trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Rationality and Relationships
by lukeprog — 2011-08-08T04:02:39.234Z

Recently I asked for feedback on two versions of a new post, 'Rationality Lessons from Romance'. 'Version 2' was my original draft. 'Version 1' was a more recent draft edited in response to comments from a collaborator. We wanted to test whether my collaborator's comments genuinely improved the post. Version 2 now sits at 1 upvote and version 1 now sits at 16 upvotes, and I take this to be some evidence in favor of the hypothesis that my collaborator's comments improved the post.

My thanks to those who participated in that experiment; we got the information we wanted!

Thanks also to those of you who provided feedback on either version of the post. Most comments were critical, but this is often the case even with massively upvoted posts like Build Small Skills in the Right Order. My hope is that relationships posts on Less Wrong merely need to be better and more sensitive to a wide variety of sensitivities than my first attempt was, not that sex and relationships are inherently mind-killing topics. There is an amazing interplay between rationality and relationships, and I feel it would be a shame to leave them unexplored.

So I'm trying to learn how LessWrongers can discuss relationships productively.

One difficulty in extracting lessons from the feedback on 'Rationality Lessons from Romance' is that different people had different complaints. Some were 'seriously skeeved-out' by the overtly personal nature of the post, even though earlier posts of a similar personal nature have fared well on Less Wrong, and even though others didn't mind the personal-ness of the post. Some didn't like the promotion of polyamory, others didn't mind. Some thought my interactions with women were unethical, others didn't. Some disagreed with a premise of the post, that sexual jealousy and monogamy are suboptimal for some people. Some felt the brief lessons pulled out from the stories were effective, others didn't. Some thought I was, like Socrates, being skewered for looking at things with too much clarity, others thought my post was weird and confusing.

I may try to rewrite 'Rationality Lessons from Romance', incorporating as much of the feedback as I can. In the meantime, I'd like to ask the Less Wrong community to very different questions:

What standard or non-standard rationality lessons can you draw from your own journeys in romance?

How have your intimate rela

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Meetup : Orange County Atheist Meetup Wednesday August 10
by JGWeissman — 2011-08-08T03:09:47.291Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Orange County Atheist Meetup Wednesday August 10

WHEN:
10 August 2011 07:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
18542 MacArthur Blvd Irvine, CA 92612

This week we are going to do something a little different for the weekly Irvine meetup. There is an atheist group in Orange County that has monthly meetups, so let's join them for their August Meetup. I attended the meetup last month, and found that several of the people there were interested in such topics as probability theory, heuristics and biases, and Singularity issues.

The main event starts at 7:30 at the upstairs table at the IHOP. Some members also show up for drinks and appetizers at the El Torito across the street at 6:30. They would appreciate if you RSVP in the comments of the linked announcement.

Discussion article for the meetup : Orange County Atheist Meetup Wednesday August 10
Career choice for a utilitarian giver
by juliawise — 2011-08-08T02:10:51.711Z

I’m a utilitarian contemplating a career change. I currently give all my income to international development (which is possible because my husband supports us both financially). I don’t have any special gift for science, etc. that would help save the world, so I think donations are the best way I can help.

I’m 26 and halfway through social work school. I enjoy social work and am reasonably good at it, but the most I’ll ever earn is probably $80K/year. I’m now thinking more about the moral imperative to earn more and thus give more.

Most high-earning careers are not ones I think I would enjoy. That means I would be fighting burnout for the rest of my career. (I'm open to suggestions if you think otherwise.) The exception is psychiatry, which I do think I would enjoy and be moderately good at. But I would need about nine years of school and residency to become a psychiatrist.

If I go to medical school and become an average psychiatrist, I’d double my expected lifetime earnings compared to social work (even after paying for school). I could give about 2 million dollars more, which GiveWell thinks turns into about 2,500 lives saved. No amount of inconvenience on my part compares with that many lives.

So what I want to do is figure out whether I could be productive as a psychiatrist or some other profession, or whether there’s a good reason I should stay on my current course.

Some considerations:

I’m fairly smart but not competitive-natured. I think this would make me bad at a lot of careers that pay well but don’t require extra school, because there’s more competition for those jobs.

I’m not sure about my academic capabilities. I haven’t taken a real science course since high school. It’s also been a long time since I had to do the kind of rote memorization that I believe is needed in law or medical school. I’m worried that I would get into one of these and then find I wasn’t up to the work.

I have no interest in chemistry. Also, I don’t do well when sleep-deprived. Both of these might make me a terrible med student.

I’ve had bouts of depression in the past, but never ones that crippled my ability to study/work. If I were busier, they might cripple me more.

I wo...
Towards a New Decision Theory for Parallel Agents 
by Ronny Fernandez — 2011-08-07T23:39:58.376Z

A recent post: Consistently Inconsistent, raises some problems with the unitary view of the mind/brain, and presents the modular view of the mind as an alternate hypothesis. The parallel/modular view of the brain not only deals better with the apparent hypocritical and contradictory ways our desires, behaviors, and believes seem to work, but also makes many successful empirical predictions, as well as postdictions. Much of that work can be found in Dennett's 1991 book: "Consciousness Explained" which details both the empirical evidence against the unitary view, and the intuition-fails involved in retaining a unitary view after being presented with that evidence.

The aim of this post is not to present further evidence in favor of the parallel view, nor to hammer any more nails in the the unitary view's coffin; the scientific and philosophical communities have done well enough in both departments to discard the intuitive hypothesis that there is some executive of the mind keeping things orderly. The dilemma I wish to raise is a question: "How should we update our decision theories to deal with independent, and sometimes inconsistent, desires and believes being had by one agent?"

If we model one agent's desires by using one utility function, and this function orders the outcomes the agent can reach on one real axis, then it seems like we might be falling back into the intuitive view that there is some me in there with one definitive list of preferences. The picture given to us by Marvin Mimsky and Dennett involves a bunch of individually dumb agents, each with a unique set of specialized abilities and desires, interacting in such a way so as to produce one smart agent, with a diverse set of abilities and desires, but the smart agent only apears when viewed from the right level of description. For convenience, we will call those dumb-specialized agents "subagents", and the smart-diverse agent that emerges from their interaction "the smart agent". When one considers what it would be useful for a seeing-neural-unit to want to do, and contrasts it with what it would be useful for a get that food-neural-unit to want to do, e.g., examine that prey longer v.s. charge that prey, turn head v.s. keep running forward, stay attentive v.s. eat that food, etc. it becomes clear that cleverly managing which unit gets to have how much control, and when, is an essential pa...
IntelligenceExplosion.com
by lukeprog — 2011-08-07T17:46:40.071Z

I put together a 'landing page' for the intelligence explosion concept similar to Nick Bostrom's landing pages for anthropics, the simulation argument, and existential risk. The new website is IntelligenceExplosion.com. You can see I borrowed the CSS from Bostrom's anthropics page and then simplified it.

Just as with the Singularity FAQ, I'll be keeping this website up to date, so please send me corrections or bibliography additions at luke [at] singinst [dot] org.
Paper draft: Relative advantages of uploads, artificial general intelligences, and other digital minds
by Kaj_Sotala — 2011-08-07T16:53:42.171Z

http://www.xuenay.net/Papers/DigitalAdvantages.pdf

Abstract: I survey four categories of factors that might give a digital mind, such as an upload or an artificial general intelligence, an advantage over humans. The categories are hardware advantages, self-improvement advantages, co-operative advantages and human handicaps. The shape of hardware growth curves as well as the ease of modifying minds are found to be some of the core influences on how quickly a digital mind may take advantage of these factors.

Still a bit of a rough draft (could use a bunch of tidying up, my references aren't in a consistent format, etc.), but I wanted to finally get this posted somewhere public so I could get further feedback.
Meetup : Hiking in Vancouver, Canada
by michaelkeenan — 2011-08-07T09:59:22.784Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Hiking in Vancouver, Canada

WHEN:
09 August 2011 06:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Grouse Mountain, British Columbia, Canada

We're hiking at Grouse Mountain on Tuesday evening from 6:30pm. The best way to get there seems to be taking the seabus to North Vancouver and then catching the 236 from there.

There is a free (if you pay for the mountain pass or have a annual pass) transit (shuttle bus) that goes from downtown to Grouse.
Pickup/drop-off points (for the shuttle bus) are Canada Place, the Hyatt Regency and the Blue Horizon Hotel.

I'm going to be driving there from Joyce St in Collingwood from about 5:30pm, so get in touch (michael dot keenan AT gmail dot com or +1 650 283 9013) if you'd like to be picked up on the way.

To hear more last minute details, join the mailing list.

Discussion article for the meetup : Hiking in Vancouver, Canada
[SEQ RERUN] My Wild and Reckless Youth
by MinibearRex — 2011-08-07T05:58:34.499Z

Today's post, My Wild and Reckless Youth was originally published on 30 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Traditional rationality (without Bayes' Theorem) allows you to formulate hypotheses without a reason to prefer them to the status quo, as long as they are falsifiable. Even following all the rules of traditional rationality, you can waste a lot of time. It takes a lot of rationality to avoid making mistakes; a moderate level of rationality will just lead you to make new and different mistakes.

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 Say Not "Complexity", 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.
Counting upvotes/downvotes
by calcsam — 2011-08-07T04:37:37.523Z

I've recently posted several articles in my "Building Rationalist Communities" series. Some, like "Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don't Implement Themselves" have been fairly popular, as measured by upvotes; others, like Community Roles less so.

But here is a small problem: I can see my net upvotes versus downvotes, but I can't see the numbers of each. Normally this is probably not much of a problem. But this series has been relatively controversial, and I would like to personally distinguish disagreement (high upvotes and high downvotes), from disinterest (low upvotes and low downvotes).

At least for my personal satisfaction and curiosity if nothing else, is there any way to see the absolute numbers?
Tip: Reading LW on the Kindle
by anonym — 2011-08-06T22:40:04.792Z

I just discovered an easy way of reading Less Wrong (and other web content) on the Kindle, and I thought others might also find this useful. I am sharing this as a discussion post rather than as a comment in an open thread in order to reach a larger audience, because this answers a need I've had for a long time (wanting a convenient way to read more on my Kindle and less on my computer monitor) that I suspect quite a few other LW readers also have. Moderators/admins: please delete this if it seems inappropriate for even the discussion section.

The free Readability Firefox Plugin adds a 'Send to Kindle' button to Firefox, which when clicked, sends the web page in a highly readable format (stripped of header, footer, and margin text, ads, etc.) to your Kindle (for free delivery via Wi-Fi or USB). You just have to change your kindle settings to accept email from kindle@readability.com, and tell the plugin your kindle address (e.g., yourusername@free.kindle.com).

On a related note, there are also epub and mobi files available for some of the sequences.
Meetup : West LA Meetup 08-09-2011
by  — 2011-08-06T20:52:05.450Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup 08-09-2011

WHEN:
09 August 2011 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10800 West Pico Blvd, Suite 312, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7pm - 9pm August 9th.

Where: The Westside Pavillion - on the bridge, which connects Nordstrom 3rd floor with Barnes & Noble / Landmark Theatres 3rd floor.

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Whether you're a regular reader or totally new, here for the theoretical musings or the practical things, come by and say hello! The conversation is largely unstructured, and the people are awesome.

There will be snacks. I will bring a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

See also: West LA Biweekly Meetups

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup 08-09-2011
Selecting optimal group projects and roles 
by calcsam — 2011-08-06T17:50:36.561Z

Related to: Designing Rationalist Projects, Committees and Leadership

As I mentioned in the above posts, Latter-day Saints communities organize committees to accomplish specific tasks, like serving the outside community or making sure new members get friends.

The question is, what tasks should rationalist communities organize committees or assign individuals to accomplish?

The easy answer: whatever its members want. But there are some collective roles and activities which are better for community-building than others.

Consider the following jury-rigged contraption, which I'll call Bhagwat’s community-building ratio:

group project goodness = U(project) / E(social friction),

that is, task goodness equals task utility divided by the expected amount of resulting social friction. For example:

Learning PUA:

U(task): medium. Many LW-goers do express a desire to improve social skills.

E(social friction): high. This seems to alienate many (most?), though not all, women. And LW meetups need more women, both to function better now and because it would facilitate future meme propagation.

Rejection therapy:

U(task): medium-to-high. This also helps to improve social skiils, especially assertiveness. More simple and widely applicable than PUA; easy to do without a mentor.

E(social friction): low. This is a multi-gender activity.

So rejection therapy would likely make a better group task then PUA.

What are the most high-utility, low-social-friction tasks?

The lowest-hanging fruit I know of is to make people feel welcome.[1]

Whenever someone comes to the group for the first time, the group leader should make sure to meet them personally and make them feel welcome. They should get their contact info and afterwards send them a brief e-mail/text, sincerely thanking them for coming.

As people are starting to come for the first few weeks, the group leader should get to know them personally and understand what they’re looking for and why they came. Maybe there’s a particular book or Less Wrong sequence they would like. Maybe they’re trying to improve some skills and would appreciate follow-up. Maybe there’s some skill they know that other Less Wrongians want to learn – and they could teach them!

If you’re able to personalize their experience, you will improve your score on Bhagwat’s Law of Commitment: “The degr

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Why are certain trends so precisely exponential?
by orthonormal — 2011-08-06T17:38:42.140Z

I was reading a post on the economy from the political statistics blog FiveThirtyEight, and the following graph shocked me:

This, according to Nate Silver, is a log-scaled graph of the GDP of the United States since the Civil War, adjusted for inflation. What amazes me is how nearly perfect the linear approximation is (representing exponential growth of approximately 3.5% per year), despite all the technological and geopolitical changes of the past 134 years. (The Great Depression knocks it off pace, but WWII and the postwar recovery set it neatly back on track.) I would have expected a much more meandering rate of growth.

It reminds me of Moore's Law, which would be amazing enough as a predicted exponential lower bound of technological advance, but is staggering as an actual approximation:

I don't want to sound like Kurzweil here, but something demands explanation: is there a good reason why processes like these, with so many changing exogenous variables, seem to keep right on a particular pace of exponential growth, as opposed to wandering between phases with different exponents?

EDIT: As I commented below, not all graphs of exponentially growing quantities exhibit this phenomenon- there still seems to be something rather special about these two graphs.
Raise the Age Demographic 
by calcsam — 2011-08-06T17:10:08.420Z

Related to: Building rationalist communities, Lessons from Latter-day Saints, Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don't Implement Themselves, Designing rationalist projects, Community roles: teachers and auxiliaries, Committees and Leadership

In the previous posts, I listed the main roles in Latter-day Saint communities. In this post and one to follow, I will outline possible roles and implications for rationalist communities.

I previously mentioned the issue of teacher selections: the balance between selecting the more natural teachers and giving the less outgoing and articulate contingent a chance.

The latter is important, because it’s a route to long-term skill development for all members.[1] But, like most investments, it requires long time horizons. It’s not viable to invest in developing talent if your embryonic talent is going to pack up and leave.

So how do you establish a long time horizon? How do you create a norm, an expectation, a common practice of sticking around in the group?

Unsurprisingly, this takes time to develop.

Reducing Turnover

Wherever the church is newly established, growth is fast, but turnover is high. This is caused (at least, immediately caused) by higher levels of infighting and quarreling. A commonly-told story is of an early church leader named Thomas B. Marsh dissatisfied over increased militarization and hostilities against neighbors. As a result, he signed an affidavit which helped trigger the forcible expulsion of Mormons from the state of Missouri.

I’ll repeat that: where the church is new, growth is fast, but turnover is high.

Many of the church members in India were in their late teens or early 20’s, looking for more direction in life. We were glad they joined, but there was a problem. The stability of the church organization in India was inversely proportional to the proportion of church members who were young, single adults.

One set of problems stemmed from romances gone awry, unwanted male attention, and resulting gossip. Another set of problems stemmed from simple unreliability – they often wouldn’t take their organizational responsibilities seriously, or wouldn’t prepare for classes they were supposed to teach.[2] And they generally weren’t as useful in teaching other members, because they weren’t as mature.

Of course fami

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Am confused about part of the IC* algorithm in Pearl's Causality.
by Psy-Kosh — 2011-08-06T16:16:22.565Z

(EDIT: Disregard this, the source of my confusion was me mixing up marked and unmarked arrows. I was thinking "marked arrow = actual causal arrow _or_ latent common cause in the underlying reality, unmarked arrow = actual causal arrow in the underlying reality", but I mixed up the definitions and it's actually the other way around. Actually, I think I was being stupid in multiple ways, but the overall answer to this post is that I was being stupid and mixed up multiple things, including to what extent steps 1 and 2 could be trusted to find all v-structures, given the possibility of unknown latent variables. (EDIT2: Wait, if there truly was an adb v-structure, shouldn't step 2 have at least put an unmarked arrowhead from a to b?))

Am having another go at trying to go through the book (second edition, first printing), and find myself rather confused about rule 2 in step 3 of the IC* algorithm.

Suppose a, b, c, d are all observed variables, a and d are adjacent by an initially undirected edge, a*->b*->c*->d (where *-> represents a marked arrow), and c is not adjacent to d.

Rule 2 would have us now turn the a-d edge into an unmarked arrow from a to d

But... shouldn't an unmarked arrow from a to d be the one thing that is absolutely forbidden? ie, one of the possible underlying reality states allowed by the above is that c has causal influence over d. If you also have a -> d, then you have a v structure with a,d,c. But assuming stable distribution relative to the true latent structure and having the actual distribution of the observable variables rather than just a sample, and all those other "it's all well behaved" assumptions, then steps 1 and 2 should have already found all of the v structures among the observed variables.

So how is rule 2 of step 3 allowed to introduce potential new (possible) v structures among observed variables? Illumination would be appreciated, thank you. :)