trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[LINK] Possible Unrepresentative Subjects in Studies of Medical Interventions
by TimS — 2013-04-23T13:18:30.995Z

This blog post on subject selection in study design seems like it might be interesting to folks.

From the post:

[C]linical trials often forbid enrollment by many patients who are treated in our health care system, including for example anyone who is over the age of 60, or has multiple medical conditions, or is on medications etc. This makes the clinical trial easier to conduct but it can also result in a research sample that is completely unlike real-world health care recipients. If for example a new medication has been FDA-approved based on a clinical trial that excluded anyone who was already taking another medication, any adverse medication interactions won’t come to light until patients start experiencing them in the health care system.

The post links to the article, published in JAMA Internal Medicine. Abstract for the publication:

Because they assign patients to treatment conditions, randomized clinical trials (RCTs) offer unparalleled internal validity for drawing inferences about the efficacy of a medical treatment. Whether such inferences can be generalized is not always clear because many RCTs enroll a low and unrepresentative proportion of all patients. The challenges of judging the clinical utility of clinical trial results are increased by poor reporting. The study by Gross et al of trials published in leading medical journals from 1999 through 2000 found that only 28% reported the proportion of screened patients who were enrolled. These deficiencies may have been ameliorated in the past decade because the CONSORT statement was revised in 2001 to require more complete information on the enrollment process in reports of clinical trials, and because many treatment research fields have been showing greater concern about generating knowledge that better informs clinical practice. Accordingly, the present study assessed the extent to which low enrollment rates are still characteristic of widely cited clinical trials, and whether reporting of enrollment information has improved.
[SEQ RERUN] The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet
by MinibearRex — 2013-04-23T04:56:26.643Z

Today's post, The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet was originally published on 10 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

An intriguing dietary theory which appears to allow some people to lose substantial amounts of weight, but doesn't appear to work at all for others.

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 Beware of Other-Optimizing, 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.
Compromise: Send Meta Discussions to the Unofficial LessWrong Subreddit
by orthonormal — 2013-04-23T01:37:31.762Z

After a recent comment thread degenerated into an argument about trolling, moderation, and meta discussions, I came to the following conclusions:

Meta conversations are annoying to stumble across, I'd rather not see them unless I think it's important, and I think other people mostly feel the same way. Moreover, moderators can't easily ignore those conversations when they encounter them, because they're usually attacks on the moderators themselves; and people can't simply avoid encountering them on a regular basis without avoiding LW altogether. This is a perfect recipe for a flamewar taking over Top Comments even when most people don't care that much.

Officially banning all meta conversations, however, is a bad precedent, and I don't want LW to do that.

Ideally, Less Wrong would implement a separate "META" area (so that people can read the regular area for all the object-level discussions, and then sally into the meta area only when they're ready). After talking to Luke (who also wants this), though, it seems clear that nobody is able to implement it very soon. So as a stopgap measure, I'm personally going to start doing the following, and I hope you join me:

Whenever a conversation starts getting bitterly meta in a thread that's not originally about a LW site meta issue, I'm going to tell people to start a thread on the LW Uncensored Reddit Thread instead. Then I'm going to downvote anyone who continues the meta war on the original thread.

I know it's annoying to send people somewhere that has a different login system, but it's as far as I can tell the best fix we currently have. Since some meta conversations are important, I'm not going to punish people for linking to meta thread discussions that they think are significant, and the relevant place for those links is usually the Open Thread. I don't want LessWrong to be a community devoted to arguing about the mechanics of LessWrong, so that's my suggestion.

Thoughts? (And yes, this thread is obviously open to meta discussion. I'm hopefully doing something constructive about the problem, instead of just complaining about it, though.)

EDIT: Changed the link to the uncensored thread more specifically, at Luke's request; originally I linked to the general LW subreddit, which is more heavily moderated.
A thought-process testing opportunity
by  — 2013-04-22T19:51:09.164Z

If you haven't seen the video of a wet towel being wrung out in space yet, it provides a great opportunity to test some basic rationality skills.

Skill #1: Notice the opportunity. (I failed this test. I had a fuzzy, wrong idea about what would happen. I didn't notice the fuzziness of my own thinking until after I watched the video, when it was too late to apply basic rationality skills. I'll never know if I could have made a correct prediction.)

Skill #2: Enumerate possibilities.

Skill #3: Incorporate prior information.

Skill #4: Making clear predictions.

Skill #5: Understanding why/how your prediction failed/succeeded.

Skill #6: There may be some things you predicted and some you didn't. Don't forget to notice the partial failures along with the partial success.

Experiment:

You are on the International Space Station. You get a towel soaking wet, then you wring it out. What happens?

Video of the experiment

If you haven't seen it, don't scroll into the comments.

Don't click the link until you've thought about it!
Minor, perspective changing facts
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-04-22T19:01:38.279Z

There's a lot of background mess in our mental pictures of the world. We try and be accurate on important issues, but a whole lot of the less important stuff we pick up from the media, the movies, and random impressions. And once these impressions are in our mental pictures, they just don't go away - until we find a fact that causes us to say "huh", and reassess.

Here are three facts that have caused that "huh" in me, recently, and completely rearranged minor parts of my mental map. I'm sharing them here, because that experience is a valuable one.

Think terrorist attack on Israel - did the phrase "suicide bombing" spring to mind? If so, you're so out of fashion: the last suicide bombing in Israel was in 2008 - a year where dedicated suicide bombers managed the feat of killing a grand total of 1 victim. Suicide bombings haven't happened in Israel for over half a decade.

Large scale plane crashes seem to happen all the time, all over the world. They must happen at least a few times a year, in every major country, right? Well, if I'm reading this page right, the last time there was an airline crash in the USA that killed more that 50 people was... in 2001 (2 months after 9/11). Nothing on that scale since then. And though there has been crashes on route to/from Spain and France since then, it seems that major air crashes in western countries is something that essentially never happens.

The major cost of a rocket isn't the fuel, as I'd always thought. It seems that the Falcon 9 rocket costs $54 million per launch, of which fuel is only $0.2 million (or, as I prefer to think of it - I could sell my house to get enough fuel to fly to space). In the difference between those two prices, lies the potential for private spaceflight to low-Earth orbit.
Meetup : Durham NC meetup: Living Luminously, Part 2
by therufs — 2013-04-22T18:33:31.572Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham NC meetup: Living Luminously, Part 2

WHEN:
25 April 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
420 E Geer St, Durham NC 27701

Continuing in the Living Luminously sequence, we'll cover:

The ABCs of Luminosity

(http://lesswrong.com/lw/1y0/the_abcs_of_luminosity/)

"Affect, behavior, and circumstance interact with each other. These interactions constitute informative patterns that you should identify and use in your luminosity project."

Lights, Camera, Action

(http://lesswrong.com/lw/1yb/lights_camera_action/)

"You should pay attention to key mental events, on a regular and frequent basis, because important thoughts can happen very briefly or very occasionally and you need to catch them."

The Spotlight

(http://lesswrong.com/lw/1za/the_spotlight/)

"Inspecting thoughts is easier and more accurate if they aren't in your head. Look at them in another form from the outside, like they belonged to someone else."

Use social pressure to increase the likelihood of your attendance -- RSVP here or via the RTLW group! (http://groups.google.com/group/rtlw)

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham NC meetup: Living Luminously, Part 2
Meetup : Mountain View: More on Reinforcement
by fiddlemath — 2013-04-22T03:18:09.010Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Mountain View: More on Reinforcement

WHEN:
23 April 2013 07:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
167 Jasmine Ct, Mountain View, CA

More from Karen Pryor's Don't Shoot the Dog, as we only got through about half of it last time. Including:

A (fast!) review of last week's stuff

How to train responses to specific cues

Methods for training away an unwanted behavior

Though they sound straightforward, that the ability to do the last two tasks are the primary atoms that let you program your brain -- to institute appropriate, perhaps-unintuitive behaviors at the right time, and to get rid of such behavior. If we can do this -- practice doing it, make a habit of this practice -- then we can make ourselves more awesome in fine detail.

I'd love to have a conversation about what it'd look like to take these ideas seriously. And, since we only did one round last time, let's play a bit more of the Training Game. Maybe with a little more structure. :j

See you there!

If you're in the San Francisco Bay area, consider joining the Bay Area Less Wrong mailing list.
Regular meetups in Mountain View and Berkeley, and other events, are announced and discussed there.

Discussion article for the meetup : Mountain View: More on Reinforcement
Meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality
by matt — 2013-04-22T01:34:19.534Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality

WHEN:
03 May 2013 07:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
491 King Street, West Melbourne VIC 3003, Australia

NOTE: We've moved a stone's throw from our old office. Note the new address.

Practical rationality. This meetup repeats on the 1st Friday of each month and is distinct from our social meetup on the 3rd Friday of each month.

Topic for May: Rationality therapy - bring questions or decisions for the group to help solve
http://lesswrongmelbourne.uservoice.com/forums/203428-general/suggestions/3876671-small-groups-rationality-therapy

Discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/melbourne-less-wrong

All welcome from 6:30pm. Call the phone number on the door and I'll let you in.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality
Can somebody explain this to me?: The computability of the laws of physics and hypercomputation
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-04-21T21:22:48.208Z

"Hypercomputation" is a term coined by two philosophers, Jack Copeland and Dianne Proudfoot, to refer to allegedly computational processes that do things Turing machines are in principle incapable of doing. I'm somewhat dubious of whether any of the proposals for "hypercomputation" are really accurately described as computation, but here, I'm more interested in another question: is there any chance it's possible to build a physical device that answers questions a Turing machine cannot answer?

I've read a number of Copeland and Proudfoot's articles promoting hypercomputation, and they claim this is an open question. I have, however, seen some indications that they're wrong about this, but my knowledge of physics and computability theory isn't enough to answer this question with confidence.

Some of the ways to convince yourself that "hypercomputation" might be physically possible seem like obvious confusions, for example if you convince yourself that some physical quality is allowed to be any real number, and then notice that because some reals are non-computable, you say to yourself that if only we could measure such a non-computable quantity then we could answer questions no Turing machine could answer. Of course, the idea of doing such a measurement is physically implausible even if you could find a non-computable physical quantity in the first place. And that mistake can be sexed up in various ways, for example by talking about "analog computers" and assuming "analog" means it has components that can take any real-numbered value.

Points similar to the one I've just made exist in the literature on hypercomputation (see here and here, for example). But the critiques of hypercomputation I've found tend to focus on specific proposals. It's less clear whether there are any good general arguments in the literature that hypercomputation is physically impossible, because it would require infinite-precision measurements or something equally unlikely. It seems like it might be possible to make such an argument; I've read that the laws of physics are consiered to be computable, but I don't have a good enough understanding of what that means to tell if it entails that hypercomputation is physically impossible.

Can anyone help me out here?
Help Me Name My Blog
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-04-21T20:30:56.004Z

A few of you may know I have a blog called Greatplay.net, located at... surprise... http://www.greatplay.net. I’ve heard some people that discovered my site much later than they otherwise would because the name of the site didn’t communicate what it was about well and sounded unprofessional.

Why Greatplay.net in the first place? I picked it when I was 12, because it was (1) short, (2) pronounceable, (3) communicable without any risk of the other person misspelling it, and (4) did not communicate any information about what the site would be about, so I could mold the site as I grew.

Now after >2 years of blogging about basically the same thing, I think my blog will always be about utilitarianism (both practical and philosophical), lifestyle design (my quest to make myself more productive and frugal, mainly so I can be a better utilitarian), political commentary (from a utilitarian perspective), and psychology (of morality and community and that which basically underlies practical utilitarianism).

I probably would want to talk about religion/atheism from time to time, which used to be my biggest interest, but I can already tell it's moderately unpopular with my current readership (yawnnn... we really have to go over why the Bible has errors again?) and I'm already personally getting increasingly bored with it, so I can do away with discussing atheism if I needed to keep to a "topic"-focused blog.

Basically, at this point, I think I stand to gain more by making my blog and domain name more descriptive than I stand to lose by risking my interests shifting away from utilitarianism (or at least the public discussion thereof). But the big question... what should I name my blog?

Option #1: Keep with Greatplay.net: There will be costs with shifting to a new domain name. The monetary cost is mostly insignificant (<$20/yr for a new domain name), but it will take a moderate amount of time to move all the archives over and make sure all the new hyperlinks on the site work. Also, there will be confusion among the readership, and everyone who was linking to my site externally would now be linking to dead stuff. So, if I've misestimated the benefits of moving, I might want to stick with the current name and not incur the costs.

Option #2: Go to PeterHurford.com: I already use this site as an online résumé of sorts, so

...
Produce / Consume Ratios
by Vaniver — 2013-04-21T18:38:06.144Z

I've been thinking about this a bit recently, and thought I'd do a dump of evidence and conjecture, and see what Less Wrong had to say.

There are lots of areas of life where activities can be partitioned into either producing products or consuming products. For those areas, it may be worthwhile to calculate one's Produce / Consume Ratio (PCR) and also contemplate what the optimal PCR is for that area.

There's often some ambiguity with units- I spend minutes preparing food, but I eat meals, not minutes. Even if you have the units aligned (producing and consuming meals, say), I'm not certain if "ratios" are the right measurement, rather than 'fractions.' The benefit of ratios is that it's a single number, but the trouble is that there are many instances where one only produces xor consumes, which implies a ratio of either 0 or infinity; since it's more common to consume and not produce, I've arranged it so those ratios will be 0, and ratios of infinity will be unlikely. (One could talk about produce fraction minus consume fraction, which would go from -1 to 1 and be a unique mapping, but I don't find it as intuitive.)

It's also worthwhile to remember the fifth of Deming's Seven Deadly Diseases: running a company on visible figures alone. This ratio is just a measure of what's going on underneath, not a goal in its own right; it's also a dial you can turn only by adding or subtracting activities. Much of the value I've gotten from thinking about it so far is just that it gives me another perspective from which to view a situation, and I sometimes see something I missed before.

Food

Comparative advantage seems large here; for many meals, prep time is mostly fixed, rather than variable, and a relative preference for cooking over cleaning suggests domestic gains from trade, not to mention massive benefits from skill specialization.

This also seems like an area where the range of PCRs is fairly well developed- everyone eats, but some people never cook (0) and chefs cook many meals that they don't eat (10-1000), and many people living alone cook most of their own meals (my ratio, eating out about one and a half times a week and eating once a day, is about .8).

It seems like there may be some missed opportunities at PCRs that are only slightly above one, which I suspect is related to friction associated with family / household size. Generally, each household will have a d...
Meetup : Atlanta Lesswrong: Cryonics FAQ & Signing up Party!
by Nova_Division — 2013-04-21T15:03:23.356Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta Lesswrong: Cryonics FAQ & Signing up Party!

WHEN:
10 May 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
2388 Lawrenceville Hwy. Apt L. Decatur, GA 30033

Transhumanism, radical life extension, and cryonics are areas that typically have a large interest intersection with rationality.
Our ATLesswrong Meetup has several people who expressed a desire for a more focused session to discuss cryonics and perhaps start the paperwork process in the company of supportive friends. So this is that session!
Have you been cryo-crastinating? Do you have questions that you keep meaning to research, but haven't got around to yet? Do you want hear what the process is like from people who have gone through with it? Then come to this session!
Please note that no one is going to pressured to sign up! Pros and Cons will be discussed (though obviously several of us have come to the conclusion that there are net pros). This is only informational, and help with paperwork IF YOU WANT IT. If you want to come fill out paperwork "just in case" you can do so, and make the decision whether to put it in the mail later. Issues of death and finances are deeply personal, and ALL feelings will be respected. (Anyone who is not respectful to the feelings of others will be asked to leave.)
Agenda:
(1) Provide information about cryonics, including the organizations you can sign up with, life insurance options, and feasibility discussions. Questions and Answers with people who have already signed up.
(2) Put some signatures on some papers! For those who are at that stage of the process.
(3) Celebrate! There will probably be libations.
I will also send out an email when I get a chance about what to do to prepare for this session, if you'd like to get the paperwork ready. Check back for the text of the email here if you are not signed up for various mailing lists.

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta Lesswrong: Cryonics FAQ & Signing up Party!
Meetup : Emotional Awareness 
by  — 2013-04-21T05:15:24.075Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Emotional Awareness

WHEN:
27 April 2013 03:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2505 w broadway, vancouver, bc

The Vancouver meetup is going to spend the next many weeks working through the CFAR core materials that are taught at the CFAR camps. Each week is another "chapter". The exercises should take around 2 hours, with plenty of time left over for hanging out and having fun.

The Bayes stuff on Saturday went well. We worked through some of the Bayes theorem practice problems. I think everyone learned something (at least I did.)

Next up is something completely different; some exercises about Emotional Awareness. It looks like it should be fun, and hopefully It will be better organized than the first one was.

As usual, Benny's Bagels on Saturday afternoon (15:30 this week). Join us on our mailing list if you are not on already.

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Emotional Awareness
[LINK] Causal Entropic Forces
by Qiaochu_Yuan — 2013-04-20T23:57:34.160Z

This paper seems relevant to various LW interests. It smells like The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition, but I haven't wrapped my head enough around either to say more than that. Abstract:

Recent advances in fields ranging from cosmology to computer science have hinted at a possible deep connection between intelligence and entropy maximization, but no formal physical relationship between them has yet been established. Here, we explicitly propose a first step toward such a relationship in the form of a causal generalization of entropic forces that we find can cause two defining behaviors of the human “cognitive niche”—tool use and social cooperation—to spontaneously emerge in simple physical systems. Our results suggest a potentially general thermodynamic model of adaptive behavior as a nonequilibrium process in open systems.