trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meet science: rationalizing evidence to save beliefs
by KatjaGrace — 2010-10-09T07:00:15.000Z

This is how science classes mostly went in high school. We would learn about a topic that had been discovered scientifically, for instance that if you add together two particular solutions of ions, some of the ions will precipitate out as a solid salt. Then we would do an experiment, wherein we would add the requisite solutions and get something entirely wrong in its color, smell, quantity, or presence. Then we would write a report with our hypothesis, the contradictory results, and a long discussion about all the mistakes that could be to blame for this unexpected result, and conclude that the real answer was probably still what we hypothesized (since we read that in a book).

Given that they had not taught the children anything about priors, this seems like a strange way to demonstrate science.
Dual n-back news
by gwern — 2010-10-08T22:16:54.856Z

A long awaited study on dual n-back has recently come out in pre-publication: http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ#jaeggi-2010 (For background, read the rest of my FAQ.)

It replicates the IQ boost, but it's by the same person as Jaeggi 2008 and has the same issue with the IQ tests being speeded rather than full-time. You can see my argument about this at the DNB mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training/browse_frm/thread/c0fe2e1f14b8af06

(Meta: is this appropriate for the discussion area? I know some people here are interested in IQ enhancement like DNB promises, but normally I would just drop this into an open thread as a comment, not make a whole quasi-article about it.)
Bayesian Buddhism: a path to optimal enlightenment
by David_Allen — 2010-10-08T21:38:24.538Z

I see epistemic rationality as a connection between Bayesian inference and Buddhism. Bayesian inference focuses on the mathematics for updating belief, Bayes' theorem. Buddhism focuses on the human factors of belief, how belief can lead to dukkha (suffering, discontent), and how dukkha can be avoided.

Combining these ideas could give us a practical path to achieving bohdi (enlightenment, optimal belief) from within the context of our human mind (emotional and physical). Call it the optimal enlightenment hypothesis. I am opening this concept up for LW discussion.

Related questions:

What would be a good name for this combination?

Would you call this a religion or perhaps a philosophy? (There may be tax implications. ;>)

What would be the teachings of this path?

What aspects of Buddhism should be refactored or eliminated?

What are the challenges?

From recent posts by Luke_Grecki and Will_Newsome, it seems that others are thinking along the same line.

Epistemic Rationality

To be rational we need to be willing to see the world as it is and not as we want it to be. This requires avoiding emotional attachment to our beliefs and adopting an even approach to evaluating evidence.

See Also:

Eliezer Yudkowsky's Twelve Virtues of Rationality

The Litany of Gendlin

Epistemic rationality as defined by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Epistemic rationality: believing, and updating on evidence, so as to systematically improve the correspondence between your map and the territory. The art of obtaining beliefs that correspond to reality as closely as possible. This correspondence is commonly termed "truth" or "accuracy", and we're happy to call it that.

Bayesian inference is a method for updating belief within epistemic rationality:

Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference in which some kind of evidence or observations are used to calculate the probability that a hypothesis may be true, or else to update its previously-calculated probability.

Buddhism encourages people to view reality as it really is and to constantly seek enlightenment.

In Buddhism's Noble Eightfold Path, as stated here:

dṛṣṭi (ditthi): viewing reality as it is, not just as it appears to be

vyāyāma (vāyāma): making an effort to improv

...
Request:  Interesting Invertible Facts
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2010-10-08T20:02:21.933Z

I'm writing the section of the rationality book dealing with hindsight bias, and I'd like to write my own, less racially charged and less America-specific, version of the Hindsight Devalues Science example - in the original, facts like "Better educated soldiers suffered more adjustment problems than less educated soldiers. (Intellectuals were less prepared for battle stresses than street-smart people.)" which is actually an inverted version of the truth, that still sounds plausible enough that people will try to explain it even though it's wrong.

I'm looking for facts that are experimentally verified and invertible, i.e., I can give five examples that are the opposite of the usual results without people catching on.

Divia (today's writing assistant) has suggested facts about marriage and facts about happiness as possible sources of examples, but neither of us can think of a good set of facts offhand and Googling didn't help me much. Five related facts would be nice, but failing that I'll just take five facts. My own brain just seems to be very bad at answering this kind of query for some reason; I literally can't think of five things I know.

(Note also that I have a general policy of keeping anything related to religion out of the rationality book - that there be no mention of it whatsoever.)
How to better understand and participate on LW
by XiXiDu — 2010-10-08T16:11:41.604Z

Update! New URL:

!!!

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2un/references_resources_for_lesswrong/

!!!

Out-of-date:

A list capturing all background knowledge you might ever need for LW.

Updated: 2010-10-10

F = Free

E = Easy (adequate for a low educational background)

This list has two purposes. One is to enable people that lack a basic formal education to read and understand the LessWrong Sequences. Secondly, it is meant as a list of useful resources for all people to help to better understand what is being discussed on LessWrong and to enable you to actively participate.

Do not flinch, most of LessWrong can be read and understood by people with a previous level of education less than secondary school. And even if you lack the most basic education, if you start with Khan Academy followed by BetterExplained then with the help of Google and Wikipedia you should be able to reach a level of education that allows you to start reading the LessWrong Sequences.

Nevertheless, before you start off you might read the Twelve Virtues of Rationality FE. Not only is scholarship just one virtue but you'll also be given a list of important fields of knowledge that anyone who takes LessWrong seriously should study:

It is especially important to eat math and science which impinges upon rationality: Evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, social psychology, probability theory, decision theory.

Mathematics:

Basics

The Khan Academy (World-class education for free (1800+ videos).) FE

Just Math Tutotrials (FREE math videos for the world!) F

BetterExplained (There’s always a better way to explain a topic.) FE

Steven Strogatz on the Elements of Math (A very basic introduction to mathematics.) FE

General

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (Reference for anyone with a serious interest in mathematics)

Free Mathematics eBooks F

Interactive Mathematics Miscellany and Puzzles F

math.stackexchange.com (Q&A for people studying math at any level) F

MathOverflow F

wolframalpha.com (Check your math!) F

Math is fundamental, not just for LessWrong. But especially Bayes’ Theorem is essential to understand the reasoning underlying most of the writings on LW.

Probability

A Guide to Bayes’ Theorem – A few links (An extensive list of links to tutorials on Bayesian probability.) FE

E. T. Jayness, Probabili

...
Pro-nice and anti-nice
by  — 2010-10-08T15:29:39.671Z

EDIT: This post is pretty flawed, but please read the comments anyway: I'm hoping to rework it into something that catches the idea better.

You can view a lot of value differences along a pro-nice/anti-nice spectrum.

Pro-nice people (I'm one) gravitate to obviously pleasant, lovely, happy experiences. We like kittens and puppies and rainbows. We like transparently "happy" music and transparently "beautiful" works of art and literature. (If you like Romantic poetry and science fiction, but not contemporary novels, you might be pro-nice.) We prefer the positive social emotions, like sympathy, encouragement, and teamwork. We may choose intellectual interests based on the fact that they make our brains feel good. We tend to be drawn towards proposals for making the world wonderful.

Pro-nice people aren't quite the same thing as optimists. An optimist tends to anticipate that things will turn out well, or look on the bright side. But pro-nice people may well hold pessimistic ideas or have melancholy temperaments. Pro-nice is a preference for the positive. A typical pro-nice attitude is "Humanity may be destructive and cruel, but the one time when we're at our best is when we're doing science. Science is lovely. I think I'll be a scientist."

Anti-nice people have a preference for the difficult. They find pro-nice preferences saccharine. They like artistic expressions that have a challenging or negative "mood." They prefer the negative social emotions, like antagonism, sarcasm, and cynicism. They dislike things that have obvious appeal, or things that everyone finds pleasant. As far as social issues go, they take a keen interest in potential catastrophes and what must be done to avert them; they generally aren't drawn to proposals to "make the world a better place."

Again, anti-nice people aren't necessarily pessimists or unhappy people. Anti-nice people prefer to direct their attention to the challenging, the problematic, the worst-case scenario. To an anti-nice person, there's nothing interesting to work on when everything is going smoothly; just liking things or agreeing with people or being contented is rather dull.

I suspect that a lot of conflict can be summarized by the clash between pro-nice and anti-nice personal...
Poverty does not respond to incentives
by KatjaGrace — 2010-10-08T14:19:36.000Z

I wrote a post a while back saying that preventing ‘exploitative’ trade is equivalent to preventing an armed threat by eliminating the ‘not getting shot in the head’ option. Some people countered this argument by saying that it doesn’t account for how others respond. If poor people take the option of being ‘exploited’, they won’t get offered such good alternatives in future as they will if they hold out.

This seems unlikely, but it reminds me of a real difference between these situations. If you forcibly prevent the person with the gun to their head from responding to the threat, the person holding the gun will generally want to escape making the threat, as now she has nothing to gain and everything to lose. The world on the other hand will not relent from making people poor if you prevent the poor people from responding to it.

I wonder if the misintuition about the world treating people better if they can’t give in to its ‘coercion’ is a result of familiarity with how single agent threateners behave in this situation. As a side note, this makes preventing ‘exploitative’ trade worse relative to preventing threatened parties acting on threats.
Rationality and advice
by NancyLebovitz — 2010-10-08T07:45:44.678Z

Giving advice is one of those common human behaviors which doesn't get examined much, which means a little thought might improve understanding of what's going on.

The evidence-- that giving advice is much more common than asking for it or following it-- suggests that giving advice is more a status transaction than a practical effort to help, and I speak as a person who's pretty compulsive about giving advice.

So, here's some advice about advice, assuming that you don't want to just raise your status on unwilling subjects.

Do what you can to actually understand the situation, including the resources the recipient is willing to put into following advice.

The idea that men give unwelcome advice to women, when the women just want to vent but can solve their problems themselves, is an oversimplification. There are women who give advice (see above). There are men who are patient with venting. I think the vent vs. want advice distinction is valuable, but ask rather than assuming gender will give you the information you need.

I have a friend who I've thanked for giving me advice, and his reaction was "but you didn't follow it!". Sometimes it helps to give people ideas to bounce off of.

Pjeby (if I understand him correctly) has been very good about the way people can reinterpret advice in light of their mental habits-- for example, hearing "find goals that inspire you" as "beat yourself up for not having achieved more".

Eliezer on Other-Optimizing-- it's from the point of view of being given lots of advice (mostly inappropriate), rather from the point of view of giving advice.
Help: When are two computations isomorphic?
by  — 2010-10-08T00:29:50.506Z

Lets work within the Turing machine model of computation and consider halting TMs. Given TMs named T and T', when would you say they implement the same computation? I see at least two possibilities:

1) Call them equivalent if they have the same global output (i.e. T(x) = T'(x) for all x).

2) Call them equivalent if they locally transform the same way (i.e. their transition functions are equivalent in some sense).

In other words, is the step-by-step operation of the TM central to your notion of computation?

I came to this question when reflecting on a discussion here involving levels of simulation. I'm interested in thinking more rigorously about computations we care about in a dovetailing ensemble, and determining where in the hierarchy they are likely to lie.

(Note that the latter equivalence implies the former, and is thus stronger.)
Notion of Preference in Ambient Control
by Vladimir_Nesov — 2010-10-07T21:21:34.047Z

This post considers ambient control in a more abstract setting, where controlled structures are not restricted to being programs. It then introduces a notion of preference, as an axiomatic definition of constant (actual) utility. The notion of preference subsumes possible worlds and utility functions traditionally considered in decision theory.

Followup to: Controlling Constant Programs.

In the previous post I described the sense in which one program without parameters (the agent) can control the output of another program without parameters (the world program). These programs define (compute) constant values, respectively actual action and actual outcome. The agent decides on its action by trying to prove statements of a certain form, the moral arguments, such as [agent()=1 => world()=1000000]. When the time is up, the agent performs the action associated with the moral argument that promises the best outcome, thus making that outcome actual.

Let's now move this construction into a more rigorous setting. Consider a first-order language and a theory in that language (defining the way agent reasons, the kinds of concepts it can understand and the kinds of statements it can prove). This could be a set theory such as ZFC or a theory of arithmetic such as PA. The theory should provide sufficient tools to define recursive functions and/or other necessary concepts. Now, extend that theory by definitions of two constant symbols: A (the actual action) and O (the actual outcome). (The new symbols extend the language, while their definitions, obtained from agent and world programs respectively by standard methods of defining recursively enumerable functions, extend the theory.) With new definitions, moral arguments don't have to explicitly cite the code of corresponding programs, and look like this: [A=1 => O=10000].

Truth, provability, and provability by the agent

Given a model, we can ask whether a statement is true in that model. If a statement is true in all models, it's called valid. In first-order logic, all valid statements are also provable by a formal syntactic argument.

What the agent can prove, however, is different from what is provable from the theory it uses. In principle, the agent could prove everything provable (valid), but it needs to stop at some point and decide what action to perform, thus being unable to actually prove the rest of the provable ...
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 4
by gjm — 2010-10-07T21:12:58.038Z

[Update: and now there's a fifth discussion thread, which you should probably use in preference to this one. Later update: and a sixth -- in the discussion section, which is where these threads are living for now on. Also: tag for HP threads in the main section, and tag for HP threads in the discussion section.]

The third discussion thread is above 500 comments now, just like the others, so it's time for a new one. Predecessors: one, two, three. For anyone who's been on Mars and doesn't know what this is about: it's Eliezer's remarkable Harry Potter fanfic.

Spoiler warning and helpful suggestion (copied from those in the earlier threads):

Spoiler Warning: this thread contains unrot13'd spoilers for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality up to the current chapter and for the original Harry Potter series. Please continue to use rot13 for spoilers to other works of fiction, or if you have insider knowledge of future chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
A suggestion: mention at the top of your comment which chapter you're commenting on, or what chapter you're up to, so that people can understand the context of your comment even after more chapters have been posted. This can also help people avoid reading spoilers for a new chapter before they realize that there is a new chapter.
It's a fact: male and female brains are different
by araneae — 2010-10-07T20:15:19.107Z

In Which I Present The Opposing Side's Hypothesis and Falsify It

This post is in part in response to a New Scientist article/book review "Fighting back against neurosexism." And the tagline is "Are differences between men and women hard-wired in the brain? Two new books argue that there's no solid scientific evidence for this popular notion."

Full disclosure here: I haven't read the books, although I do have a B.S. in neurobiology. But you don't even need to understand anything about neurobiology to falslify their most basic hypothesis: that male and female brains have no hardwired behavioral differences.

And it's easy to falsify: if male and female brains were the same, all humans would be completely bisexual. If it's true that female brains, on average, prefer to fuck, date, and marry men, and male brains, on average, prefer to fuck, date, and marry women, then male and female brains are in fact different.

A Really Long Argument In Which I Argue That Humans Are Not Bisexual

The god of the gaps here, is of course, culture. One could argue that culture makes people straight. There are number of arguments against this here, such as some famous cases of failed gender reassignment at birth, all the way to gay people, who despite being raised in straight cultures somehow arise anyway.

Yes, some people are bisexual, and the number who are is certainly informed by culture. Bisexuality has increased to unprecedented levels. What exactly constitutes bisexuality makes decent surveys difficult, but the most generous figure is 15%, and this includes people who identify as straight, have had no experience of the opposite sex, but have had "some same sex attraction." The null hypothesis predicts 100% bisexuality, and not only that, it predicts a nature of bisexuality which has no preference for either sex. In our hypothetical situation of identical male and female brains, if 100% of women would choose a man over a woman only 60% of the time, then women still show a preference for men and our hypothesis is falsified.

But the situation is even more dire than that. It's so dire that some argue that bisexuality doesn't exist at all. I would not go so far; while I personally do not know any bisexuals that show no gender preference, and quite a few that do show a preference, I am positive there are some out there tha...
There is no such thing as pleasure
by Richard_Kennaway — 2010-10-07T13:49:48.476Z

By saying that there is no such thing as pleasure, I don't mean that I don't enjoy anything. I mean that I can find nothing in common among all the things I do enjoy, to call "pleasure". In contrast, I can find something in common among all physically painful things. I have experienced toothache, indigestion, a stubbed toe, etc., and these experiences differ along only a few dimensions: intensity, location, sharpness, and temporal modulation are about it. I perceive a definite commonality among these experiences, and that is what I call "pain". (Metaphorical pains such as "emotional pain" or "an eyesore" are not included.)

However, I cannot find anything in common among solving an interesting problem, sex, listening to good music, or having a good meal. Not common to all of them, nor even common to any two of them. There is not even a family resemblance. This is what I mean when I say there is no such thing as pleasure. But that's just me. I know that mental constitutions vary, and I suspect they vary in more ways than anyone has yet discovered. Perhaps they vary in this matter? Are there people who do experience "pleasure", in the sense in which I do not?

Why is this a LessWrong topic? Because people often talk about "pleasure" as if there were such a thing, the obtaining of which is the reason that people seek pleasurable experiences, and the maximisation of which is what people do. But it appears to me that "pleasure" is nothing more than a label applied to disparate experiences, becoming a mere dormitive principle when used as an explanation. Does that difference result from an actual difference in mental constitution?

If there are people who do experience a definite thing common to all enjoyable experiences, this might be one reason for the attraction, to some, of utilitarian theories -- even for taking some sort of utilitarianism to be obviously, trivially true. My experience, as set out above, is certainly one reason why I find all varieties of utilitarianism a priori implausible.
What's a "natural number"?
by cousin_it — 2010-10-07T13:34:26.983Z

A big problem with natural numbers is that the axiomatic method breaks on them.

Mystery #1: if we're allowed to talk about sets of natural numbers, sets of these sets, etc., then some natural-sounding statements are neither provable nor disprovable ("independent") from all the "natural" axiomatic systems we've invented yet. For example, the continuum hypothesis can be reformulated as a statement about sets of sets of natural numbers. The root cause is that we can't completely axiomatize which sets of natural numbers exist, because there's too many of them. That's the substantial difference between second-order logic and first-order logic; logicians say that second-order logic is "defined semantically", not by any syntactic procedure of inference.

Mystery #2: if we're allowed to talk about arithmetic and use quantifiers (exists and forall) over numbers, but not over sets of them - in other words, use first-order logic only - then some natural-sounding statements appear to be true, but to prove them, we need to accept as axioms a lot of intuition about concepts other than natural numbers. For example, Goodstein's theorem is a simple arithmetical statement that cannot be proved in Peano arithmetic, but can be proved in "stronger theories". This means the theorem is a consequence of our intuition that some "stronger theory", e.g. ZFC, is consistent - but where did that intuition come from? It doesn't seem to be talking about natural numbers anymore.

Can we teach a computer to think about natural numbers the same way we do, that is, somehow non-axiomatically? Not just treat numbers as opaque "things" that obey the axioms of PA - that would make a lot of true theorems unreachable! This seems to be the simplest AI-hard problem that I've ever seen.