trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Math of When to Self-Improve
by John_Maxwell — 2010-05-15T20:35:37.449Z

An economic analysis of how much time an individual or group should spend improving the way they do things as opposed to just doing them. Requires understanding of integrals.

An Explanation of Discount Rates

Your annual discount rate for money is 1.05 if you're indifferent between receiving $1.00 now and $1.05 in a year. Question to confirm understanding (requires insight and a calculator): If a person is indifferent between receiving $5.00 at the beginning of any 5-day period and $5.01 at the end of it, what is their annual discount rate? Answer in rot13: Gurve naahny qvfpbhag engr vf nobhg bar cbvag bar svir frira.

If your discount rate is significantly different than prevailing interest rates, you can easily acquire value for yourself by investing or borrowing money.

An Explanation of Net Present Value

Discount rates are really cool because they let you assign an instantaneous value to any income-generating asset. For example, let's say I have a made-for-Adsense pop culture site that is bringing in $2000 a year, and someone has offered to buy it. Normally figuring out the minimum price I'm willing to sell for would require some deliberation, but if I've already deliberated to discover my discount rate, I can compute an integral instead.

To make this calculation reusable, I'm going to let a be the annual income generated by the site (in this case $2000) and r be my discount rate. For the sake of calculation, we'll assume that the $2000 is distributed perfectly evenly throughout the year.

Question to confirm understanding: If a person has a discount rate of 1.05, at what price would they be indifferent to selling the aforementioned splog? Answer in rot13: Nobhg sbegl gubhfnaq avar uhaqerq avargl-gjb qbyynef.

When to Self-Improve

This question of when to self-improve is complicated by the fact that self-improvement is not an either-or proposition. It's possible to generate value as you're self-improving. For example, you can imagine an independent software developer who's trying to choose between improving their tools and working on creating software that will turn a profit. Although the developer's skills will not improve as quickly through the process of software creation as they would through tool upgrades, they still will improve.

My proposed solution to this problem is for the developer to analyze themse...
Study: Encouraging Obedience Considered Harmful
by MBlume — 2010-05-14T18:11:56.265Z

A while back I did a couple of posts on the care and feeding of young rationalists. Though it is not new, I recently found a truly excellent post on this topic, in Dale Mcgowan's blog, The Meming of Life. The post details a survey carried out on ordinary citizens of Hitler's Germany, searching for correlations between style of upbringing, and adult moral decisions.

Everyday Germans of the Nazi period are the focus of a fascinating study discussed in the PBB seminars and in the Ethics chapter of Raising Freethinkers. For their book The Altruistic Personality, researchers Samuel and Pearl Oliner conducted over 700 interviews with survivors of Nazi-occupied Europe. Included were both “rescuers” (those who actively rescued victims of persecution) and “non-rescuers” (those who were either passive in the face of the persecution or actively involved in it). The study revealed interesting differences in the upbringing of the two groups — specifically the language and practices that parents used to teach their values.

Non-rescuers were 21 times more likely than rescuers to have been raised in families that emphasized obedience—being given rules that were to be followed without question—while rescuers were over three times more likely than non-rescuers to identify “reasoning” as an element of their moral education. “Explained,” the authors said, is the single most common word used by rescuers in describing their parents’ ways of talking about rules and ethical ideas.

Not Just Because I Said So

For anyone interested in rational and ethical upbringing, I really cannot recommend Meming of Life strongly enough.
The Social Coprocessor Model
by Roko — 2010-05-14T17:10:15.475Z

Followup to: Do you have High-Functioning Asperger's Syndrome?

LW reader Madbadger uses the metaphor of a GPU and a CPU in a desktop system to think about people with Asperger's Syndrome: general intelligence is like a CPU, being universal but only mediocre at any particular task, whereas the "social coprocessor" brainware in a Neurotypical brain is like a GPU: highly specialized but great at what it does. Neurotypical people are like computers with measly Pentium IV processors, but expensive Radeon HD 4890 GPUs. A High-functioning AS person is an Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition - with on-board graphics!

This analogy also covers the spectrum view of social/empathic abilities, you can think about having a weaker social coprocessor than average if you have some of the tendencies of AS but not others. You can even think of your score on the AQ Test as being like the Tom's Hardware Rating of your Coprocessor. (Lower numbers are better!).

If you lack that powerful social coprocessor, what can you do? Well, you'll have to run your social interactions "in software", i.e. explicitly reason through the complex human social game that most people play without ever really understanding. There are several tricks that a High-functioning AS person can use in this situation:

(Most importantly) Find a community of others - who are trying to solve the same problem (Though be careful not to wind up with a group of people who have weaker social coprocessors and aren't doing anything about it, as you will tend to conform to this behavior). Having even a few friends who are in a similar niche to you is worth a huge amount in terms of motivating social pressure, as a sounding board to bounce ideas off, and simply for the instinctive feel of support that having a group of people "in the same boat as you" gives.

Cached answers - you can precompute the "right" responses to social situations. Probably the best example of this is the answer to the "buy me a drink" problem: you approach an attractive NT person who you might like as a future partner. After a short time, they ask you to buy them a drink. The logical answer to this question is "what kind of drink would you like?", because in most social situations where you want to build up a positive relationship with a person, it is best to comply with their requests; not creating explicit conflict is usually a safe heuristic. But this is

...
Bay Area Lesswrong Meet up Sunday May 16
by LucasSloan — 2010-05-14T05:37:46.850Z

No invitations to Benton House have been forthcoming for the last couple months, so I thought we might do one located in a restaurant somewhere. I would suggest Holder's Country Inn, but if anyone else has any suggestions, I'm more than willing to change venue. I would suggest a meeting time of 7, but that is also amenable to change.

Edit: We're meeting at the Inn. I'll be out front at 7 with a sign saying Less Wrong.
Cambridge Less Wrong meetup this Sunday, May 16
by jimrandomh — 2010-05-14T04:34:00.146Z

Last month's Cambridge, Massachusetts meetup was a success, with six people in attendance and some very interesting discussions. Meetups will recur on the third Sunday of each month, so the next one is this week, at the same time and place: 4pm at the Clear Conscience Cafe at 581 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA, near the Central Square T station. Please comment if you plan to attend.
Blue- and Yellow-Tinted Choices
by Scott Alexander — 2010-05-13T22:35:42.109Z

A man comes to the rabbi and complains about his life: "I have almost no money, my wife is a shrew, and we live in a small apartment with seven unruly kids. It's messy, it's noisy, it's smelly, and I don't want to live."
The rabbi says, "Buy a goat."
"What? I just told you there's hardly room for nine people, and it's messy as it is!"
"Look, you came for advice, so I'm giving you advice. Buy a goat and come back in a month."
In a month the man comes back and he is even more depressed: "It's gotten worse! The filthy goat breaks everything, and it stinks and makes more noise than my wife and seven kids! What should I do?"
The rabbi says, "Sell the goat."
A few days later the man returns to the rabbi, beaming with happiness: "Life is wonderful! We enjoy every minute of it now that there's no goat - only the nine of us. The kids are well-behaved, the wife is agreeable - and we even have some money!"

-- traditional Jewish joke

Related to: Anchoring and Adjustment

Biases are “cognitive illusions” that work on the same principle as optical illusions, and a knowledge of the latter can be profitably applied to the former. Take, for example, these two cubes (source: Lotto Lab, via Boing Boing):

The “blue” tiles on the top face of the left cube are the same color as the “yellow” tiles on the top face of the right cube; if you're skeptical you can prove it with the eyedropper tool in Photoshop (in which both shades come out a rather ugly gray).

The illusion works because visual perception is relative. Outdoor light on a sunny day can be ten thousand times greater than a fluorescently lit indoor room. As one psychology book put it: for a student reading this book outside, the black print will be objectively lighter than the white space will be for a student reading the book inside. Nevertheless, both students will perceive the white space as subjectively white and the black space as subjectively black, because the visual system returns to consciousness information about relative rather than absolute lightness. In the two cubes, the visual system takes the yellow or blue tint as a given and outputs to consciousness the colors of each pixel compared to that background.

So this optical illusion occurs when the brain judges quantities relative to their surroundings rather than based on some obj...
Updating, part 1: When can you change your mind? The binary model
by PhilGoetz — 2010-05-13T17:55:12.768Z

I was recently disturbed by my perception that, despite years of studying and debating probability problems, the LessWrong community as a whole has not markedly improved its ability to get the right answer on them.

I had expected that people would read posts and comments by other people, and take special note of comments by people who had a prior history of being right, and thereby improve their own accuracy.

But can that possibly work? How can someone who isn't already highly-accurate, identify other people who are highly accurate?

Aumann's agreement theorem (allegedly) says that Bayesians with the same priors agree. But it doesn't say that doing so helps. Under what circumstances does revising your opinions, by updating in response to people you consider reliable, actually improve your accuracy?

To find out, I built a model of updating in response to the opinions of others. It did, eventually, show that Bayesians improve their collective opinions by updating in response to the opinions of other Bayesians. But this turns out not to depend on them satisfying the conditions of Aumann's theorem, or on doing Bayesian updating. It depends only on a very simple condition, established at the start of the simulation. Can you guess what it is?

I'll write another post describing and explaining the results if this post receives a karma score over 10.

That's getting a bit ahead of ourselves, though. This post models only non-Bayesians, and the results are very different.

Here's the model:

There are G people in a group such as LessWrong.

There are N problems being discussed simultaneously.

Problems are binary problems, with an answer of either 1 or 0.

Each person's opinion on each problem is always known to all people.

Each person i has an accuracy: Their probability pi of getting any arbitrary problem correct on the first guess.

givt is what person i believes at time t is the answer to problem v (1 or 0).

pij expresses person i's estimate of the probability that an arbitrary belief of person j is correct.

Without loss of generality, assume the correct answer to every problem is 1.

Algorithm:

# Loop over T timesteps
For t = 0 to T-1 {

# Loop over G people
For i = 0 to G-1 {

# Loop over N problems
For v = 0 to N-1 {

If (t == 0)

# Special initialization for the first timestep
If (random in [0..1] < pi) givt := 1; Else givt :...
Aspergers Poll Results: LW is nerdier than the Math Olympiad?
by Roko — 2010-05-13T14:24:24.783Z

Followup to: Do you have High Functioning Aspergers Syndrome?

EDIT: To combat nonresponse bias, I'd appreciate it if anyone who considered the poll and decided not to fill it in would go and do so now, but that people who haven't already seen the poll refrain from doing so. We might get some idea of which way the bias points by looking at the difference in results.

This is your opportunity to help your community's social epistemology!

Since over 80 LW'ers were kind enough to fill out my survey on Aspergers, I thought I'd post the results.

4 people said they had already been diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome, out of 82 responses. That's 5%, where the population incidence rate is thought to be 0.36%. However the incidence rate is known to be larger than the diagnosis rate, as many AS cases (I don't know how many) go undiagnosed. An additional 4 people ticked the five diagnostic criteria I listed; if we count each of them as 1/2 a case, LW would have roughly 25 times the baseline AS rate.

The Less Wrong mean average AQ test score was 27, and only 5 people got at or below 16, which is the population average score on this test. 21 people or 26% scored 32 or more on the AQ test, though this is only an indicator and does not mean that 26% of LW have Aspergers.

To put the AQ test results in perspective, this paragraph from Wikipedia outlines what various groups got on average:

The questionnaire was trialled on Cambridge University students, and a group of sixteen winners of the British Mathematical Olympiad, to determine whether there was a link between a talent for mathematical and scientific disciplines and traits associated with the autism spectrum. Mathematics, physical sciences and engineering students were found to score significantly higher, e.g. 21.8 on average for mathematicians and 21.4 for computer scientists. The average score for the British Mathematical Olympiad winners was 24. Of the students who scored 32 or more on the test, eleven agreed to be interviewed and seven of these were reported to meet the DSM-IV criteria for Asperger syndrome, although no formal diagnosis was made as they were not suffering any distress. The test was also taken by a group of subjects who had been diagnosed with autism or Asperger syndrome by a professional, the average score being 35 and 38 for males and females respectively.

If we take 7...
Conditioning on Observers
by Joanna Morningstar — 2010-05-11T05:15:53.394Z

Response to Beauty quips, "I'd shut up and multiply!"

Related to The Presumptuous Philosopher's Presumptuous Friend, The Absent-Minded Driver, Sleeping Beauty gets counterfactually mugged

This is somewhat introductory. Observers play a vital role in the classic anthropic thought experiments, most notably the Sleeping Beauty and Presumptuous Philosopher gedankens. Specifically, it is remarkably common to condition simply on the existence of an observer, in spite of the continuity problems this raises. The source of confusion appears to be based on the distinction between the probability of an observer and the expectation number of observers, with the former not being a linear function of problem definitions.

There is a related difference between the expected gain of a problem and the expected gain per decision, which has been exploited in more complex counterfactual mugging scenarios. As in the case of the 1/2 or 1/3 confusion, the issue is the number of decisions that are expected to be made, and recasting problems so that there is at most one decision provides a clear intuition pump.

Sleeping Beauty

In the classic sleeping beauty problem, experimenters flip a fair coin on Sunday, sedate you and induce amnesia, and wake you either on just the following Monday or both the following Monday and Tuesday. Each time you are woken, you are asked for your credence that the coin came up heads.

The standard answers to this question are that the answer should be 1/2 or 1/3. For convenience let us say that the event W is being woken, H is that the coin flip came up heads and T is that the coin flip came up tails. The basic logic for the 1/2 argument is that:

P(H)=P(T)=1/2, P(W|H) = P(W|T) = P(W) = 1 so by Bayes rule P(H|W) = 1/2

The obvious issue to be taken with this approach is one of continuity. The assessment is independent of the number of times you are woken in each branch, and this implies that all non zero observer branches have their posterior probability equal to their prior probability. Clearly the subjective probability of a zero observer branch is zero, so this implies discontinuity in the decision theory. Whilst not in and of itself fatal, it is surprising. There is apparent secondary confusion over the number of observations in the sleeping beauty problem, for example:

If we want to replicate the situation 1000 times, we shouldn't end up with 1500 observ

...
Do you have High-Functioning Asperger's Syndrome?
by Roko — 2010-05-10T23:55:45.936Z

EDIT: To combat nonresponse bias, I'd appreciate it if anyone who looked at this post before and decided not to fill in the poll would go and do so now, but that people who haven't already considered and decided against filling in the poll refrain from doing so. We might get some idea of which way the bias points by looking at the difference in results.

This is your opportunity to help your community's social epistemology!

There is some evidence that consequentialist/utilitarian thinking is more common in people with Asperger's syndrome, so I thought it would be interesting to follow that correlation the other way around: what fraction of people who are attracted to rational/consequentialist thinking have what one might call "High-functioning Asperger's Syndrome"? From wisegeek:

Impaired social reactions are a key component of Asperger's syndrome. People who suffer from this condition find it difficult to develop meaningful relationships with their peers. They struggle to understand the subtleties of communicating through eye contact, body language, or facial expressions and seldom show affection towards others. They are often accused of being disrespectful and rude, since they find they can’t comprehend expectations of appropriate social behavior and are often unable to determine the feelings of those around them. People suffering from Asperger's syndrome can be said to lack both social and emotional reciprocity.

Although Asperger's syndrome is related to autism, people who suffer from this condition do not have other developmental delays. They have normal to above average intelligence and fail to meet the diagnostic criteria for any other pervasive developmental disorder. In fact, people with Asperger's syndrome often show intense focus, highly logical thinking, and exceptional abilities in math or science.

This book makes the following point about "High-functioning adults":

"Individuals at the most able end of the autistic spectrum have the most hidden form of this disorder, and as a result, these individuals and their family are often the most disadvantaged in terms of getting a diagnosis. Because they have higher IQs, high-functioning adults are able to work out ways to compensate for their difficulties in communication or in social functioning that are based on logical reasoning."

So if you are a very smart AS person, it might...
Q&A with Harpending and Cochran
by MBlume — 2010-05-10T23:01:29.986Z

Edit: Q&A is now closed. Thanks to everyone for participating, and thanks very much to Harpending and Cochran for their responses.

In response to Kaj's review, Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran, the authors of the The 10,000 Year Explosion, have agreed to a Q&A session with the Less Wrong community.

If you have any questions for either Harpending or Cochran, please reply to this post with a question addressed to one or both of them. Material for questions might be derived from their blog for the book which includes stories about hunting animals in Africa with an eye towards evolutionary implications (which rose to Jennifer's attention based on Steve Sailer's prior attention).

Please do not kibitz in this Q&A... instead go to the kibitzing area to talk about the Q&A session itself. Eventually, this post will be edited to note that the process has been closed, at which time there should be no new questions.
Not Mothers’ Day
by KatjaGrace — 2010-05-10T16:13:42.000Z

As far as I can tell, the point of phoning your mother on mothers’ day is to demonstrate your affection to her.

For a behaviour to be an honest signal of characteristic X it needs to be costly enough for those without characteristic X not to bother (or bother as much). So phoning your mother in itself is a fine signal that you like her and/or respect her. If you hated her you would call her less often or never, depending on how explicit you wanted to be about it.

Having a specific day when you are meant to phone seems to largely negate the purpose however. It’s easier for people who don’t care much to phone, relative to those who do, when:

Everyone gets reminded by the media and advertising for a long time beforehand. This means behaviour doesn’t reflect effort put into remembering.

There is one specific day you must send the signal on for it to count. This means the somewhat less caring can’t be separated from the more caring by their tendency to put the phone call off.

It’s expected that you will phone, so not phoning would be rude. There is an added cost of not phoning to anyone who doesn’t actually want to cause upset, regardless of their affection.

So it looks like I could send a stronger signal of affection toward my mother by phoning her on any other day of the year. I can probably even countersignal by not phoning her on Mothers’ day, since my talking to her regularly makes it implausible that I dislike her or wish to offend her. Why do people mostly phone on mothers day then?

I’m writing from a subculture in Australia, and I hear many variations on this tradition and presumably its requirements and implicit messages exist internationally. Perhaps someone from a culture where this makes sense can tell me about it?

Anyway, I didn’t call my mother yesterday. I presume she interprets my calling her other times as a much stronger signal. I dedicate this blog post to her instead, to show that I can remember to commemorate her goodness at being a mother on a day when I wasn’t reminded a zillion times (ok, so not a very distant day from when I was reminded, but I should be doing better than celebrating on Mothers’ Day, right?). Happy Not Mothers’ Day Mummy!