trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Is it immoral to have children?
by jefftk — 2013-10-22T12:13:26.610Z

In "The Immorality of Having Children" (2013, pdf) Rachels presents the "Famine Relief Argument against Having Children":

Conceiving and raising a child costs hundreds of thousands of dollars; that money would be far better spent on famine relief; therefore, conceiving and raising children is immoral.

They present this as a special case of Peter Singer's argument from Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972), which is why they haven't called it something more reasonable like the "Opportunity Cost Argument".

[Note: the use of "Famine Relief" here is in reference to Peter Singer's 1972 example, but famine relief is not where your money does the most good. Treat the argument as "that money would be far better spent on GiveWell's top charities" or whatever organization you think is most effective.]

It's true that having and raising a child is very expensive. They use an estimate of $227k for the direct expenditure through age 18 while noting that college [1] and time costs could make this much higher. Let's use a higher estimate of $500k to account for these. Considered over twenty years, that's $25k/year or $2k/month. This puts it at the top of the range of expenses, next to housing. It's also true that this money can do a lot of good when spent on effective charities. At GiveWell's current best estimate of $2.3k this is enough money to save nearly one life per month. [2]

But perhaps we shouldn't be thinking of this money as an expense at all, and instead more as an investment? Could having kids be a contender for the most effective charity? That is, could having and raising kids be one of the most effective things you could do with your time and money?

For example you could convince your kid to be unusually generous, donating far more than they cost to raise. Except that it's much cheaper to convince other people's kids to be generous, and our influence on the adult behavior of our children is not that big. Alternatively, if you're unusually smart, by having kids you could help make there be more smart people in the future. But how many more generations will pass before we learn enough about the genetics of intelligence to make this aspect of parental genetics irrelevant? Rachels considers the idea that your having children might greatly benefit the world, and rightly finds it insufficient. While your child may do a lot of good, for the expense there are much ...
Which stage of effectiveness matters most?
by KatjaGrace — 2013-10-22T09:36:00.000Z

Many altruistic endeavors seem overwhelmingly likely to be ineffective compared to what is possible. For instance building schools, funding expensive AIDS treatment, and raising awareness about breast cancer and low status.

For many other endeavors, it is possible to tell a story under which they are massively important, and hard to conclusively show that we don’t live in that story. Yet it is also hard to make a very strong case that they are better than a huge number of other activities. For instance, changing policy discourse in China, averting rainforest deforestation or pushing for US immigration reform.

There are also (at least in theory) endeavors that can be reasonably expected to be much better than anything else available. Given current disagreement over what fits in this category, it seems to either be empty at the moment, or highly dependent on values.

An important question for those interested in effective altruism is whether most of the gains from effectiveness are to come from people who support the obviously ineffective endeavors moving to plausibly effective ones, or from people who support the plausibly effective endeavors moving to the very probably effective ones.

One reason this matters is that the first jump requires hardly any new research about actual endeavors, while the second seems to require a lot of it. Another is that the first plan involves engaging quite a different demographic to the second, and probably in a different way. Finally, the second plan requires intellectual standards that can actually filter out the plausible endeavors from the very good ones. Such standards seem hard to develop and maintain. Upholding norms that filter terrible interventions from plausible ones is plenty of work, and probably easier.

My own intuition has been that most of the value will come from the second possibility. However I suspect others have the opposite feeling, or at least aim to exploit the first possibility more at the moment. What do you think? Is the distinction even just?
LINK: "This novel epigenetic clock can be used to address a host of questions in developmental biology, cancer and aging research."
by fortyeridania — 2013-10-22T07:59:30.855Z

The paper is called DNA methylation age and human tissues and cell types and it's from Genome Biology. Here is a Nature article based on the paper.

I have submitted this to LW because of its relevance to the measurement of aging and, hence, to life extension. Here is a bit from the Nature piece:

"Ageing is a major health problem, and interestingly there are really no objective measures of aging, other than a verified birth date," says Darryl Shibata, a pathologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "Studies like this one provide important new efforts to increase the rigour of human aging studies."

Note: The discrepancy in spelling ("ageing" vs. "aging") is in the original.
Meetup : Princeton NJ Meetup
by Larks — 2013-10-22T02:10:25.174Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Princeton NJ Meetup

WHEN:
16 November 2013 01:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Small World Coffee, 14 Witherspoon St. Princeton, NJ 08540

My girlfriend and I have just moved to Princeton, and would like to meet any LessWrong readers who go to the university or live in the area. I used to co-run the Oxford meetups a long time ago, and it'd be good to do something similar again. All welcome!
We don't have any particular topics in mind, but we're A) willing to discuss anything LW-ey, as well as just socialise, and B) capable of coming up with conversation topics, so don't feel you have to have anything clever to say to be welcome!
As such, we hereby precommit to being at Small World Coffe* from 1pm to 3pm. By the sign of the paperclip so shall ye know us. If you prefer a different time/place, please let me know, either by PM or in the comments.
*unless people recommend a better option before October 31st. At that point the time and date are fixed.

Discussion article for the meetup : Princeton NJ Meetup
What Can We Learn About Human Psychology from Christian Apologetics?
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-10-21T22:02:19.113Z

A couple months ago I set up a Skype meeting Robin Hanson to chat about the book he's working on. But the first thing he wanted to talk wasn't directly related to the book. He'd read some of my work critiquing Christian apologetics, and said something to the effect of even though people who spend a lot of time arguing about religion are extreme cases, maybe they somehow shed light on the psychology of ordinary people. I didn't have a good response at the time; I had taken a shot at discussing the sociology of apologetics in my first book, but I was never terribly satisfied with that chapter and hadn't thought about the subject much since writing it.

Since then, I've thought about it more, and now have a better answer for Robin. The take-away is that to understand Christian apologetics, you need to see it as a giant exercise is violating Eliezer's advice in the Against Rationalization subsequence, particularly The Bottom Line. What's particularly noteworthy is the enormous amount of effort many Christians put into doing so, rather than just shrugging their shoulders and saying "I believe on faith." (Note: everything I say here is probably applicable to some degree to other forms of apologetics, but I'll focus on Christian apologetics and in particular Protestant apologetics because it's what I'm most familiar with.)

And I need to emphasize from the start that we are talking about a lot of Christians here. Big name professional apologists are rare, but then so by definition are "big names" in any field. Consumers of apologetics are not so rare: countless evangelicals have read C. S. Lewis' apologetic work Mere Christianity and it's number 3 on Christianity Today's list of "The Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals." Immediately following Mere Christianity on the list is another apologetic work, Francis Schaeffer's The God Who Is There. Josh McDowell's The Evidence That Demands A Verdict is number 13. McDowell's More Than A Carpenter has reportedly sold 15 million copies, while Lee Strobel's Case For... books have reportedly sold 10 million copies all together.

I think apologists are best-seen as a highly specialized kind of religious professional, in some ways analogous to priests and ministers. Indeed there's overlap: many prominent apologists have had less well-known careers as pastors, while many evangelical pastors brush up on their a...
Criticisms of the Metaethics
by Carinthium — 2013-10-21T11:23:30.990Z

I'll admit that I'm using the LessWrong Board to try and figure out flaws in my own philosophical ideas. I should also make a disclaimer that I do not dispute the usefulness of Eliezer's ideas for the purposes of building a Friendy AI.

My criticisms are designed for other purposes- namely, that contrary to what I am led to believe most of this site believes Eliezer's metaethics does not work for solving ethical dilemnas except as a set of arbitrary rules, and in no way the stand-out best choice compared to any other self-consistent deontological or consequentialist system.

I'll also admit that I have something of a bias, for those looking in- I find an interesting intellectual challenge to look through philosophies and find weak points in them, so I may have been over-eager to find a bias that doesn't exist. I have been attempting to find an appropriate flaw for some time as some of my posts may have foreshadowed.

Finally, I will note that I am also attempting to dodge attacks on Elizier's ethics despite it's connections to Eliezer's epistemology.

---------------------------------------

1: My Basic Argument

Typically, people ask two things out of ethics- a reason to be ethical in the first place, and a way to resolve ethical dilemnas. Eliezer gets around the former by, effectively, appealing to the fact that people want to be moral even if there is no universially compelling argument.

The problem with Eliezer's metaethics are based around what I call the A-case after the character I invented to be in it the first time I thought up this idea. A has two options- Option 1 is the best choice from a Consequentialist perspective and A is smart enough to figure that out. However, following Option 1 would make A feel very guilty for some reason (which A cannot overcome merely by thinking about it), whereas Option 2 would feel morally right on an emotive level.

This, of course, implies that A is not greatly influenced by consequentialism- but that's quite plausible. Perhaps you have to be irrational to an intelligent non-consequentialist, but an irrational non-consequentialist smart enough to perform a utility calculation as a theoretical exercise is plausible.

How can we say that the right thing for A to do is Option 1, in such a way as be both rational and in any way convincing to A? From the premises, it is likely that any possible argument will be rejected...
[Link] Trouble at the lab
by  — 2013-10-21T08:51:31.457Z

Related: The Real End of Science

From the Economist.

“I SEE a train wreck looming,” warned Daniel Kahneman, an eminent psychologist, in an open letter last year. The premonition concerned research on a phenomenon known as “priming”. Priming studies suggest that decisions can be influenced by apparently irrelevant actions or events that took place just before the cusp of choice. They have been a boom area in psychology over the past decade, and some of their insights have already made it out of the lab and into the toolkits of policy wonks keen on “nudging” the populace.

Dr Kahneman and a growing number of his colleagues fear that a lot of this priming research is poorly founded. Over the past few years various researchers have made systematic attempts to replicate some of the more widely cited priming experiments. Many of these replications have failed. In April, for instance, a paper in PLoS ONE, a journal, reported that nine separate experiments had not managed to reproduce the results of a famous study from 1998 purporting to show that thinking about a professor before taking an intelligence test leads to a higher score than imagining a football hooligan.

The idea that the same experiments always get the same results, no matter who performs them, is one of the cornerstones of science’s claim to objective truth. If a systematic campaign of replication does not lead to the same results, then either the original research is flawed (as the replicators claim) or the replications are (as many of the original researchers on priming contend). Either way, something is awry.

...

I recommend reading the whole thing.
Meetup : Washington DC: Anthropics with Robin Hanson
by maia — 2013-10-21T03:58:55.739Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: Anthropics with Robin Hanson

WHEN:
27 October 2013 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We'll be meeting to discuss anthropics: things like the Doomsday Argument, self-sampling, and the Great Filter. Robin Hanson will be leading the discussion.

We'll meet in the courtyard at the center of the National Portrait Gallery, as usual.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: Anthropics with Robin Hanson
An Introduction To Rationality
by kerspoon — 2013-10-20T02:43:39.630Z

This article is an attempt to summarize basic material, and thus probably won't have anything new for the hard core posting crowd. It'd be interesting to know whether you think there's anything essential I missed, though.

Summary

We have a mental model of the world that we call our beliefs. This world does not always reflect reality very well as our perceptions distort the information coming from our senses. The same is true of our desires such that we do not accurately know why we desire something. It may also be true for other parts of our subconscious. We, as conscious beings, can notice when there is a discrepancy and try to correct for it. This is known as Epistemic rationality. Seen this way science is a formalised version of epistemic rationality. Instrumental rationality is the act of doing what we value, whatever that may be.

Both forms of rationality can be learnt and it is the aim of this document to convince you that it is both a good idea and worth your time.

Hill Walker's Analogy

Reality is the physical hills, streams, roads and landmarks (the territory) and our beliefs are the map we use to navigate them. We know that the map is not the same thing as the territory but we hope it is accurate enough to understand things about it all the same. Errors in the map can easily lead to us doing the wrong thing.

The Lens That Distorts

We see the world through a filter or lens called perception. This is necessary; there is too much information in the world to map fully but it is very important to quickly recognise certain things. For example it is useful to recognise that a lion is about to attack you.

To go back to our hill walker's analogy: we are quicker navigating with a hill walker's map than an aerial photograph. This is because the map has been filtered to only show what is commonly needed by walkers. Too much information can slow our judgement or confuse us. On the other hand incorrect information or a lack of information is just as bad. If when out walking we are told to turn left at the second stream yet the hill has more streams than the map then we will get lost. The map was not adequate in this situation.

In the same way our own maps can be wrong caused by errors in our perceptual filter. Optical illusions are a nice example of such a phenomenon where there is a distortion between map and territory.

An Example

Light from the sun bounces off ou...
Meditation Trains Metacognition
by LoganStrohl — 2013-10-20T00:47:03.927Z

Summary: Some forms of meditation may train key skills of metacognition, serving as powerful tools for applied rationality. I expect aspiring rationalists to advance more quickly with a regular practice of mindfulness meditation.

The state of scientific research on meditation isn't great. Although there's evidence that it does something good--probably something involving down-regulation of negative affect--there are many basic questions1 that either haven't been studied at all or haven't been studied well enough to let me update much. According to a meta-analysis by Sedlmeier et al., one problem with evaluating the research is that it's hard to pin down what meditation is, let alone what it does or why it does it. In their words,

...two of our main findings are that (a) meditation has a substantial impact on psychological variables, indicated by a medium-sized (e.g., Cohen, 1988) global effect, and (b) its effects might be somewhat stronger for negative emotional than for cognitive variables. Due to the lack of a comprehensive theoretical approach (and results from studies derived therefrom), it is still unclear how meditation works... Moreover, a closer look at the studies included in the meta-analysis revealed that they differed in many respects that might have affected the results.2

So I just want to be clear that I don't mean in this post to wholeheartedly recommend daily meditation as the best possible use of 1/24th of your time.

Nevertheless, my own experience and reports from several of my friends suggest a specific cognitive result from a certain flavor of meditation that will be very good news for rationality if we can reliably reproduce it.3 In a recent post, Julia Galef pointed out exactly what I consider to be far and away the greatest benefit I've reaped from my meditative practices over the years. She wrote,

Meditation seems to train you to stop automatically identifying with all of your thoughts, so that, for example, when the thought "John’s a jerk" pops into your head, you don’t assume that John necessarily is a jerk. You take the thought as something your brain produced, which may or may not be true, and may or may not be useful -- and this ability to take a step back from your thoughts and reflect on them is arguably one of the building blocks of rationality.

I'd like to delve more deeply into how and why this could work. ...
Existential Risk II
by fowlertm — 2013-10-20T00:25:25.437Z

Meta

-This is not a duplicate of the original less wrong x-risk primer. I like lukeprog's article just fine, but it works mostly as a punch in the gut for anyone who needs a wake up call. Very little of the actual research on x-risk is discussed in that article, so the gap that was there before it was published was largely there after. My article and his would work well being read together.

-This was originally written to accompany a presentation I gave, hence the random inclusion of both hyperlinks and citations. It also lives, with minor differences, here.

-Summary: For various reasons the future is scarier than a lot of people realize. All sorts of things could lead to the destruction of the human species, ranging from asteroid impacts to runaway AIs, and these things are united by the fact that any one of them could destroy the value of the future from a human perspective. The dangers can be separated into bangs (very sudden extinction), crunches (not fatal but crippling), shrieks (mostly curse with a little blessing), and whimpers (a long, slow fading), though there is nothing sacred about these categories. Some humans have are trying to prevent this, though their methods are still in their infancy. Much more should be done to support them.

In the beginning

I want to start this off with a quote, which nicely captures both how I use to feel about the idea of human extinction and how I feel about it now:

I think many atheists still trust in God. They say there is no God, but …[a]sk them how they think the future will go, especially with regards to Moral Progress, Human Evolution, Technological Progress, etc. There are a few different answers you will get: Some people just don’t know or don’t care. Some people will tell you stories of glorious progress… The ones who tell stories are the ones who haven’t quite internalized that there is no god. The people who don’t care aren’t paying attention. The correct answer is not nervous excitement, or world-weary cynicism, it is fear. -Nyan Sandwich

Back when I was a Christian I gave some thought to the rapture, which is not entirely unlike extinction as far as most ten-year-olds can tell. Sometime during this period I found a slim little book of fiction which portrayed a damned so...
[Link] You and Your Research
by katydee — 2013-10-20T00:05:08.582Z

I've seen Richard Hamming's classic talk You And Your Research referenced several times on LessWrong and figured I would post the full version. The introduction is reproduced below:

The title of my talk is, ``You and Your Research.'' It is not about managing research, it is about how you individually do your research. I could give a talk on the other subject - but it's not, it's about you. I'm not talking about ordinary run-of-the-mill research; I'm talking about great research. And for the sake of describing great research I'll occasionally say Nobel-Prize type of work. It doesn't have to gain the Nobel Prize, but I mean those kinds of things which we perceive are significant things. Relativity, if you want, Shannon's information theory, any number of outstanding theories - that's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Now, how did I come to do this study? At Los Alamos I was brought in to run the computing machines which other people had got going, so those scientists and physicists could get back to business. I saw I was a stooge. I saw that although physically I was the same, they were different. And to put the thing bluntly, I was envious. I wanted to know why they were so different from me. I saw Feynman up close. I saw Fermi and Teller. I saw Oppenheimer. I saw Hans Bethe: he was my boss. I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done.

When I came to Bell Labs, I came into a very productive department. Bode was the department head at the time; Shannon was there, and there were other people. I continued examining the questions, ``Why?'' and ``What is the difference?'' I continued subsequently by reading biographies, autobiographies, asking people questions such as: ``How did you come to do this?'' I tried to find out what are the differences. And that's what this talk is about.

I consider this talk good and useful not only for those interested in research, but for those interested in achieving much of anything. Check it out!