trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
What's the name of this cognitive bias?
by pete22 — 2013-07-06T15:05:47.350Z

Picture a circular road on a map. Let's say that my office is at twelve o'clock, my home is at five o'clock, and the post office is at three o'clock.

Now, suppose I have to leave work, pick up a document at home, and take it to the post office to mail it. I know it's faster to walk clockwise home, passing the post office, and then return to it with the letter. But my gut preference is to go counterclockwise, either because of an aversion to retracing my steps, or because that route just ... feels "cleaner" or more efficient somehow, or ... I can't articulate it any better than that.

Does anyone else share this intuition? Is it a manifestation of one or more known/studied effects?
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 22, chapter 93
by daenerys — 2013-07-06T03:02:36.426Z

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 93. The previous thread has passed 300 comments.

There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,18,19,20.

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
Personal Library Management
by Ritalin — 2013-07-05T22:14:17.907Z

I've just finished my finals, and, after six years of college, I am faced with this fact: I have accumulated one heck of a lot of books, most of which I haven't read yet.

An app, or at the very least an algorythm, on how to manage them, make a reading list, and go about reading them, is something I really wish for, but I have no idea how to approach this problem in a time-efficient, productive way, and I wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel.

Do any of you have the same problem? What are your solutions?

The main post will be gradually updated and amended as the discussion progresses.

EDIT: For Mac Users, it appears that Delicious Library is a great solution. While looking for alternatives, I found this web app, libib, which seems very promising.

EDIT 2: I've spent most of the day cataloguing all of my stuff on libib, which is incredibly efficient... as long as the ISBN is readily-recognized. This doesn't work so well with rarer books and older books, but they're a small enough minority that I can delcare a smashing success.

Step 1 was making a list of all available books.

Step 2 is going to be applying the Universal Decimal System,

Step 3 will be Establishing a

Reading List and a

List of What's Already Read and a

List of What Will Probably Never Be Read
[HPMOR][Possible Spoilers] Gedankenexperiment: Time Turner Meta-Informational Relativity
by stcredzero — 2013-07-05T19:33:22.100Z

Some people have been asking the question about the 6-hour limit on time turners in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Apparently, if a character, let's say it's Amelia Bones, goes back in time N hours and relays a piece of information about the future to another character, say Dumbledore, then Dumbledore cannot go back in time more than (6-N) hours.

The 6 hour limit is a useful rule to keep the HPMOR universe from becoming over-complicated with time travel, however several people have brought up the following objection. The claim is that Amelia Bones, by traveling back in time and saying that she has information she hasn't yet revealed, has already revealed information about the future in the form of Metadata: That the future still exists N hours in the future and that Amelia Bones was in it, etc. I will show, however, that this is not the case.

Imagine that Amelia Bones has traveled back in time from 1 hour in the future, but she is confused about the time after having apparated across time zones and mistakenly tells Dumbledore that she has information for him from 4 hours in the future. Call this Scenario A. Now imagine that the same scenario happens, but that Amelia is not mistaken about the time. Call that Scenario B.

The thing to note here, is that, from the informational point of view of Dumbledore, provided he doesn't have some additional side-channel information, Scenario A and Scenario B are indistinguishable. (In the same sense that being in an accelerating room is indistinguishable from being in a gravity field in General Relativity.) This is what I mean by "time turner meta-informational relativity." Provided that the act of arriving at some time and place with a time turner doesn't itself leak information about how far in the future you arrived from, meta-information about the future is not the same as information. The time-space coordinate meta-information conveyed when Amelia Bones tells Dumbledore, "I used a Time Turner and I have information about the future," is smeared out over the possible 6 hours. This tells us that meta-information cannot be the same as particular information about the future.

Additional consequence: From this, we can hypothesize that *any* time-indeterminate information conveyed to the past will be "smeared out" over the possible range of times, and that further backwards-time travel is l...
Beeminding Sin
by  — 2013-07-05T16:32:02.143Z

(This is something that I originally posted to the CFAR Alumni list, and then fleshed out a bit and posted to the Beeminder blog. It has been well received and there have been suggestions that I post it here, so here it is.)

For a long time I found that I was spending too much time on certain unproductive things and struggled with getting myself to do what I actually wanted to do with my time. The big break came one morning when I noticed that there was a very tight correlation between the things I wanted to stop doing and the traditional Christian concept of Sin.

Once I noticed this, I went straight to the Wikipedia page for the Seven Deadly Sins, and mapped them onto my own vices:

Lust: Porn, flirting, etc.

Gluttony: Junk food like cookies and chocolate. I might add "more than two bowls of spaghetti" here; the stuff is just too easy to eat.

Sloth: Wasting time on stuff that isn't goal directed or self-improving. Being non-industrious. Failing to strive. Useless news/discussion websites, etc.

Wrath: Acting irrationally out of anger, pain, or frustration. Chewing someone out, violence, slamming doors, etc.

Envy: Not reading, using, or appreciating someone else's work because solving a problem is caught up in my identity.

I'm too much of a cheapskate to have trouble with material excess (Greed), and haven't been burned by Pride yet, so I wouldn't know what to avoid. Maybe I'll figure these out soon.

The nice thing about traditional concepts like Sin is that they come bundled with some guarantees of relative completeness for very little cognitive investment on my part. Someone has tested and developed this thing very extensively; even if it's not perfect, all I have to do is use it. Further, concepts like Sin come with a rich aesthetic heritage that lends them some emotional weight and solidness that fresh concepts just don't have. A culture that's been going for >1500 years will leave behind some impressive artifacts. We would be fools not to take advantage of them.

While I figured all of this out, I had also been looking for a way to beemind my way out of these harmful behaviors. I'd considered a number of schemes, but none were satisfactory. Armed with the concept of Sin, I had a comprehensive and reasonably clear-cut list of things to avoid. When I read how Bethany beeminds sugar-free days, I knew exactly what I had to do.

How it works is this: if I do some...
New LW Meetup: Lyon
by FrankAdamek — 2013-07-05T15:29:25.286Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on June 28th. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

[Lyon, France] LW Meetup in Lyon: 03 July 2013 06:00PM

Other irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Brussels meetup with HEALES: 13 July 2013 01:00PM
Frankfurt meetup: 30 June 2013 04:30PM
Israel LW meetup: 04 July 2013 07:00PM
[Moscow] The Goals We Set: 07 July 2013 04:00PM
[Munich] LW Munich Meetup in July: 06 July 2013 03:00PM
San Francisco: Effective Altruism: 28 June 2013 07:54PM
[Vienna] LW Vienna Meetup #4: 13 July 2013 03:00PM

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

Austin, TX: 29 June 2019 01:30PM
London Practical - Sunday 7th July: 07 July 2013 02:00PM
Melbourne LW Outing: Astronomy evening in Eltham, Saturday 29th June, 5:30pm: 29 June 2013 05:30PM
Melbourne LW Outing: Indoor Rock Climbing, Sunday June 30th: 30 June 2013 02:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

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 notif...
Singleton: the risks and benefits of one world governments
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-07-05T14:05:20.850Z

Many thanks to all those whose conversations have contributed to forming these ideas.

Will the singleton save us?

For most of the large existential risks that we deal with here, the situation would be improved with a single world government (a singleton), or at least greater global coordination. The risk of nuclear war would fade, pandemics would be met with a comprehensive global strategy rather than a mess of national priorities. Workable regulations for the technology risks - such as synthetic biology or AI – become at least conceivable. All in all, a great improvement in safety...

...with one important exception. A stable tyrannical one-world government, empowered by future mass surveillance, is itself an existential risk (it might not destroy humanity, but it would “permanently and drastically curtail its potential”). So to decide whether to oppose or advocate for more global coordination, we need to see how likely such a despotic government could be.

This is the kind of research I would love to do if I had the time to develop the relevant domain skills. In the meantime, I’ll just take all my thoughts on the subject and form them into a “proto-research project plan”, in the hopes that someone could make use of them in a real research project. Please contact me if you would want to do research on this, and would fancy a chat.

Defining “acceptable”

Before we can talk about the likelihood of a good outcome, we need to define what a good outcome actually is. For this analysis, I will take the definition that:

A singleton regime is acceptable, if it is at least as good as any developed democratic government of today.

This definition can be criticised for its conservatism, or its cowardice. Shouldn’t we be aiming to do much better than what we’re doing now? What about the inefficiency of current governments, the huge opportunity costs? Is this not a disaster in itself?

As should be evident from some of my previous posts, I don’t see loss of efficiency as a huge problem, and I see the push towards efficiency (in certain circumstances) as a huge risk. Others disagree, however, which is why I chose the above minimalist definition. There are many different moral and ethical systems out there, each having their own preferences for ideal governments and their own impressions as to how our current gove...
A New Interpretation of the Marshmallow Test
by elharo — 2013-07-05T12:22:59.433Z

I've begun to notice a pattern with experiments in behavioral economics. An experiment produces a result that's counter-intuitive and surprising, and demonstrates that people don't behave as rationally as expected. Then, as time passes, other researchers contrive different versions of the experiment that show the experiment may not have been about what we thought it was about in the first place. For example, in the dictator game, Jeffrey Winking and Nicholas Mizer changed the experiment so that the participants didn't know each other and the subjects didn't know they were in an experiment. With this simple adjustment that made the conditions of the game more realistic, the "dictators" switched from giving away a large portion of their unearned gains to giving away nothing. Now it's happened to the marshmallow test.

In the original Stanford marshmallow experiment, children were given one marshmallow. They could eat the marshmallow right away; or, if they waited fifteen minutes for the experimenter to return without eating the marshmallow, they'd get a second marshmallow. Even more interestingly, in follow-up studies two decades later, the children who waited longer for the second marshmallow, i.e. showed delayed gratification, had higher SAT scores, school performance, and even improved Body Mass Index. This is normally interpreted as indicating the importance of self-control and delayed gratification for life success.

Not so fast.

In a new variant of the experiment entitled (I kid you not) "Rational snacking", Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri, and Richard N. Aslin from the University of Rochester gave the children a similar test with an interesting twist.

They assigned 28 children to two groups asked to perform art projects. Children in the first group each received half a container of used crayons, and were told that if they could wait, the researcher would bring them more and better art supplies. However, after two and a half minutes, the adult returned and told the child they had made a mistake, and there were no more art supplies so they'd have to use the original crayons.

In part 2, the adult gave the child a single sticker and told the child that if they waited, the adult would bring them more stickers to use. Again the adult reneged.

Children in the second group went through the same routine except this time the adult fulfilled their promises, bringing the child...
How I Became More Ambitious
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2013-07-04T23:34:15.548Z

Follow-up to How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious

Living with yourself is a bit like having a preteen and watching them get taller; the changes happen so slowly that it's almost impossible to notice them, until you stumble across an old point of comparison and it becomes blindingly obvious. I hit that point a few days ago, while planning what I might want to talk about during an OkCupid date. My brain produced the following thought: "well, if this topic comes up, it might sound like I'm trying to take over the world, and that's intimidating- Wait. What?"

I'm not trying to take over the world. It sounds like a lot of work, and not my comparative advantage. If it seemed necessary, I would point out the problems that needed solving and delegate them to CFAR alumni with more domain-specific expertise than me.

However, I went back and reread the post linked at the beginning, and I no longer feel much kinship with that person. This is a change that happened maybe 25-50% deliberately, and the rest by drift, but I still changed my mind, so I will try to detail the particular changes, and what I think led to them. Introspection is unreliable, so I'll probably be at least 50% wrong, but what can you do?

1. Idealism versus practicality

I would still call myself practical, but I no longer think that this comes at the expense of idealism. Idealism is absolutely essential, if you want to have a world that changes because someone wanted it to, as opposed to just by drift. Lately in the rationalist/CFAR/LW community, there's been a lot of emphasis on agency and agentiness, which basically mean the ability to change the world and/or yourself deliberately, on purpose, through planned actions. This is hard. The first step is idealism-being able to imagine a state of affairs that is different and better. Then comes practicality, the part where you sit down and work hard and actually get something done.

It's still true that idealism without practicality doesn't get much done, and practicality without idealism can get a lot done, but it matters what problems you're working on, too. Are you being strategic? Are you even thinking, at all, about whether your actions are helping to accomplish your goals? One of the big things I've learned, a year and a half and two CFAR workshops later, is how automatic and easy this lack of strategy really is.

I had a limited sort of idealism in high school; I w...
Caught in the glare of two anthropic shadows
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-07-04T19:54:16.922Z

This article consists of original new research, so would not get published on Wikipedia!

The previous post introduced the concept of the anthropic shadow: the fact that certain large and devastating disasters cannot be observed in the historical record, because if they had happened, we wouldn't be around to observe them. This absence forms an “anthropic shadow”.

But that was the result for a single category of disasters. What would happen if we consider two independent classes of disasters? Would we see a double shadow, or would one ‘overshadow’ the other?

To answer that question, we’re going to have to analyse the anthropic shadow in more detail, and see that there are two separate components to it:

The first is the standard effect: humanity cannot have developed a technological civilization, if there were large catastrophes in the recent past.

The second effect is the lineage effect: humanity cannot have developed a technological civilization, if there was another technological civilization in the recent past that survived to today (or at least, we couldn't have developed the way we did).

To illustrate the difference between the two, consider the following model. Segment time into arbitrarily “eras”. In a given era, a large disaster may hit with probability q, or a small disaster may independently hit with probability q (hence with probability q2, there will be both a large and a small disaster). A small disaster will prevent a technological civilization from developing during that era; a large one will prevent such a civilization from developing in that era or the next one.

If it is possible for a technological civilization to develop (no small disasters that era, no large ones in the preceding era, and no previous civilization), then one will do so with probability p. We will assume p constant: our model will only span a time frame where p is unchanging (maybe it's over the time period after the rise of big mammals?)

Assume a technological civilization develops during a given era (in which, of course, there is no disasters). Let _ denotes no disaster, ▄ denotes a small disaster only, and █ denotes a large disaster (with or without a small disaster as well). Then the possible past sequences that end in the current era (which is a _ by definition) can be divided into sequences that end in the following ways (the anthr...
[Link]: Anthropic shadow, or the dark dusk of disaster
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-07-04T19:52:24.609Z

From a paper by Milan M. Ćirković, Anders Sandberg, and Nick Bostrom:

We describe a signiﬁcant practical consequence of taking anthropic biases into account in deriving predictions for rare stochastic catastrophic events. The risks associated with catastrophes such as asteroidal/cometary impacts, supervolcanic episodes, and explosions of supernovae/gamma-ray bursts are based on their observed frequencies. As a result, the frequencies of catastrophes that destroy or are otherwise incompatible with the existence of observers are systematically underestimated. We describe the consequences of this anthropic bias for estimation of catastrophic risks, and suggest some directions for future work.

There cannot have been a large disaster on Earth in the last millennia, or we wouldn't be around to see it. There can't have been a very large disaster on Earth in the last ten thousand years, or we wouldn't be around to see it. There can't have been a huge disaster on Earth in the last million years, or we wouldn't be around to see it. There can't have been a planet-destroying disaster on Earth... ever.

Thus the fact that we exist precludes us seeing certain types of disasters in the historical record; as we get closer and closer to the present day, the magnitude of the disasters we can see goes down. These missing disasters form the "anthropic shadow", somewhat visible in the top right of this diagram:

Hence even though it looks like the risk is going down (the magnitude is diminishing as we approach the present), we can't rely on this being true: it could be a purely anthropic effect.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 21, chapters 91 & 92
by NancyLebovitz — 2013-07-04T11:49:07.263Z

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapters 91 & 92 . The previous thread has passed 500 comments.

There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,18,19,20.

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.