trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Logical uncertainty, kind of. A proposal, at least.
by Manfred — 2013-01-13T09:26:15.670Z

If you want context and are fast at seeing the implications of math, see Benja's post. This post is much lighter on the math, though it may take more background reading and more laborious interpolation, since it's, well, lighter on the math.

Imagine I introduced my pet robot to a game. The robot has 10 seconds to pick a digit, and if the trillionth prime number ends with that digit, the robot gets a cookie (it likes peanut butter cookies the best). 10 seconds is not enough time for my robot to calculate the answer deductively. And yet, guessing an answer is superior to running out of time quietly. What sort of general logic should my robot follow in under 10 seconds to figure out that it should be indifferent between answering 1, 3, 7 or 9? Does it even make sense to be indifferent between the real answer and an impossible answer, even if you don't know which is which?

As you might expect from context, the proposed solution will involve assigning every true or false math statement a probabability-esque degree of plausibility, with numbers other than 0 or 1 indicating logical uncertainty. Why is this a good idea?

To explain logical uncertainty, let's first take a step back and reframe logical certainty in terms of rules for reasoning that apply to both deductive logic and probabilistic logic. An important resource here is E.T. Jaynes' Probability Theory (pdf) - the most relevant part being page 31 of the book. The key idea is that each of the probability axioms applies just fine no matter what kind of Boolean statement you want to find the probability of. Which is to say probability already applies to arithmetic - the laws of probability are also laws of arithmetic, just in the limit that probabilities go to 1 or 0. Our robot starts with a collection of definitions labeled with probability 1 (like "0 is a number" or "S(0)+0=S(0)" [if this S(0) stuff needs context, see wikipedia]), and then applies deductive rules according to the universal rules of probability. We translate "A implies B" into the language of probabilities as P(AB|C) = P(A|C), and then apply the always-true product rule P(B|AC)=P(AB|C) / P(A|C). If P(A|C)=1, that is, A|C is deductively true, and A implies B, then P(B|AC)=P(B|C)=1. The machinery that underlies deduction is in fact the same machinery that underlies probabilistic reasoning. And we...
On private marriage contracts
by  — 2013-01-12T14:53:54.939Z

Warning: First Read Everything Here, only participate or read on if you are sure you understand the risks.

Based on the commentary and excerpt Federico made on studiolo, I've added the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Thaler and Sunstein to my reading list. Since the book seems relevant enough to this site and has been mentioned before, I may eventually write a review. The post by Federico is made up mostly of excerpts from Chapter 15 of the book "Privatizing Marriage".

In addition to this I recommend reading the following excellent essays:

Sister Y's The Right to Marry

A Really, Really, Really Long Post About Gay Marriage That Does Not, In The End, Support One Side Or The Other also recommended by CharlieSheen

The reason the particular topic he talks about caught my interest is because the proposed solutions by Thaler and Sunstein seem somewhat similar to the one I argued for...

Marriage is a personal or religious arrangement, it is only the states business as far as it is also a legally enforceable contract. It is fundamentally unfair that people agree to a set of legal terms and cultural expectations that ideally are aimed to last a lifetime yet the state messes with the contract beyond recognition in just a few decades without their consent.

Consider a couple marrying in 1930s or 1940s that died or divorced in the 1980s. Did they even end their marriage in the same institution they started in? Consider how divorce laws and practice had changed. Ridiculous. People should have the right to sign an explicit, customisable contract governing their rights and duties as well as terms of dissolution in it. Beyond that the state should have no say, also such contracts should supersede any legislation the state has on child custody, though perhaps some limits on what exactly they can agree on would be in order.

Such a contract has no good reason to be limited to just describing traditional marriage or even having that much to do with sex or even raising children, it can and should be used to help people formalize platonic and non-sexual relationships as well. It should also be used for various kinds of non-traditional (for Western civ) marriage like polygamy or other kinds of polyamours arrangements and naturally homosexual unions.

...and Vladimir_M argued convincingly against. Here...

However, are you sure th

...
Meetup : Brussels meetup
by Axel — 2013-01-12T13:39:50.879Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup

WHEN:
16 February 2013 01:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles

We are once again meeting at 'la fleur en papier doré' close to the Brussels Central station. If you feel like an intelligent discussion and are in the neighborhood, consider dropping by. As always, I'll have a sign.

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup
[Link] St. Paul: memetic engineer
by  — 2013-01-12T13:21:10.391Z

New post by Federico on his new blog that I mentioned earlier. Worth reading for those interested in the memetics of religion, politics, Christianity or Islam. The cited material also led my mind to some related questions.

AnnoDomini suggests I write about “St. Paul the social engineer!”

“Social engineering” is coercive. Saint Paul was a missionary, not a law-maker; I would call him a memetic engineer.

Like any ingeniarius, a memetic engineer takes elements at his disposal, makes one or two small changes, synthesises, and sells his product. The product is designed to fulfil a personal end; if it endures, this is most likely incidental. Few engineers care if their creation outlasts them.

The elements at this memetic engineer’s disposal are an ethnic-supremacist religion, a popular dead Messiah, and a cunning intellect.

Saul of Tarsus spends his twenties persecuting Christians. In his own words:

13 For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews’ religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it: 14 And profited in the Jews’ religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers.

Galatians 1:13–14

He even participates in the racist murder of a naive idealist called Stephen, in a scene echoed many centuries later by Sacha Baron Cohen.

55 But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, 56 And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. 57 Then they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord, 58 And cast him out of the city, and stoned him: and the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young man’s feet, whose name was Saul. 59 And they stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. 60 And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep.

Acts 7:55–60

But what he sees afterwards gives him pause.

1 And Saul was consenting unto his death. And at that time there was a great persecution against the church which was at Jerusalem; and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judaea and Samaria, ex

...
Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)
by Kawoomba — 2013-01-12T10:09:23.640Z

Link

One of us is no more.

Computer activist Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide in New York City yesterday, Jan. 11.

The accomplished Swartz co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, was one of the three co-owners of the popular social news site Reddit, and completed a fellowship at Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. In 2010, he founded DemandProgress.org, a “campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA.”

He deserves a eulogy more eloquent than what I am capable of writing. Here's Cory Doctorow's, one of his long time friends.

It's a sad world in which you are being arrested and grand jury'd for downloading scientific journals and papers with the intent to share them.
A fungibility theorem
by Nisan — 2013-01-12T09:27:25.637Z

Restatement of: If you don't know the name of the game, just tell me what I mean to you. Alternative to: Why you must maximize expected utility. Related to: Harsanyi's Social Aggregation Theorem.

Summary: This article describes a theorem, previously described by Stuart Armstrong, that tells you to maximize the expectation of a linear aggregation of your values. Unlike the von Neumann-Morgenstern theorem, this theorem gives you a reason to behave rationally.1

The von Neumann-Morgenstern theorem is great, but it is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It tells you that if you obey four axioms, then you are an optimizer. (Let us call an "optimizer" any agent that always chooses an action that maximizes the expected value of some function of outcomes.) But you are a human and you don't obey the axioms; the VNM theorem doesn't say anything about you.

There are Dutch-book theorems that give us reason to want to obey the four VNM axioms: E.g., if we violate the axiom of transitivity, then we can be money-pumped, and we don't want that; therefore we shouldn't want to violate the axiom of transitivity. The VNM theorem is somewhat helpful here: It tells us that the only way to obey the four axioms is to be an optimizer.2

So now you have a reason to become an optimizer. But there are an infinitude of decision-theoretic utility functions3 to adopt — which, if any, ought you adopt? And there is an even bigger problem: If you are not already an optimizer, than any utility function that you're considering will recommend actions that run counter to your preferences!

To give a silly example, suppose you'd rather be an astronaut when you grow up than a mermaid, and you'd rather be a dinosaur than an astronaut, and you'd rather be a mermaid than a dinosaur. You have circular preferences. There's a decision-theoretic utility function that says

$\mbox{mermaid} \prec \mbox{astronaut} \prec \mbox{dinosaur}$

which preserves some of your preferences, but if you have to choose between being a mermaid and being a dinosaur, it will tell you to become a dinosaur, even though you really really want to choose the mermaid. There's another decision-theoretic utility function that will tell you to pass up being a dinosaur in favor of being an astronaut even though you really really don't want to. Not being an optimizer means that any rational decision theory will tell you to do things you don'...
Proof of fungibility theorem
by Nisan — 2013-01-12T09:26:09.484Z

Appendix to: A fungibility theorem

Suppose that is a set and we have functions . Recall that for , we say that is a Pareto improvement over if for all , we have . And we say that it is a strong Pareto improvement if in addition there is some for which . We call a Pareto optimum if there is no strong Pareto improvement over it.

Theorem. Let be a set and suppose for are functions satisfying the following property: For any and any , there exists an such that for all , we have .

Then if an element of is a Pareto optimum, then there exist nonnegative constants such that the function achieves a maximum at .

Proof. Let . By hypothesis, the image is convex.

For , let the Pareto volume of be the set

This is a closed convex set. Note that is a Pareto optimum precisely when . Let's assume that this is the case; we just have to prove that maximizes for some choice of .

It suffices to find a hyperplane that contains and that supports . Then the desired function can be constructed by ensuring that is a level set.

If lies in a proper affine subspace of , let be the smallest such subspace. Let be the interior of in and let be the interior of . The case where is a point is trivial; suppose it's not, so is nonempty. By convexity, is the closure of and is the closure of .

Since is convex, is convex, and we can exhaust with a nested sequence of nonempty compact convex sets . And is convex, so we can exhaust with a nested sequence of nonempty compact convex sets . By the hyperplane separation theorem, for each , there is a hyperplane separating and . I claim that has a convergent subsequence. Indeed, each must intersect the convex hull of , and the space of hyperplanes intersecting that convex hull is compact. So has a subsequence that converges to a hyperplane .

It's easy to see that separates from for each , and so separates from . So must contain and support .

Note that the theorem does not guarantee the existence of a Pareto optimum. But if is closed and bounded, then a Pareto optimum exists.

A limitation of the theorem is that it assumes a finite list of values , not an infinite one.
[SEQ RERUN] Devil's Offers
by MinibearRex — 2013-01-12T07:04:31.741Z

Today's post, Devil's Offers was originally published on 25 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It is dangerous to live in an environment in which a single failure of resolve, throughout your entire life, can result in a permanent addiction or in a poor edit of your own brain. For example, a civilization which is constantly offering people tempting ways to shoot off their own feet - for example, offering them a cheap escape into eternal virtual reality, or customized drugs. It requires a constant stern will that may not be much fun. And it's questionable whether a superintelligence that descends from above to offer people huge dangerous temptations that they wouldn't encounter on their own, is helping.

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 Harmful Options, 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.
How to signal curiosity?
by Wei Dai — 2013-01-11T22:47:23.698Z

At LessWrong we encourage people to be curious. Curiosity causes people to ask questions, but sometimes those questions get misinterpreted as social challenges or rhetorical techniques, or maybe just regular questions that you don't have a "burning itch" to know the answers for (and hence maybe not particularly worth answering). I sometimes preface a question by "I'm curious," but of course anyone could say that so it's not a very effective way to distinguish oneself as being genuinely curious. Another thing I sometimes do is to try to answer the question myself and present one or more answers as my "guesses" and ask if one of them is correct, since someone who is genuinely curious is more likely put in such effort. But unfortunately sometimes that backfires when the person you're directing the question at interprets the guesses as a way to make them look bad, because for example you failed to hypothesize the actual answer and include it as one of the guesses, and all your guesses make them look worse than the actual answer.

I've noticed examples of this happening to others on LW (or at least possibly happening, since I can't be sure whether someone else really is curious) as well as to myself, and can only imagine that the problem is even worse elsewhere, where people may not give each other as much benefit of doubt as we do around here. So my question is, what can curious people do, to signal their genuine curiosity when asking questions? Has anyone thought about this question already, or perhaps can recognize some strategies they already employ and make them explicit for the rest of us?

ETA: Perhaps I should say a bit more about the kind of situation I have in mind. Often I'll see a statement from someone that either contradicts my existing beliefs about something or is on a topic that I'm pretty ignorant about, and it doesn't come with an argument or evidence to back it up. I'd think "I don't want to just take their word since they might be wrong, but there also seems a good chance that they know something that I don't in which case I'd really like to know what it is, so let's ask why they're saying what they're saying." And unfortunately this sometimes gets interpreted as "I'm pretty sure you're wrong, and I'm going to embarrass you by asking a question that I don't think you can answer."

ETA2: The reason I use "signal" i...
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Berlin, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Buffalo, Moscow, Purdue, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2013-01-11T16:36:05.418Z

This summary was posted to LW main on January 4th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Brussels meetup: 05 January 2013 01:00PM
Fourth Buenos Aires Less Wrong meetup: 05 January 2013 03:00PM
Moscow: Applied Rationality in a New Year: 05 January 2013 04:00PM
Washington, DC Meetup with Special Guest: 06 January 2013 03:00PM
Berlin Meetup: Bayes: 09 January 2013 07:30PM
Buffalo Meetup: 10 January 2013 07:00PM
First Purdue Meetup: 11 January 2013 06:50PM
13th January London Meetup: 13 January 2013 02:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 05 January 2019 02:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

Whether or not there's currently a meetup in your area, you can sign up to be notified automatically of any future meetups....
[SEQ RERUN] Harmful Options
by MinibearRex — 2013-01-11T05:12:22.011Z

Today's post, Harmful Options was originally published on 25 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Offering people more choices that differ along many dimensions, may diminish their satisfaction with their final choice. Losses are more painful than the corresponding gains are pleasurable, so people think of the dimensions along which their final choice was inferior, and of all the other opportunities passed up. If you can only choose one dessert, you're likely to be happier choosing from a menu of two than from a menu of fourteen. Refusing tempting choices consumes mental energy and decreases performance on other cognitive tasks. A video game that contained an always-visible easier route through, would probably be less fun to play even if that easier route were deliberately foregone. You can imagine a Devil who follows someone around, making their life miserable, solely by offering them options which are never actually taken. And what if a worse option is taken due to a predictable mistake? There are many ways to harm people by offering them more choices.

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 Imaginary Positions, 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.
Meetup : Durham HPMoR Discussion, chapters 27-29
by evand — 2013-01-11T05:12:12.780Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham HPMoR Discussion, chapters 27-29

WHEN:
12 January 2013 11:00:00AM (-0500)

WHERE:
Nanataco, 2512 University Dr, Durham NC

We'll be meeting at Nanataco at 11:00 for brunch to discuss HPMoR chapters 27-29.

As always, please feel free to join us even if you haven't read the chapters.

Please RSVP here or on the mailing list so I can know how large a table we should ask for.

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham HPMoR Discussion, chapters 27-29
[LINK] General-audience documentary on cosmology, anthropics, and superintelligence
by Academian — 2013-01-11T05:11:19.775Z

If you have friends or family you'd like to get thinking about cosmology and the like, this might be a nice documentary to stir up curiosity. Despite clearly being aimed at a general audience, I thought this documentary -- including interviews of Tegmark and Bostrom --- did a surprisingly good job of talking about the beginning of the universe and our place in it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyH2D4-tzfM

Also, even though I've had all these thoughts before, it still makes me more emotionally motivated to live long enough to see scientific advances on these questions.
A question about two books concerning biases
by JMiller — 2013-01-11T00:36:17.808Z

I'm taking a class on heuristics and biases. I'm this class we have the option to read one of two "applied" books on the subject. The books are "The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear" by Seth Mnookin and "Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You" by Judith Sedivy and Greg Carlson.

I'd like to know if anyone has read one or both of these books, and how well or poorly they mesh with less wrong rationality.

Thanks,
Jeremy