or other metrics)?

What is the probability that someone will become happier, more productive, less violent, or commit acts of terrorism as a result of joining different religions (or not joining any)?

Everyone, religious and atheist, should be motivated to want the answers to these questions to become widely known.

(Yes, I know this would be politically impractical. Pointing that out is not interesting. What is interesting, is whether such a NIT would be beneficial, supposing it could be made.)
Peter Thiel warns of upcoming (and current) stagnation
by SilasBarta — 2011-10-04T17:30:53.926Z

SIAI benefactor and VC Peter Thiel has an excellent article at National Review about the stagnating progress of science and technology, which he attributes to poorly-grounded political opposition, widespread scientific illiteracy, and overspecialized, insular scientific fields. He warns that this stagnation will undermine the growth that past policies have relied on.

Noteworthy excerpts (bold added by me):

In relation to concerns expressed here about evaluating scientific field soundness:

When any given field takes half a lifetime of study to master, who can compare and contrast and properly weight the rate of progress in nanotechnology and cryptography and superstring theory and 610 other disciplines? Indeed, how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise, as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change, evolutionary biology, and embryonic-stem-cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields? [!!! -- SB]

Grave indictors:

Looking forward, we see far fewer blockbuster drugs in the pipeline — perhaps because of the intransigence of the FDA, perhaps because of the fecklessness of today’s biological scientists, and perhaps because of the incredible complexity of human biology. In the next three years, the large pharmaceutical companies will lose approximately one-third of their current revenue stream as patents expire, so, in a perverse yet understandable response, they have begun the wholesale liquidation of the research departments that have borne so little fruit in the last decade and a half. [...]

The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, the year when oil prices quadrupled. To a first approximation, the progress in computers and the failure in energy appear to have roughly canceled each other out. Like Alice in the Red Queen’s race, we (and our computers) have been forced to run faster and faster to stay in the same place.

Taken at face value, the economic numbers suggest that the notion of breathtaking and across-the-board progress is far from the mark. If one believes the economic data, then one must reject the optimism of the scientific establishment. Indeed, if one shares the widely held view that the U.S. government may have

...
Apply your knowledge: pick half a number
by Eneasz — 2011-10-04T16:49:59.198Z

NPR's Planet Money is running an experiment which could be an interesting way to test your other-people-modeling skills.

This is a guessing game. To play, pick a number between 0 and 100. The goal is to pick the number that's closest to half the average of all guesses.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/10/03/133654225/please-help-us-pick-a-number?sc=fb&cc=fp

The other people guessing are self-selected, I would assume primarily NPR listeners.
Lecturing congressmen on cognitive biases
by Apprentice — 2011-10-04T14:11:43.312Z

A new session of Iceland's parliament convened on Saturday, opening with a religious service as is traditional. For the last couple of years, a local humanist group has offered alternatives to the religious ceremony. On Saturday they had a psychologist give a lecture on cognitive biases, principally on confirmation bias and the availability heuristic. This was attended by 13 out of 63 members of parliament. (Source in Icelandic).

I'm more pro-religion than most people who read Less Wrong and I am generally not excited about atheist activism. This, however, struck me as a good idea.
Another "Oops" moment [link]
by fortyeridania — 2011-10-04T10:59:51.107Z

http://www.thebigquestions.com/2011/10/04/big-news/

Steven Landsburg notes that mathematician Edward Nelson has retracted his claim that the axioms of Peano Arithmetic are inconsistent.

The bit Landsburg cites indicates that the retraction was cordial and drama-free, the way a retraction should be--even a retraction of a claim as momentous as this one.

Now, is this kind of event more common in math than in other fields? Is it more common now than before? (Landsburg seems to attribute it in part to the existence of the Internet.) Your thoughts?
Religion, happiness, and Bayes
by fortyeridania — 2011-10-04T10:21:25.771Z

Religion apparently makes people happier. Is that evidence for the truth of religion, or against it?

(Of course, it matters which religion we're talking about, but let's just stick with theism generally.)

My initial inclination was to interpret this as evidence against theism, in the sense that it weakens the evidence for theism. Here's why:

As all Bayesians know, a piece of information F is evidence for an hypothesis H to the degree that F depends on H. If F can happen just as easily without H as with it, then F is not evidence for H. The more likely we are to find F in a world without H, the weaker F is as evidence for H.

Here, F is "Theism makes people happier." H is "Theism is true."

The fact of widespread theism is evidence for H. The strength of this evidence depends on how likely such belief would be if H were false.

As people are more likely to do something if it makes them happy, people are more likely to be theists given F.

Thus F opens up a way for people to be theists even if H is false.

It therefore weakens the evidence of widespread theism for the truth of H.

Therefore, F should decrease one's confidence in H, i.e., it is evidence against H.

We could also put this in mathematical terms, where F represents an increase in the prior probability of our encountering the evidence. Since that prior is a denominator in Bayes' equation, a bigger one means a smaller posterior probability--in other words, weaker evidence.

OK, so that was my first thought.

But then I had second thoughts: Perhaps the evidence points the other way? If we reframe the finding as "Atheism causes unhappiness," or posit that contrarians (such as atheists) are dispositionally unhappy, does that change the sign of the evidence?

Obviously, I am confused. What's going on here?
Cryonics on Castle [Spoilers]
by wedrifid — 2011-10-04T09:46:55.391Z

Check out the latest episode of Castle (Headcase) to see Cryonics covered in mainstream fiction in a not entirely terrible manner. The details are not exactly accurate but probably not more inaccurate than similar fictionalised coverage of most other industries. In fact there is one obvious implementation difference that the company in Castle uses which is how things clearly ought to be:

Amulets of Immortality

It is not uncommon for cryonics enthusiasts to make 'immortality' jokes about their ALCOR necklaces but the equivalent on the show make the obvious practical next step. The patients have heart rate monitors with GPS signalers that signal the cryonics company as soon as the patient flatlines. This is just obviously the way things should be and it is regrettable that the market is not yet broad enough for 'obvious' to have been translated into common practice.

Other things to watch out for:

Predictable attempts by the cops to take the already preserved body so they can collect more evidence.

A somewhat insightful question of whether the cryonics company should hand over the corpsicle without taking things to court because that way they would not risk legal precedent being set based on a case where there are unusual factors which may make them lose. It may be better to lose one patient so that they can force the fight to happen on a stronger case.

Acknowledgement that only the head is required, which allows a compromise of handing over the body minus the head.

Smug superiority of cops trying to take the cryonics patient against the will of the patient himself, his family and the custodians. This is different than cops just trying to claim territory and do their job and to the hell with everyone else, it is cops trying to convey that it is morally virtuous to take the corpse and the wife would understand that it was in her and her corpsicle husband's best interest to autopsy his head if she wasn't so stupid. (Which seems like a realistic attitude.)

Costar and lead detective Beckett actually attempts to murder a cryonics patient (to whatever extent that murder applies to corpsicle desiccation). For my part this gave me the chance to explore somewhat more tangibly my ethical intuitions over what types of responses would be appropriate. My conclusion was that if someone had shot Beckett in order to protect the corpsicle I

...
Meetup : UMD Meetup
by atucker — 2011-10-04T04:22:10.903Z

Discussion article for the meetup : UMD Meetup

WHEN:
05 October 2011 04:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
University of Maryland

We're meeting in Terrapin Room B of the Student Involvement Suite in STAMP.

Discussion article for the meetup : UMD Meetup
Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance
by lukeprog — 2011-10-04T02:45:31.391Z

Gooey personal details alert! See also: Alicorn's Polyhacking.

Years ago, my first girlfriend (let's call her 'Alice') ran into her ex-boyfriend at a coffee shop. They traded anecdotes, felt connected, a spark of intimacy...

And then she left the coffee shop, quickly.

Later she explained: "You have my heart now, Luke."

I felt proud, but even Luke2005 also felt a twinge of "the universe is suboptimal," because Alice hadn't been able to engage that connection any further. The cultural scripts defining our relationship said that only one man owned her heart. But surely that wasn't optimal for producing utilons?

This is an account of some lessons in rationality that I learned during my journeys in romance.* I haven't been very rational in my relationships until recently, but in retrospect I learned a fair bit about rationality from the failures resulting from my irrationality in past relationships.

Early lessons included realizations like the one above — that I wasn't happy with the standard cultural scripts. I hadn't really noticed the cultural scripts up until that point. I was a victim of cached thoughts and a cached self.

Rationality Lesson: Until you explicitly notice the cached rules for what you're doing, you won't start thinking of them as something to be optimized. Ask yourself: Which parts of romance do you currently think of as subjects of optimization? What else should you be optimizing?

Gather data

At the time, I didn't know how to optimize. I decided I needed data. How did relationships work? How did women work? How did attraction work? The value of information was high, so I decided to become a social psychology nerd. I began to spend less time with Alice so I could spend more time studying.

This wasn't easy. She and I had connected in some pretty intimate ways, including a simultaneous deconversion from fundamentalist Christianity. But in the end my studies paid off. Moreover, my studies in personality and relationship styles helped me to realize that I (and therefore she) would have been miserable if I had decided to pursue marriage with her (or anyone at the time). Now that is valuable information to have!

Rationality Lesson: Respond to the value of information. Once you notice you might be running in the wrong direction, don't keep going that way just because you've got momentum. Stop a moment, and invest some energy in the t...
Knox and Sollecito freed
by komponisto — 2011-10-03T20:24:14.748Z

See: You Be the Jury, The Amanda Knox Test

While we hear about Bayes' Theorem being under threat in some courts, it is nice to savor the occasional moment of rationality prevailing in the justice system, and of mistakes being corrected.

Congratulations to the Italian court system for successfully saying "Oops!"

Things go wrong in this world quite a bit, as we know. Sometimes it's appropriate to just say "hooray!" when they go right.

Discuss, or celebrate.
Stop blaming efficiency
by KatjaGrace — 2011-10-03T16:00:58.000Z

Andrew Sullivan, quoting and commenting on Adam Frank:

We’re more efficient than we’ve ever been, but extreme efficiency has drawbacks:

More efficient forestation means running through forests faster. More efficient fishing methods means running through natural fishing stocks faster. … The truth is that we have limits. True connections between family, friends and colleagues can not be compressed down to tightly scheduled “quality time.” The relentless logic of efficiency can unintentionally strip the most valued qualities of human life just as easily as it strips forests.

Under a common meaning, ‘efficiency’ is just getting more of what you want for a given cost. Since people want different things, what is efficient for you may be very inefficient for someone else. If you don’t want deforestation, then my efficient tree harvesting method is not an efficient way to pursue your goals. Often people seem to forget this and think of the fact that other people are efficiently pursuing goals they don’t like as a problem with the concept of efficiency. This can then prompt them to go back and reject the original goal of efficiency in their own endeavours. Which is a very bad idea, if they are hoping to get what they want, without wasting other things they want in the process. Which is very likely what they are hoping for.

For instance if ‘the most valued qualities of human life’ are stripped by spending most of your time say efficiently pursuing career productivity, the problem is not that efficiency is bad, the problem is that you are efficiently pursuing the wrong goals. i.e. goals that are not your own, or at least not all of what you value. Being inefficient about, say, work is a terrible strategy for improving your home life, since only a miniscule proportion of the ways to be inefficient at work involve any home life improvement, and most of those not efficient improvements. Fortunately people using this strategy probably know intuitively that they will have to aim at the set of ways of being inefficient at work that do help their family lives. But once you have got as far as pursuing the values you actually care about, being efficient about them has really got to help, no matter how much your enemies also like efficiency. Similarly, don’t abandon ‘succeeding’, just because bad...
Rationality Quotes October 2011
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-03T06:41:13.512Z

Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
[SEQ RERUN] Self-Anchoring
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-03T03:10:21.073Z

Today's post, Self-Anchoring was originally published on 22 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Related to contamination and the illusion of transparancy, we "anchor" on our own experience and underadjust when trying to understand others.

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 Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You, 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 : Stockholm meetup
by NihilCredo — 2011-10-02T23:01:02.843Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Stockholm meetup

WHEN:
09 October 2011 02:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Café Tabac (Stora Nygatan 46, Gamla Stan, Stockholm, Sweden)

Where there are nerds there are Swedes, and LessWrong is no exception. Let's meet up!

The first event, as normal, will be more about introducing ourselves, sharing interests, and generally having a good time. We will then decide what would interest us further (rationalist book club? Regular discussion of LW material? Scientific/math/CS/language subjects? Social/political activism? etc.)

If you are interested but cannot attend this meetup for whatever reason, leave a comment! We want to know you're out there! (Also, the date is flexible)

Disclaimer: I don't live in Stockholm so I don't have much experience with its venues in the daytime. I tried to pick something in a central location and without terrible reviews, but locals should feel free to recommend alternatives. In particular, if you know a library that has a café or meeting room, I believe that would be ideal; biblioteket.se is rather unhelpful to that end.

Discussion article for the meetup : Stockholm meetup
Physics Video Lectures
by EvelynM — 2011-10-02T09:05:58.698Z

The Perimeter Institute has videos of classes of all of their areas of research:

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Outreach/What_We_Research/Quantum_Gravity/

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Outreach/What_We_Research/Superstring_Theory_/

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Outreach/What_We_Research/Quantum_Foundations_/

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Outreach/What_We_Research/Cosmology_%26_Gravitation/

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Outreach/What_We_Research/Particle_Physics_/

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Outreach/What_We_Research/Quantum_Information/

Scroll to the bottom for the lectures.

A lecture from 2005 by Roger Penrose on the pre-Big Bang and Weyl Curvature.

INI Web Seminars: Penrose, 2005-11-07

This one is quite good. "Time is nothing to a photon."
[Funny] Even Clippy can be blamed on the use of non-Bayesian methods
by lukeprog — 2011-10-02T07:40:13.176Z

From this 2001 article:

Eric Horvitz... feels bad about [Microsoft Office's Clippy]... many people regard the paperclip as annoyingly over-enthusiastic, since it appears without warning and gets in the way.

To be fair, that is not Dr Horvitz's fault. Originally, he programmed the paperclip to use Bayesian decision-making techniques both to determine when to pop up, and to decide what advice to offer...

The paperclip's problem is that the algorithm... that determined when it should appear was deemed too cautious. To make the feature more prominent, a cruder non-Bayesian algorithm was substituted in the final product, so the paperclip would pop up more often.

Ever since, Dr Horvitz has wondered whether he should have fought harder to keep the original algorithm.

I, at least, found this amusing.