trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Verifying Rationality via RationalPoker.com
by Louie — 2011-03-25T16:32:00.315Z

Related to: Problem of verifying rationality

We're excited to announce the (soft) launch of RationalPoker.com! It's a new guide developed by me, Zvi, Kevin, and patrissimo detailing how to use online poker as rationality training to conquer your cognitive biases. We want our community to go from knowing a lot about cognitive biases to actually having a training method that allows us to integrate that knowledge into our habits -- truly reducing biases instead of just leaving us perpetually lamenting our flawed brain-ware. In the coming weeks, we'll be making the case that online poker is a useful rationalist pursuit along with developing introductory "How To" material that allows those who join us to play profitably.

We want to make sure we aren’t wasting our time practicing an ungrounded art with methods that don’t work. Poker gives us an objective way to test x-rationality. The difference between winning and losing in poker once you know a small amount of domain-specific knowledge is due to differing levels of rationality. Our site will be presenting the case that a strong rationalist who can act on their knowledge of cognitive biases (a defining feature of x-rationality but not traditional rationality) should have a distinct advantage. We'll be offering the connecting material between the sequences and online poker to teach you how to apply knowledge of cognitive biases to poker in a way that verifies your current level of rationality and naturally teaches you to improve your rationality over time.

Incidentally, this also presents a solution for those of us looking to earn money from anywhere with a flexible schedule that leaves time for outside interests.

We’re just getting started so please be kind! Our site is definitely not a final product yet. If you're curious about where we're going with this though, add us to your RSS feeds or check the site every few days. We hope some of you who aren't convinced yet consider playing once you feel like we’ve finally given you enough information to understand why poker is a profitable rationalist pursuit.

Also, if you sign up for one of the online poker rooms like Full Tilt using our affiliate links, the residuals get donated to Less Wrong/Singularity Institute. That way, the more p...
Constantly ask what you're currently doing that is irrational
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2011-03-25T08:21:00.470Z

At today's meetup in Tortuga, we were supposed to discuss something we're currently being irrational about. In retrospect I could probably have done better than the item I picked (for example, it now occurs to me that I'm probably currently being irrational about bedtimes and sleep-cycle stuff)...

But the key point is that while straining my brain to think of something I was currently being irrational about, but hadn't fixed yet, I noticed myself being irrational in small ways too.

For example, I was sitting on the floor in a way that was beginning to strain my left thigh, but wasn't standing up and finding a chair...

So I stood up and found a chair.

I think it might be a valuable exercise to spend an hour practicing rationalist mindfulness, constantly asking yourself, "What am I currently doing that is not rational?" as though you had to find something to fulfill your obligation to an LW meetup.
The function of belief - advice appreciated.
by Goobahman — 2011-03-25T05:28:48.187Z

Hi Less Wrongers and Less Wrongerettes,

Doing a fortnightly Less Wrong group with some friends, and next session we're planning to scrutinize belief, hoping to touch on belief in belief, belief as attire etc. but I wanted to start by examining what belief is and the functions of belief. I have a few subtitles:

The function of belief -To anticipate experience

Belief in Belief -

Belief as attire - (the two are pretty closely related)

Free Floating Belief - beliefs that are useless

Correct belief - when beliefs are held for poor reasons, but turn out to be correct, why they are still inaccurate

Making beliefs pay rent - Don't ask what to believe, ask what to anticipate. Want to finish on this one because I think it's applicability is limitless.

just wanted some critiques/suggestions. Particuarly concerned with the first one, defining belief and it's purpose. I need help making the concepts clear and concise.

The more accessible to the layman the better!
"Is there a God" for noobs
by loup-vaillant — 2011-03-25T00:26:56.091Z

I am trying to write a small essay about the issue. I intend to eventually submit it to reddit (both r/religion and r/atheism), and to show it to my family. This is basic stuff. I basically want to show that:

Either God exists, or it doesn't. Therefore, either theism or atheism is false.

It is worthwhile to actively seek truth in this matter

Being confident is not the same as being arrogant, or intolerant.

My hope is to be able to be able to have meaningful discussions about the topic without being called arrogant or disrespectful. The present draft still miss an introduction, but I think I'll just state what I told above. So, what do you think? Did I miss something? Did I underestimate inferential distances? Could I use other wording? Is this just pointless? Overall, how someone who've never read Less Wrong nor Dawkings might react to that?

Edits:

Replaced "odds" by "likelihood".

Change my quotation to remove religious references (I kept Flat Earth, though). It is now (hopefully obviously) a full piece of fiction.

Replaced "meta" by a small explanation of it.

Removed "exist", in the hope of avoiding argument about the meaning of "existence".

Missing Introduction

Truth is universal

We all live in the same world. Of course, each of us perceive it differently. We don't see the same things, we don't live in the same places, we don't meet the same people. Because of that and more, we don't hold the same beliefs. But there's only one reality. If a statement is true, it is so for everyone.

For instance, I happen to wear black socks at the time of this writing. Believe it or not, that's the reality, so "Loup was wearing blacks socks when he wrote this" is true for everyone, including you. Even if you believe I'm lying, I am wearing black socks. You can't be absolutely certain of this fact, but a fact it is.

Now imagine I believe the Earth is flat, and you believe the earth is (roughly) spherical. Those two beliefs are mutually contradictory. Clearly, one of us is mistaken.

We should avoid false beliefs

31th day

My captain has gone nuts. I couldn't believe that at first. He's a good leader, and got us out of many tight situations. But he wants to sail west towards India. He actually believe that the Earth has the shape of a ball. A ball. Some sort of giant orb, floating in… nothing, I suppose. I'm no navigation master, but I do know one thing: if we sail

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Crime and punishment
by PhilGoetz — 2011-03-24T21:53:09.612Z

Why do those words go together?

Society - and for once, I'm using this term universally - teaches that, if you committed a crime, you should be punished.

But in some societies, we have an insanity defense. If you had a brain condition so that you had no - here it's a little vague - consciousness, or moral sense, or free will, or, well, something - then it would be cruel to punish you for your crime. Instead of going to prison, you should be placed somewhere where you can't hurt anybody, where professional physicians and counselors can study your case and try to reform you so that you can rejoin society.

Wait - so that isn't what prison is for?

No. Prison is to punish people. Is it any wonder that prison doesn't reform people, when we don't want it to reform them? Most people would be upset if prisoners could go in on Friday, and emerge, rehabilitated, on Sunday. When people say, "It would be cruel to punish people who aren't responsible for their actions", they are implicitly saying, "Prison is necessarily cruel; and that's good, because we should be cruel to criminals who are responsible for their actions."

But the more we learn about psychology and neuroscience, the further responsibility recedes into the distance.

Outcome-based justice argues that we should give up playing the blame game, because neuroscience keeps finding more and more proofs that things are "not our fault". Instead, we should write laws that deter crime.

You might think this is what we already try to do. But it isn't! Witness this confused article from the Brookings Institute, Cognitive Neuroscience and the Future of Punishment by O. Carter Snead. Snead objects to outcome-based justice. He summarized all of the arguments for it, yet managed to completely miss their point, concluding where he started from, saying that outcome-based justice is obviously bad because it could lead to being cruel to people who didn't deserve it. (Instead of only being cruel to the people who do deserve it, which is obviously what we want to do.)

Snead understands that outcome-based justice deters crime:

Many features of the criminal justice system that are frequently criticized as draconian and inhumane are, in fact, motivated by a purely consequentialist crime-control rationale. Such measures include laws that authorize life senten

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The "supernatural" category
by rstarkov — 2011-03-24T20:52:53.978Z

The term "supernatural" is frequently used in discussions related to skepticism. I am trying to establish the category that people refer to with this term.
All uses of this term appear to imply a separation of concepts and events into two disjoint categories: "natural" and "supernatural". Some examples of things typically classified into "supernatural": God, ghosts, telepathy, telekinesis, aura. Things typically classified as "natural": animals, rocks, talking, earthquake, body temperature.
I will try to follow the advice given in Similarity Clusters and try to establish some verbal hints as to what causes a concept to be classified into either similarity cluster.
One idea I had is the following: anything we expect to be able to experience, if the necessary prerequisites are met, is "natural"; anything we expect to fail to experience even if we try hard is "supernatural". This seems to work quite well on the concepts mentioned above. This works for unlikely events too: a plane crash is not "supernatural" because if I'm at the right place and the right time then I expect to be able to experience it.
It's still a bit weak for exceedingly unlikely events. For example, proton decay has never been witnessed, and we don't know if it can even occur. But "proton decay" is not classified as "supernatural"; rather as a "hypothesis". Telepathy, however, might for all we know be as rare as proton decay (thus being exceedingly hard to confirm experimentally), and yet it's classified into "supernatural". Something is missing from this verbal hint.
But what?
Approaching this from a different perspective, it appears that one can classify "supernatural" as having the property of being "outside of the universe". On further thought, however, this isn't helpful at all: the latter is not so much a verbal hint as a label in itself.
If taken literally, one might argue that all supernatural things therefore don't exist. They are said to be outside the universe, but we can only experience things within the universe, because anything we can experience must be part of the universe, and thus "inside" it. This is quite useless, however, in my opinion: as used by actual people, the category "supernatural" isn't intended to preclude existence. So this doesn't work.
Could it be that the category "supernatural" is actually completely useless, by offering so little information about the things that ...
Why Would A Certain Hoax Story Be Reported For So Long?
by Servant — 2011-03-24T17:11:38.503Z

Recently, Tyler Cowen, on his blog, reported a story of a German court case where Demitrius Soupolos sued Frank Maus for "breach of contract". Demitrius paid Maus to do a certain service, which Maus then was unable to deliever. Maus argued that he was only paid to make a good effort on said service but was prevented from doing so (due to an "act of god", as one American legal scholar supposedly claimed). This got me curious: who would win that court case? So I began doing a Google search for more information about this case...only to see that this case has been repeated over and over. Tyler Cowen's blog post links to an article on this case written in March 30th 2009...and that all these other news stories just copy this article, word-for-word. There is no mention of a verdict anywhere in my searches (which I think would be fairly important concerning that this is a court case after all), nor were any of these news articles about Soupolos were written in Germany (where the court case was supposed to be held), leading me to conclude that this is nothing more than a hoax. Now, this may not be a hoax, but I'm fairly confident that it is a hoax.

Tyler made his blog post in March 23rd 2011...so why would this hoax story continue to spread long after 2009? The answer is simple: the context of the story. Frank Maus' service was impregnation of Demitrius' wife, a "beauty queen"*. The "act of god" that prevented Frank Maus for carrying out this service...was the fact that Frank Maus was infertile and didn't know of this infertility because his wife deceived him.

The story seems so weird, strange, and soap operaic when you added in the 'context' that it becomes understandable that somebody may instinctively wish to grapple with the implications of this story as opposed to digging in deeper and questioning the story's inauthenticity (and I must admit, when I was doing my research, I was not intending to question the story but merely wanted to know who won the court case in question). Let's assume that the Maus story is a fake. I have two questions based on that assumption:

1) If someone wants to create a hoax story that is generally accepted by the population (either for purely sadistic entertainment or for more sinister purposes), would he desire to create a story that is weird or unbelievable just to ...
"If the race starts at X, I'll win"
by cousin_it — 2011-03-24T17:04:28.029Z

I just found a brilliant metaphor in an article about programmers vs designers, here's the relevant quote:

...a mistake we sometimes make as UX Designers is that we believe, if the race starts at wireframing, we will win.

This looks like a new and unflattering lens through which to view my self-image. If I have good math skills but poor understanding of customers, then I'm smugly confident about winning "if the race starts at rigorous problem formulation". But of course the universe isn't so obliging, and the race always starts before you'd hoped it would! If you feel blocked today, can it be because you're an expert at some task but poor at its natural complementary tasks?
death-is-bad-ism going a little bit more mainstream?
by Psy-Kosh — 2011-03-24T08:27:23.506Z

So, apparently appsumo is having a custom reddit bundle, a bundle meant to appeal to redditors, and 10% of the proceeds get donated. On the surface, doesn't sound _that_ interesting, except...

Take a closer look: http://appsumo.com/reddit-special-deal/ and find that the recipient of the donations will be... SENS!

I find this to be an interesting development. It wasn't the "custom transhumanist bundle" or "the custom sens bundle" but "the custom reddit bundle". Yes, "reddit" doesn't, in and of itself, count as extremely mainstream as such, but I'd say it's still an interesting development.
Link: Paul Graham on intelligence vs determination
by Vladimir_Golovin — 2011-03-24T08:18:40.449Z

Paul Graham of Y-Combinator on picking winners-at-life:
Paul Graham spills: Why some companies get his cash and others don't

What's most essential for a successful startup?
The founders. We've learned in the six years of doing Y Combinator to look at the founders--not the business ideas--because the earlier you invest, the more you're investing in the people. When Bill Gates was starting Microsoft, the idea that he had then involved a small-time microcomputer called the Altair. That didn't seem very promising, so you had to see that this 19-year-old kid was going places.

What do you look for?
Determination. When we started, we thought we were looking for smart people, but it turned out that intelligence was not as important as we expected. If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.
St. Louis, Missouri Meetup - now happening every week!
by  — 2011-03-24T06:48:05.061Z

I got inspired by the NY meetup post by Cosmos, and I'd love to get a recurring meetup started in St. Louis.

Where: Kayak Coffee at Skinker and Forest Park Parkway, near Washington University.

When: Every Tuesday from 6-8 PM, until and including May 3, 2011 and starting again in September 2011. I won't be in St. Louis for the summer, though of course if enough people will be around the meetups will continue without me.

What: Meet each other and share our thoughts/discoveries on subjects related to LW and/or transhumanism, whatever you find interesting. I'm personally interested in the instrumental value of rationality, philosophy, self-improvement, life hacking, futurism.

I want to use rationality to win more often, and to help the people around me win more often. Let's see where it goes!

I'll make a sign that says 'Less Wrong'. RSVP here - I looking forward to meeting you.

Edit: I meant March, not May.

Update: Our inaugural meetup was excellent. One person RSVP'd and didn't show up, but four others didn't RSVP and did show up. Future meetups are being planned, so leave a comment or message me if you want to get involved.

Update two: We're now meeting every week - I've updated the time to reflect our recurring time. Definitely send me a message if you want to come!
Sean Carroll: Does the Universe Need God? [link]
by Dreaded_Anomaly — 2011-03-23T19:31:17.926Z

Does the Universe Need God? (essay by Sean Carroll)

In this essay, Sean Carroll:

Dissolves the problem of "creation from nothing":

A provocative way of characterizing these beginning cosmologies is to say that "the universe was created from nothing." Much debate has gone into deciding what this claim is supposed to mean. Unfortunately, it is a fairly misleading natural-language translation of a concept that is not completely well-defined even at the technical level. Terms that are imprecisely defined include "universe," "created," "from," and "nothing." (We can argue about "was.")

The problem with "creation from nothing" is that it conjures an image of a pre-existing "nothingness" out of which the universe spontaneously appeared – not at all what is actually involved in this idea. Partly this is because, as human beings embedded in a universe with an arrow of time, we can't help but try to explain events in terms of earlier events, even when the event we are trying to explain is explicitly stated to be the earliest one. It would be more accurate to characterize these models by saying "there was a time such that there was no earlier time."

To make sense of this, it is helpful to think of the present state of the universe and work backwards, rather than succumbing to the temptation to place our imaginations "before" the universe came into being. The beginning cosmologies posit that our mental journey backwards in time will ultimately reach a point past which the concept of "time" is no longer applicable. Alternatively, imagine a universe that collapsed into a Big Crunch, so that there was a future end point to time. We aren't tempted to say that such a universe "transformed into nothing"; it simply has a final moment of its existence. What actually happens at such a boundary point depends, of course, on the correct quantum theory of gravity.

The important point is that we can easily imagine self-contained descriptions of the universe that have an earliest moment of time. There is no logical or metaphysical obstacle to completing the conventional temporal history of the universe by including an atemporal boundary condition at the beginning. Together with the successful post-Big-Bang cosmological model already in our possession, that would constitute a consistent and self-contained description of the history of the universe.

Nothing in the fact that t

...
Link: Who Is Afraid Of The Singularity (NPR)
by Eneasz — 2011-03-23T19:13:17.131Z

A standard pop-news article on the singularity, focus on Kurzweil

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/03/23/134762846/who-is-afraid-of-the-singularity?sc=fb&cc=fp
The trouble with teamwork
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2011-03-23T18:05:42.335Z

I've hated group projects since about Grade 3. I grew up assuming that at some point, working in groups would stop being a series of trials and tribulations, and turn into normal, sane people working just like they would normally, except on a shared problem. Either they would change, or I would change, because I am incredibly bad at teamwork, at least the kind of it that gets doled out in the classroom. I don’t have the requisite people skills to lead a group, but I’m too much of a control freak to meekly follow along when the group wants to do a B+ project and I would like an A+. Drama inevitably ensues.

I would like to not have this problem. An inability to work in teams seems like a serious handicap. There are very few jobs that don’t involve teamwork, and my choice of future career, nursing, involves a lot.

My first experiences in the workplace, as a lifeguard, made me feel a little better about this. There was a lot less drama and a lot more just getting the work done. I think it has a lot to do with a) the fact that we’re paid to do a job that’s generally pretty easy, and b) the requirements of that job are pretty simple, if not easy. There is drama, but it rarely involves guard rotations or who’s going to hose the deck, and I can safely ignore it. Rescues do involve teamwork, but it’s a specific sort of teamwork where the roles are all laid out in advance, and that’s what we spent most of our training learning. Example: in a three-guard scenario, the guard to notice an unconscious swimmer in the water becomes guard #1: they make a whistle signal to the others and jump in, while guard #2 calls 911 and guard #3 clears the pool and does crowd control. There isn’t a lot of room for drama, and there isn’t much point because there is one right way to do things, everyone knows the right way to do things, and there isn’t time to fight about it anyway.

I’m hoping that working as a nurse in a hospital will be more this and less like the school-project variety of group work. The roles are defined and laid out; they’re what we’re learning right now in our theory classes. There’s less of a time crunch, but there’s still, usually, an obviously right way to do things. Maybe it gets more complicated when you have to approach a colleague for, say, not following the

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Folk theories can be useful even when they're entirely wrong
by taw — 2011-03-23T16:04:16.620Z

Here's an interesting but very old paper - two theories of Heat Control.

It discusses mental models of home heating systems (thermostats) non-experts use.

These models tend to be extremely wrong from theoretical perspective, but surprisingly useful in practice.

The findings are applicable to a much wider range of subjects than just thermostats, and have certain epistemological significance, especially with regard to compartmentalization.