trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Mammography problem from 'Intro to Bayes' in my own words/picture
by jwhendy — 2011-04-09T03:09:21.934Z

I've been reading through the sequences, and am currently working through the Intro to Bayes' Theorem (by the fact that I'm reading the Intro to Bayes (finally), you can tell that I'm pretty early in the process). It's been quite thought provoking. I'm finally getting questions right more reliably, and wanted to share one of the visualization tools that helped me, at least. There are many "applets" strewn about, written in Java, that help one to visualize what the various probability components are doing. In the mammography example, at least, an the idea of a sieve popped into my head as a neat way to think about what the test is doing.

I'm planning to take fairly extensive notes (more about that in a soon-to-come post), but thought I'd share a little "re-write" of that problem with a graphic in case it's of any use, and also in case I've blundered in my understanding. Re-writing things in my own words helps make them my own -- I realize that this is probably going to come across as really, really, incredibly, simplistic, but it's where I'm at!

In case it's not intuitive... it's supposed to show 100% of women broken into their measured partitions of 1% with cancer and 99% without. Those respective groups are then "sifted," and the known reliability of the sieve for each of those groups is used to determine p(cancer|test+).

I'm open to aesthetic critiques as well -- I enjoy making things like this and knowing how intuitive it is to look at is helpful. It didn't turn out how my mind visualized it, but I figured it was decent enough for a start.

This was made using emacs org-mode, LaTeX, and TikZ.

Update: per some comments, I tried to make things more clear in a redo. The original picture shown is HERE.

----- Click for bigger picture or download -----
Human errors, human values
by PhilGoetz — 2011-04-09T02:50:32.851Z

The trolley problem

In 2009, a pair of computer scientists published a paper enabling computers to behave like humans on the trolley problem (PDF here). They developed a logic that a computer could use to justify not pushing one person onto the tracks in order to save five other people. They described this feat as showing "how moral decisions can be drawn computationally by using prospective logic programs."

I would describe it as devoting a lot of time and effort to cripple a reasoning system by encoding human irrationality into its logic.

Which view is correct?

Dust specks

Eliezer argued that we should prefer 1 person being tortured for 50 years over 3^^^3 people each once getting a barely-noticeable dust speck in their eyes. Most people choose the many dust specks over the torture. Some people argued that "human values" includes having a utility aggregation function that rounds tiny (absolute value) utilities to zero, thus giving the "dust specks" answer. No, Eliezer said; this was an error in human reasoning. Is it an error, or a value?

Sex vs. punishment

In Crime and punishment, I argued that people want to punish criminals, even if there is a painless, less-costly way to prevent crime. This means that people value punishing criminals. This value may have evolved to accomplish the social goal of reducing crime. Most readers agreed that, since we can deduce this underlying reason, and accomplish it more effectively through reasoning, preferring to punish criminals is an error in judgement.

Most people want to have sex. This value evolved to accomplish the goal of reproducing. Since we can deduce this underlying reason, and accomplish it more efficiently than by going out to bars every evening for ten years, is this desire for sex an error in judgement that we should erase?

The problem for Friendly AI

Until you come up with a procedure for determining, in general, when something is a value and when it is an error, there is no point in trying to design artificial intelligences that encode human "values".

(P.S. - I think that necessary, but not sufficient, preconditions for developing such a procedure, are to agree that only utilitarian ethics are valid, and to agree on an aggregation function.)
New FAI paper: 'Learning What to Value' by Daniel Dewey
by lukeprog — 2011-04-09T00:11:39.708Z

Daniel Dewey, 'Learning What to Value'

Abstract: I.J. Good's theory of an "intelligence explosion" predicts that ultraintelligent agents will undergo a process of repeated self-improvement. In the wake of such an event, how well our values are fulfilled will depend on whether these ultraintelligent agents continue to act desirably and as intended. We examine several design approaches, based on AIXI, that could be used to create ultraintelligent agents. In each case, we analyze the design conditions required for a successful, well-behaved ultraintelligent agent to be created. Our main contribution is an examination of value-learners, agents that learn a utility function from experience. We conclude that the design conditions on value-learners are in some ways less demanding than those on other design approaches.
Are Functional languages the future of programming?
by jsalvatier — 2011-04-08T20:48:23.889Z

Because I have been learning about Type Theory, I have become much more aware of and interested in Functional Programming.

If you are unfamiliar with functional programming, Real World Haskell describes functional programming like this:

In Haskell [and other functional languages], we de-emphasise code that modifies data. Instead, we focus on functions that take immutable values as input and produce new values as output. Given the same inputs, these functions always return the same results. This is a core idea behind functional programming.

Along with not modifying data, our Haskell functions usually don't talk to the external world; we call these functions pure. We make a strong distinction between pure code and the parts of our programs that read or write files, communicate over network connections, or make robot arms move. This makes it easier to organize, reason about, and test our programs.

Because of this functional languages have a number of interesting differences with traditional programming. In functional programming:

Programming is lot more like math. Programs are often elegant and terse.

It is much easier to reason about programs, including proving things about them (termination, lack of errors etc.). This means compilers have much more room to automatically optimize a program, automatically parallelizing code, merging repeated operations etc.

Static typing helps (and requires) you find and correct a large fraction of trivial bugs without running the program.

Pure code means doing things with side effects (like I/O) requires significantly more thought to start to understand, but also makes side effects more explicit.

Program evaluation is defined much more directly on the syntax of the language.

After having learned and experimented a bit with functional languages, it seems like they are the future of programming languages. It is my impression that functional languages are more popular among LWers than among programmers in general. Do other LWers share my assessment? Are there other things about functional languages I should be aware of?
Profile of Eric Schadt
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-04-08T18:09:06.954Z

This article leaves me with a very mixed impression-- it's excessively gosh-wow, but it matches my beliefs that things are generally more complex than they look, and this is especially true about biology.

Schadt doesn't seem to have much web presence, which makes it harder to judge anything about what he's doing.

His background was very intellectually deprived-- he's ended up doing serious biology (or at least in high-status jobs in the field) through a combination of moderately good luck and extremely high drive. It leaves me wondering how much talent just gets lost.

ETA: I forgot to mention that the reason I posted is that if Schadt is right that biological systems are extremely complex, that it isn't feasible to develop drugs based on counteracting the effects of single genes, but that this complexity can be met by people doing networked science, then it's very important.
What is wrong with "Traditional Rationality"?
by Perplexed — 2011-04-08T17:13:52.387Z

In several places in the sequences, Eliezer writes condescendingly about "Traditional Rationality". The impression given is that Traditional Rationality was OK in its day, but that today we have better varieties of rationality available.

That is fine, except that it is unclear to me just what the traditional kind of rationality included, and it is also unclear just what it failed to include. In one essay, Eliezer seems to be saying that Traditional Rationality was too concerned with process, whereas it should have been concerned with winning. In other passages, it seems that the missing ingredient in the traditional version was Bayesianism (a la Jaynes). Or sometimes, the missing ingredient seems to be an understanding of biases (a la Kahneman and Tversky).

In this essay, Eliezer laments that being a traditional rationalist was not enough to keep him from devising a Mysterious Answer to a mysterious question. That puzzles me because I would have thought that traditional ideas from Peirce, Popper, and Korzybski would have been sufficient to avoid that error. So apparently I fail to understand either what a Mysterious Answer is or just how weak the traditional form of rationality actually is.

Can anyone help to clarify this? By "Traditional Rationality", does Eliezer mean to designate a particular collection of ideas, or does he use it more loosely to indicate any thinking that is not quite up to his level?
Meta: How should LW account deletion work?
by matt — 2011-04-08T02:41:49.558Z

At 2011-04-08 LW user account deletion is broken. We (Trike) will fix it… but how should it work?

Options:

Easy complete deletion: At the click of a button you can remove your account, all of your posts, and all of your comments. It's just that easy to scrub your activity from the site.

Delete = Disable account: The account deletion process removes your ability to log in and your user page. Your posts and comments remain. (You get warned that you're about to lose the ability to change anything you've previously posted and that your username will continue to be associated with your previous account activity.) Actually deleting everything requires you to do it manually.

I favour 2 (Delete = Disable account). Poking a hole into all of the conversations you've been a part of should be hard - it reduces the quality of the site's archive.

I've made three comments below: "VOTE: Easy complete deletion", "VOTE: Delete = Disable account", and "VOTE: Karma balance". What do y'reckon?

(Detail - Under the Delete = Disable account option: Your username would continue to be unavailable to others. Your user account page would be replaced with a "User account deleted" page. Your old account activity would remain and link back to the "Account deleted" page.)
Help re:Less Wrong Meetup please?
by Goobahman — 2011-04-08T00:08:03.607Z

Hi Everyone,

I've been conducting a LW meetup in West Sydney. had 3 somewhat succesful sessions. Covered the following topics:

1. What is rationality? Who uses it? Why be less wrong?

2. Map and Territroy

3. Belief: functions, proper and imporper and other things pertaining.

I'm wondering what would be a good topic for the next session, so any suggestions would be much appreciated. I'm finding whilst people enjoy the conversations for the most part, they find it hard to make it applicable and marry it back to real life situations.

Any ideas on how I can help communicate that what we study and do at the meet up is relevant and applicable in their day to day lives? And what would be a good topic to do this on?

I get the feeling this will require people to sort of open up and share themselves with the group. Any good ways of cultivating that type of environment?

Thanks in advance.
Failure Modes sometimes correspond to Game Mechanics
by Johnicholas — 2011-04-07T23:18:40.772Z

If you want to carry a brimming cup of coffee without spilling it, you may want to "change" your goal to instead primarily concentrate on humming. This is an example of a general pattern. It sometimes helps to focus on a nearby artificial goal rather than your actual goal. Let me call that strategy "gamification". There is a business strategy, also named "gamification", of adding game mechanics to a website in order to achieve various business goals. This is related but different. Here I'm referring to a strategy for problem solvers.

We sometimes fail, and sometimes one failure is very similar to another failure. That is, there are characteristic ways that we fail. One of the primary ways that we can improve is to learn our failure modes and create external structures (pieces of paper, software tools) that check, protect against, or head off those forms of failure.

For example, imagine this plan of checklist improvement:

Change your normal way of working to include an explicit checklist (that starts empty).

When you make a mistake:

Analyze what went wrong

Try to generalize the particular incident to a category

Add an item to your checklist.

This is very simple and generic, but it is reasonable to believe that if you carefully and diligently followed this plan, your reliability would go up (with diminishing returns because your errors are also your opportunities for improvement). I have not read Mayo, but her "error-theoretic" philosophy of science might be applicable here.

We can try to build a correspondence between failure modes, and game mechanics that attempt to cope for that failure mode.

Failure modes and their corresponding game mechanics

Overwhelmedness and Boredom/Apathy

In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow diagram with axes of challenge versus mastery, flow appears when both the task challenge (or difficulty) and the individual's mastery of (or skill in) the task is high. If challenge is too high, you may feel overwhelmed and fail to make progress. An artificial, very easy goal may help. If the challenge is too low, you may feel bored or apathetic, and fail to make progress. An artificial, more difficult goal may help. Quests (see WorldOfWarcraft or almost any fantasy RPG) and Achievements are game mechanics that fit this general pattern of GoalSetting; easy achievements (see AchievementUnlocked) correspond to the overwhelmedness failure...
Spaniard Lesswrongers, Unite!
by Raw_Power — 2011-04-07T22:46:53.648Z

Por favor contesten en la sección de comentarios si son Españoles o residentes en España. La idea es entrar en comunicación, y poder discutir problemas de racionalidad propios de España. Que ésta página es muy EEUU-céntrica y aquí tenemos problemas endémicos.

Nota: Los hispanoamericanos también son los bienvenidos, anque solo sea por el idioma.

Nota 2: Los demás hispanohablantes y residentes en España también están bienvenidos: disculpad mi falta de imaginación al asumir que no habría. De hecho, que venga cualquier Lesswronger que quiera, ya nos las arreglaremos para compaginar idiomas.

Translation: Pease answer in the Comments section if you happen to be Spaniards or resident in Spain. The point of this thread is to establish contact, and be able to discuss rationality problems that are endemic to Spain. This site can sometimes feel far too US-Centric.

Note: Latin Americans are welcome to join us, if only because we share a language.

Note 2: Other residents of Spain, heck, any other lesswrongers are welcome. Sorry for assuming you wouldn't be there: I wansn't being exclusive, it's just that I wasn't expecting you. I forget Barcelona is a very cosmopolitan city.
LessWrongers at Eastercon, 22-25 April?
by Richard_Kennaway — 2011-04-07T21:20:04.645Z

Given that LessWrong readers tend to read science fiction, I wonder if any of us will be at this year's Eastercon in Birmingham (UK), 22-25 April? I will be, from Friday afternoon until some time on Monday afternoon. Anyone else? Anyone wants to say hello, I look like this.

ETA: Moved to main forum per custom, although this isn't quite a formal meetup arrangement. For one thing, the convention hasn't published a programme yet, so it isn't possible to schedule anything more definite than "some time over the Easter weekend".
A potential problem with using  Solomonoff induction as a prior
by JoshuaZ — 2011-04-07T19:27:40.562Z

There's a problem that has occurred to me that I haven't seen discussed anywhere: I don't think people actually wants to assign zero probability to all hypotheses which are not Turing computable. Consider the following hypothetical: we come up with a theory of everything that seems to explain all the laws of physics but there's a single open parameter (say the fine structure constant). We compute a large number of digits of this constant, and someone notices that when expressed in base 2, the nth digit seems to be 1 iff the nth Turing machine halts on the blank tape for some fairly natural ordering of all Turing machines. If we confirm this for a large number of digits (not necessarily consecutive digits- obviously some of the 0s won't be confirmable) shouldn't we consider the hypothesis the digits really are given by this simple but non-computable function? But if our priors assign zero probability to all non-computable hypotheses then this hypothesis must always be stuck with zero probability.

If the universe is finite we could approximate this function with a function which was instead "Halts within K" steps where K is some large number, but intutively this seems like a more complicated hypothesis than the original one.

I'm not sure what is a reasonable prior in this sort of context that handles this sort of thing. We don't want an uncountable set of priors. It might make sense to use something like hypotheses which are describable in Peano arithmetic or something like that.
[LINK] Ethical Pick-Up Artistry (Clarisse Thorn)
by KenChen — 2011-04-07T18:34:08.805Z

Clarisse Thorn recently posted a useful article about Ethical Pick-Up Artistry, bringing up a few basic critiques of traditional PUA and suggesting a few alternatives.

Here’s the thing: the current pickup artist subculture has a monopoly on effective advice for how to break down social interactions and talk to women. Not all of it works, but enough of it works that it draws guys in. As a pickup artist instructor once told me, “When I first found the community I was horrified by how sleazy and gross it is, but I had never had a girlfriend and I told myself: dude, if you don’t learn this stuff you’re gonna die alone.”

I’ve theorized that maybe feminists should provide good pickup advice, in an attempt to counterbalance some of the awfulness of the existing community. In the meantime, however, I figure the next best thing to do is to provide a list of less-misogynistic pickup artist instructors and sites, and a few very basic critiques.

A proposal to formalize this Not the same thing, but a discussion on forming a community to practice social artistry in general has been brought up on LW before, but I'm not personally aware of anything coming out of that.
What are you working on? April 2011
by jsalvatier — 2011-04-07T17:56:51.168Z

The is the second 'What are you working on?' thread. The last one is here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started, those are for a different thread.

Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).

Talk about your goals for the project.

Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.

Link to your work if it's linkable
Autism and Lesswrong
by CuSithBell — 2011-04-07T15:34:38.846Z

I am turning over in my head an idea for a discussion post. This preliminary post has two main purposes:

Do we have statistics for where lesswrong readers / posters lie on the Autism spectrum?

What are your thoughts on the relationship (if any) between lesswrong and autism (and, perhaps, between rationality and autism)?

Can you help me out?
Building on existing human motivations
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-04-07T14:36:42.190Z

A marketer explains what he learned from D&D.

In particular, that killing monsters, taking their stuff, and telling the tale are basic human pleasures, and successful marketing builds on such stuff-- and that playing the good guy is more satisfying than playing the bad guy.

On the other hand (this is me, not the article), it doesn't seem to be as satisfying to be a good guy who finds an undramatic solution than to be a combative good guy. I count the sort of non-violence that gets you killed as combative goodguyism.

Would it help to personify irrationality as a monster? I don't think so, though I do think we come close to personifying death as a monster, and in fact there's a parable somewhere portraying death as a dragon.

I was never a serious gamer, but I do have pleasant memories of actually finding a use for the druid spell that creates a forest.
The AV referendum and rationality
by  — 2011-04-07T13:16:27.013Z

I know 'Politics is the mind-killer' and I'm prepared for downvotes here, but thought this would be worth pointing out.
In the UK at the moment we're preparing for a referendum, on May 5, on whether to switch our voting system for General Elections from First Past The Post (FPTP) to the Alternative Vote (AV). I see this not as a question of politics (the fact that it crosses normal party lines tends to suggest I'm right) but as a question of information theory and cybernetics. Once it's seen in that light, the answer becomes obvious.
Unfortunately, the only real coverage this has received in the media has been along group identity lines. Both sides claim the Nazis would benefit from a vote for the other side, and other than that the No campaign's line has been pretty much "There's a black man in this leaflet but not this other one, therefore the Yes campaign are racist!" or "Nick Clegg likes AV and you don't like Nick Clegg, therefore you don't like AV!"
Meanwhile the Yes campaign has been little better, its main campaign consisting of "MPs don't like AV and you don't like MPs, so vote Yes!" and "Stephen Fry likes AV, and you like Stephen Fry, so vote Yes!"
It would be quite understandable, with debate like that, if the average British LessWronger were to think that the matter was just a matter of normal mammalian status politics, on a par with the riots last year over whether to call something a 'graduate tax' or 'tuition fees'. But in this case, there is a substantial difference, and an obvious rational choice.
Assuming, for the moment, that we're agreed that representative democracy of some form is a reasonable system of government, one of the main advantages of that system is that it has to be somewhat responsive to the citizenry - voters put information into the system at election time, and that information determines the makeup of the government.
Assuming we think that a good thing, we want to maximise the amount of information each voter can put into the system. The more information put in, the more accurately the government can respond to the will of the people.
Now, with First Past The Post, the system is that in each constituency, the candidate with the largest number of votes gets elected, and all the candidate cares about is his/her majority over the candidate with the next-largest number of votes. This means that in all but a very small number of cases...
Lesswrong Meetup in Barcelona?
by Raw_Power — 2011-04-07T11:50:23.101Z

Perhaps the Spaniard and/or Catalan tropers, and those others who simply feel like visiting this wonderful city that is Barcelona, could meet here during Semana Santa, the Spanish Spring Break, which lasts from April 15 to April 24. We could decide on a date within that interval. I'm not trying to compete with Paris or anything, but it's really one of the most convenient times in the year for such an event to take place.

Don't expect any Ku Klux Klan lookalikes though, Catalonia just doesn't do that.