trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Index of Yvain's (Excellent) Articles
by lukeprog — 2011-06-30T09:57:01.363Z

Yvain is one of Less Wrong's best and most prolific writers. I suspect many Less Wrongers haven't read his posts. Here's an index of Yvain's articles (not including meta posts, ranked by upvotes (like on my post index):

Generalizing from One Example (176)

Diseased Thinking: Dissolving Questions about Disease (154)

Eight Short Studies on Excuses (137)

Confidence Levels Inside and Outside an Argument (97)

The Least Convenient Possible World (96)

Intellectual Hipsters and Metacontrarianism (94)

The Apologist and the Revolutionary (92)

Are Wireheads Happy? (89)

Doing Your Good Deed for the Day (85)

Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others... (78)

Defense Against the Dark Arts: Case Study #1 (72)

How to Not Lose an Argument (71)

A Parable of Obsolete Ideologies (71)

Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great (70)

Shut Up and Guess (64)

Simultaneously Right and Wrong (62)

Beware Trivial Inconveniences (61)

The Trouble with 'Good' (60)

That Other Kind of Status (57)

Never Leave Your Room (54)

Guilt: Another Gift Nobody Wants (52)

Missing the Trees for the Forest (50)

Techniques for Probability Estimates (50)

The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist (50)

Offense Versus Harm Minimization (49)

The Power of Positivist Thinking (46)

When Truth Isn't Enough (44)

Book Review: The Root of Thought (41)

Conflicts Between Mental Subagents: Expanding Wei Dai's Master-Slave Model (40)

Diplomacy as a Game Theory Laboratory (39)

Typical Mind and Politics (39)

The Skeptic's Trilemma (37)

The 'Spot the Fakes' Test (36)

Blue- and Yellow-Tinted Choices (36)

Applied Picoeconomics (36)

Antagonizing Opioid Receptors for (Prevention of) Fun and Profit (34)

What I Tell You Three Times is True (33)

Where's Your Sense of Mystery? (30)

Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up? (30)

Crowley on Religious Experience (29)

Solutions to Political Problems as Counterfactuals (28)

Why Real Men Wear Pink (28)

Rationalist Poetry Fans, Unite! (27)

Why Support the Underdog? (27)

The Zombie Preacher of Somerset (24)

Are You a Solar Deity? (24)

The Implicit Association Test (23)

More Thought on Assertions (22)

Fight Biases, or Route Around Them? (22)

Bogus Pipeline, Bona Fide Pipeline (19)

Help, Help, I'm Being Oppressed! (19)

It's Not Like Anything to Be a Bat (12)

Framing Effects in Anthropology (1)
[SEQ RERUN] Focus Your Uncertainty
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2011-06-30T05:21:41.099Z

Today's post, Focus Your Uncertainty, was originally published on 05 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you are paid for post-hoc analysis, you might like theories that "explain" all possible outcomes equally well, without focusing uncertainty. But what if you don't know the outcome yet, and you need to have an explanation ready in 100 minutes? Then you want to spend most of your time on excuses for the outcomes that you anticipate most, so you still need a theory that focuses your uncertainty.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we're 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 The Importance of Saying "Oops", 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.
Please vote -- What topic would be best for an investigation and brief post?
by Nic_Smith — 2011-06-30T04:50:40.316Z

Followup to: Systematic Search for Useful Ideas

I've set up a pairwise poll for this question and additional suggestions are welcome. My original proposal was to examine topics that haven't already been covered here, but instead of that, I'd like to ask people to consider the existing level of discussion on a topic in evaluating what would be "best."

ETA: There are currently over 500 pairs. You don't have to go through all of them -- answer as many or as few as you like.
Born rule or universal prior?
by cousin_it — 2011-06-29T23:27:22.981Z

You're about to flip a quantum coin a million times (these days you can even do it on the internet). What's your estimate of the K-complexity of the resulting string, conditional on everything else you've observed in your life so far? The Born rule, combined with the usual counting argument, implies you should say "about 1 million". The universal prior implies you should say "substantially less than 1 million". Which will it be?

EDIT: Wei Dai's comment explains why this post is wrong.
LW Bipolar Support Group?
by bipolar — 2011-06-29T22:06:30.588Z

Related to: Intrapersonal negotiation

I'm writing to inquire about whether there's interest on LW in developing a bipolar support group.

There's a general issue of the people at in-person support groups and designated online forums. been relatively uneducated; having little capacity for or ability for reflection; and for the discussion at such places to degenerate into platitudes. I was touched by datadataeverywhere's posting Intrapersonal negotiation and would be interested in talking with similar people about similar topics.

I'm bipolar ii and have been for at least a decade but only fully became aware of my condition over the past year. I've found my varying functionality/productivity corresponding to hypomanic/depressive oscillations very confusing and have little idea of how to best ride out the waves. I am seeing a psychiatrist and have read books such as The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide, Second Edition: What You and Your Family Need to Know, and The Bipolar Workbook: Tools for Controlling Your Mood Swings. I tried to read the Goodwin/Jamison Manic-Depressive Illness but found it dull. I looked at Jamison's other books but though she's a very poetic author I found the accuracy and general applicability of her subjective narratives questionable.

Anyway, any LWers who are interested should comment below or PM me.
So what are our Mid-Term goals? 
by Fergus_Mackinnon — 2011-06-29T20:44:56.471Z

I know that Rationalism is fairly spread out as an ideology, but, thankfully, very few rationalists seem to subscribe to the popular belief that allowing someone you can't see to suffer by your inaction is somehow different from walking on while some kid you don't know bleeds out on the pavement. So, if most of us are consequentialist altruists, precisely what should we be doing? SIAI are working on the Silver-Bullet project, for example, but what about the rest of us? Giles is attempting to form a altruist community, and I'm sure there are a number of other, scattered, projects members are working on independently. (I searched for any previous discussions, but didn't find any. If there are some I missed, please send me the links.)

However, a lot of the community's mid-term plans seem to be riding on the success of the SIAI project, and although I am not qualified to judge it's probability... not having other plans in the event it fails, when most of us don't have any skills that would contribute to the Friendly AI project anyway, seems overly-hopeful. There are of course several short-term projects, the Rationalist Boot-Camps for example, but they don't currently seem to be one of the main focuses.

I suppose, what I'm trying to ask without stepping on too many SIAI researchers toes, is what should non-researchers who want to help be doing in case it doesn't work, and why?
Meetup : Cambridge Massachusetts meetup
by jimrandomh — 2011-06-29T16:57:15.314Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge Massachusetts meetup

WHEN:
03 July 2011 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
290 Main St # 6, Cambridge, MA

It's the first Sunday of the month, so we'll be meeting at Cosi near Kendall Square in Cambridge. The theme of this meetup is rationalization. We'll have a short presentation and some exercises to practice recognizing what rationalization feels like, noticing it, and switching from rationalization to reasoning.

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge Massachusetts meetup
Meetup : DC Special Meetup
by atucker — 2011-06-29T11:57:03.188Z

Discussion article for the meetup : DC Special Meetup

WHEN: 03 July 2011 01:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: Washington Mall, Washington, DC

NOTE: We will be moving around, but intend to stay in the mall area. PM me for contact information.

Since our regular host is out of town, we're holding a special meetup out and about in downtown DC.

We plan to do some Rejection Therapy, stare into each other's eyes, play a new rationality game (based on that hilarious Telephone game last meetup), and probably find a place to settle down and talk. If you can think of other activities that involve being outdoors, or having strangers around, we'll try and fit those in too.
If you feel like sharpening your social skills, this is the meetup to go to.

Discussion article for the meetup : DC Special Meetup
London meetup, Sunday 2011-07-03 14:00, near Holborn
by taryneast — 2011-06-29T09:20:03.650Z

Reminder: we're meeting in London this weekend: Sunday 3rd July, at 2pm, in the Shakespeares Head (official page) on Kingsway near Holborn Tube station. We usually have a big picture of an extra-swirly paperclip on the table so you can find us (and some of us even have paperclip-buttons!). Hope to see you there. :)
Is it possible to prevent the torture of ems?
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-06-29T07:42:11.889Z

When I was reading The Seven Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Gaming, I was struck by the number of people who are strongly motivated to cause misery to others [1], apparently for its own sake. I think the default assumption here is that the primary risk to ems is from errors in programming an AI, but cruelty from other ems, from silicon minds closely based on humans but not ems (is there a convenient term for this?) and from just plain organic humans strikes me as extremely likely.

We're talking about a species where a significant number of people feel better when they torture Sims. I don't think torturing Sims is of any moral importance, but it serves as an indicator about what people like to do. I also wonder how good a simulation has to be before torturing it does matter.

I find it hard to imagine a system where it's easy to upload people which has security so good that torturing copies wouldn't be feasible, but maybe I'm missing something.

[1] The article was also very funny. I point this out only because I feel a possibly excessive need to reassure readers that I have normal reactions.
Meetup : Two-monthly London Meetup
by Alexandros — 2011-06-29T07:16:32.942Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Two-monthly London Meetup

WHEN:
03 July 2011 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
64-68 Kingsway, Holborn, London WC2B 6BG

After two months of having the smaller fortnightly meetups, the time has come to have another two-monthly London meetup! It will be on Sunday July 3 at 14:00, at the usual location: Shakespeares Head on Kingsway near Holborn Tube station. (Note that there's more than one pub in London with that name, so make sure you get the right one.) As always, we'll have a big picture of a paperclip on the table so you can find us. Hope to see lots of you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Two-monthly London Meetup
The scope of "free will" within biology?
by Jay_Schweikert — 2011-06-29T06:34:09.175Z

I've recently read through Eliezer's sequence on "free will", and I generally found it to be a fairly satisfying resolution/dissolution of the many misunderstandings involved in standard debates about the subject. There's no conflict between saying "your past circumstances determined that you would rush into the burning orphanage" and "you decided to rush into the burning orphanage"; what really matters is the experience of weighing possible options against your emotions and morals, without knowledge of what you will decide, rather than some hypothetical freedom to have done something different, etc. Basically, the experience of deciding between alternatives is real, don't worry too much about nonsense philosophical "free will" debates, just move on and live your life. Fine.

But I'm trying to figure out the best way to conceptualize the idea that certain biological conditions can "inhibit" your "free will," even under a reductionist understanding of the concept. Consider this recent article in The Atlantic called "The Brain on Trial." The basic argument is that we have much less control over ourselves than we think, that biology and upbringing have tremendous influences on our decisions, and that the criminal justice system needs to account for the pervasiveness of biological influence on our actions. On the one hand, duh. The article treats the idea that we are "just" our biology as some kind of big revelation that has only recently been understood:

The crux of the problem is that it no longer makes sense to ask, “To what extent was it his biology, and to what extent was it him?,” because we now understand that there is no meaningful distinction between a person’s biology and his decision-making. They are inseparable.

Is that because we've just now discovered reductionism? If we weren't "just" our biology, what would we be? Magic? Whatever we mean by consciousness and decision-making, I'm sure LW members pretty much all accept that they occur within physics. The author doesn't even seem to fully grasp this point himself, because he states at the end that there "may" be at least some space for free will, independent of our biology, but that we just don't understand it yet:

Free will may exist (it may simply be beyond our current science), but one thing seems clear: if free will does exist, it has little room in which to operate. It can at

...
[SEQ RERUN] The Importance of Saying "Oops"
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2011-06-29T05:25:57.563Z

Today's post, The Importance of Saying "Oops", was originally published on 05 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When your theory is proved wrong, just scream "OOPS!" and admit your mistake fully. Don't just admit local errors. Don't try to protect your pride by conceding the absolute minimal patch of ground. Making small concessions means that you will make only small improvements. It is far better to make big improvements quickly. This is a lesson of Bayescraft that Traditional Rationality fails to teach.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we're 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 Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable, 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.
Weekly Marin, CA meetup
by Nevin — 2011-06-29T02:24:51.724Z

The Less Wrong Marin group has been happening for over a month now, and can be declared a regular meetup. Our typical meeting includes some version of dinner at Nevin's house, 665 Northern Ave, Mill Valley on Tuesdays at 6:30pm. Each meetup is announced on the Bay Area Less Wrong mailing list.

The group size is usually around six. This is what we look like right now:
Born probabilities vs. the universal prior
by cousin_it — 2011-06-28T23:49:06.299Z

Just to sharpen a point that Manfred already made:

Imagine a world with a single observer flipping a quantum coin many times. After the observer has seen a million coinflips and they look fair (incompressible), what should he believe about the next thousand? Modern physics says he should have a uniform probability distribution (Born rule). But the universal prior seems to disagree. The algorithmic complexity of the preceding million coinflips is already sunk, so seeing 1000 heads in a row should look more probable to the observer than seeing a more random sequence. Moreover, the combined weight of the first hundred eligible simple programs should exceed the combined weight of everything else in the mixture, no matter how many input bits we've already seen. (That last statement depends on the encoding of programs, but I think I can make it work for any encoding by tweaking the value of 100.)

Of course this doesn't in any way overthrow the universality of Solomonoff induction. The Born rule is a computable prior, therefore it's found somewhere within the universal mixture, so the observer's probability assignments will never be more than a multiplicative constant away from the uniform prior. But then we should be able to detect the multiplicative constant experimentally, and it just doesn't seem to be there. As far as we know, the outcomes of real-world quantum coinflips pass all known tests for "true" randomness, like limiting frequencies or the law of large numbers, with no apparent bias toward algorithmic simplicity.

These days it's easy to get quantum coinflips from the internet. So you have an easy way to generate and observe a random bitstring whose probability under the Solomonoff prior is unimaginably close to zero. Maybe run some tests on it, hoping that Nature uses a pseudorandom generator in disguise after all, but I wouldn't bet on that :-)

The above argument seems to dash hopes of explaining our conscious observations by a simplicity prior, like UDASSA. This raises the question: what sort of prior would fare better? In particular, what prior should we use for separating good physical theories from bad ones?
Anyone want to give Holmesian reasoning a try?
by  — 2011-06-28T21:53:52.249Z

In Sherlock Holmes fiction, we see that Holmes is capable of making correct inferences using insufficient information and long, tenuous chains of reasoning. I'm curious what would happen if we tried to apply this in real life. Here's a riddle containing insufficient information to come to the right answer with any certainty; will our Holmesian reasoning attempts be anything close to the "correct" answer, or will it be totally off?

The other day, I was listening to music from a movie on my headphones. In the movie, one scene depicts one of the characters getting out of bed. He puts one foot on the ground, then the other. The headphones were broken on one side. Which side?

Use your meta-riddle awareness: this isn't just a random event, but the sort of event that I would make into a riddle.

Here's the answer I had in mind, rot13'd.
Meetup: Less Wrong Moscow 2 Jule 2011
by turchin — 2011-06-28T20:19:32.737Z

WHEN: 2 Jule 2011, 16.00 Moscow time
WHERE: Moscow, Novokuznetskaya subway station, Klimentovskiy pereulok, 1/18 (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology's building aka Fiztech). 1 (2 in Russian) floor.

This first meeting will be of somewhat experimental character and will be devoted to general topics of rationality and transhumaism. We will face each other in meatspace and discuss future vision for LW-Moscow. The main language of the meeting will be Russian, but English speakers are welcome.
Observed Pascal's Mugging
by  — 2011-06-28T15:53:03.237Z

When I first read about Pascal's Mugging, it stuck in my brain. I knew that I had seen something like this occur in real life, though I couldn't quite place the specifics at the time. Then it hit me- chain letters are a classical example of this. They promise that if you copy the letter X times and distribute it, you will have good luck, your hair will grow back, etc., but if you don't distribute it, you will have bad luck, pianos will fall on you, etc.

I thought a little bit further about this, because I knew I hadn't originally gotten bothered about this sort of thing because of chain letters (no one sends actual mail anymore); chain letters are just the obvious example that will occur after five minutes of thought. The actual thing that had stuck in my brain was a phenomenon particular to the internet. On Youtube and 4chan, there are often messages posted at least superficially similar to the following:

In [year], [someone] was killed after [spectacularly gruesome details]. Post a copy of this message in the next 10 minutes, or the ghost of [someone] will find you tonight and [spectacularly gruesome details].

These threads have hundreds of replies almost every time that I see them on 4chan, and on Youtube they spread from one video to the next while actual comments become buried. This demonstrates that at least a significant fraction of the people that see these make the mental calculation that if they do not post it, they have a small chance of suffering incredible disutility, but if they do post it, they suffer only a few seconds of lost time. (They're also much more effective at spreading than chain letters because the transmission time and cost of spreading are much less than with chain letters).

This is one of the best examples of real-life Pascalian muggings that I've found and one of the arguments for the benefits of raising the sanity waterline- the lost man-hours to this sort of thing may be non-trivial. Also, this demonstrates one crude way of hacking the human brain in order to accomplish a task. Essentially, these postings and all of their variants are simple memetic mind viruses. In 4chan especially, they can be seen to outcompete actual posting when placed side by side. No one wants to be killed in spectacularly gruesome detail, and so they spread w...
Cryonics facility coming to Texas?
by SilasBarta — 2011-06-28T14:51:58.231Z

It seems that the non-profit Stasis Foundation is planning to build a cryopreservation "castle" (dubbed the "Timeship") in the San Antonio area. My parents pointed me to this article, which was carried in the Austin American-Statesman. I can't find a site for the Stasis Foundation; (here's the Google search and here's the Timeship propaganda page). The article discusses the effort in the context of a potential loss of tax exemption for not moving the project forward in a timely manner.

So is anyone familiar with this group? What advantages do they seek by having this facility that can't be achieved with existing cryonics non-profits?
Meetup : East Coast Super Fun Rationalists Sleepover Party Extravaganza
by atucker — 2011-06-28T03:53:20.946Z

Discussion article for the meetup : East Coast Super Fun Rationalists Sleepover Party Extravaganza

WHEN: 09 July 2011 - 10 July 2011

WHERE: New York City

The Cambridge and DC groups happened to be simultaneously considering a trip to visit the world-famous NYC group. After a bit of coordination, we are proud to announce the East Coast Super Fun Rationalists Sleepover Party Extravaganza!

The general plan is to arrive on the afternoon of the 9th, and leave on the (late) morning of the 10th. This is still in the planning stages, so the schedule, accommodations, etc. are still being worked out.

If you're in the Cambridge or DC groups (and have RSVPed), these are being worked out for you, otherwise, either assume you have to work this out on your own, or send me a PM with your email address. You'll probably have to find your own transportation, but I can help with suggestions.

If a lot of people not attached to groups come, it would be great if someone stepped up to coordinate those people.

If you're in a group (Toronto?) and think your group might be interested in attending, please send me a PM with your email address.

Details:

Saturday
2 PM: Cambridge and DC groups arrive
3 PM: Lunch
5 - 11 PM: Large event
11 - ?: Miscellaneous Hanging out

Sunday
Lunch
12ish-5: Large event
6 PM: Depart

Check this page for updated information as we get closer to the date.

Discussion article for the meetup : East Coast Super Fun Rationalists Sleepover Party Extravaganza