trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[SEQ RERUN] Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately
by MinibearRex — 2013-04-08T05:01:03.797Z

Today's post, Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately was originally published on 01 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Wealthy philanthropists typically make the mistake of trying to purchase warm fuzzy feelings, status among friends, and actual utilitarian gains, simultaneously; this results in vague pushes along all three dimensions and a mediocre final result. It should be far more effective to spend some money/effort on buying altruistic fuzzies at maximum optimized efficiency (e.g. by helping people in person and seeing the results in person), buying status at maximum efficiency (e.g. by donating to something sexy that you can brag about, regardless of effectiveness), and spending most of your money on expected utilons (chosen through sheer cold-blooded shut-up-and-multiply calculation, without worrying about status or fuzzies).

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 Helpless Individuals, 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.
Rationality Quotes April 2013
by Vaniver — 2013-04-08T02:00:38.710Z

Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Utility Quilting
by  — 2013-04-07T23:48:11.497Z

Related: Pinpointing Utility

Let's go for lunch at the Hypothetical Diner; I have something I want to discuss with you.

We will pick our lunch from the set of possible orders, and we will recieve a meal drawn from the set of possible meals, O.

Speaking in general, each possible order has an associated probability distribution over O. The Hypothetical Diner takes care to simplify your analysis; the probability distribution is trivial; you always get exactly what you ordered.

Again to simplify your lunch, the Hypothetical Diner offers only two choices on the menu: the Soup, and the Bagel.

To then complicate things so that we have something to talk about, suppose there is some set M of ways other things could be that may affect your preferences. Perhaps you have sore teeth on some days.

Suppose for the purposes of this hypothetical lunch date that you are VNM rational. Shocking, I know, but the hypothetical results are clear: you have a utility function, U. The domain of the utility function is the product of all the variables that affect your preferences (which meal, and whether your teeth are sore): U: M x O -> utility.

In our case, if your teeth are sore, you prefer the soup, as it is less painful. If your teeth are not sore, you prefer the bagel, because it is tastier:

U(sore & soup) > U(sore & bagel)
U(~sore & soup) < U(~sore & bagel)

Your global utility function can be partially applied to some m in M to get an "object-level" utility function U_m: O -> utility. Note that the restrictions of U made in this way need not have any resemblance to each other; they are completely separate.

It is convenient to think about and define these restricted "utility function patches" separately. Let's pick some units and datums so we can get concrete numbers for our utilities:

U_sore(soup) = 1 ; U_sore(bagel) = 0
U_unsore(soup) = 0 ; U_unsore(bagel) = 1

Those are separate utility functions, now, so we could pick units and datum seperately. Because of this, the sore numbers are totally incommensurable to the unsore numbers. *Don't try to comapre them between the UF's or you will get type-poisoning. The actual numbers are just a straightforward encoding of the preferences mentioned above.

What if we are unsure about where we fall in M? That is, we won't know whether our teeth are sore until we take the first bite. That is, we have a probability distrib...
On moving posts from Main to Discussion
by PhilGoetz — 2013-04-07T15:34:26.215Z

Yesterday, someone moved one of my posts from Main to Discussion without telling me. Again.

I encourage the site administrators to show some basic courtesy to the posters who provide the content for the site. I believe this would be a better way of doing things:

1. Have a policy on what has to happen to move a post from Main to Discussion. Who can do it? How many admins are there who can do this? State this policy in a FAQ.

2. When you move a post from Main to Discussion, make a comment on the post saying you have done so and why you have done so.
What celebration is
by KatjaGrace — 2013-04-07T14:35:50.000Z

I’m back! And to celebrate being back, I shall discuss celebrating. I actually have not much idea why people celebrate things the way they do, but the practice has many interesting features.

Stylized facts about celebrating stuff:

It generally happens at the beginnings and ends of differentiated periods of time (e.g. a year, time living in a particular area, time on a particular project, a lifetime), and on annual anniversaries of those.

It usually requires most of one’s time, for between a couple of hours and a day.

If it is repeated, it tends to be ritualistic and traditional, containing roughly the same activities every time, but different ones for different celebrations.

The activities tend to be enjoyable, social, ones. They tend not to have other obvious purposes, besides eating.

Celebrating seems to generally express the importance of a subject. Celebrating a thing indicates approval for it.

Celebrations tend to involve more symbolism than your usual activity.

Many celebrations are shared by large numbers of people. Of all the social activities people engage in, most of the largest scale coordinated ones seem to be celebrations.

Celebrating seems normatively expected to be social. Celebrating a thing alone is often considered a sad sign.

Celebrations are more often associated with a religion than the average activity is, though many are not.

Celebrated entities are often humans, or significant human events. But there are also celebrations of beer and dance and so on. I’m unsure what unifying feature these things have. Perhaps just they are popular enough in some group to get general approval for expressing support for them. But it seems something like idealization or identity comes in – many mundane things are popular yet largely uncelebrated. e.g. double glazed windows.

Not celebrating stuff that others are celebrating is seen as somewhat antisocial, serious, and passionless. Yet not a terrible sin.

Why would you have an activity like this? One where periodically large numbers of people – often many perfect strangers – stop what they are doing and enjoy themselves socially in repetitive and symbolic ways that are understood to express approval regarding a particular thing?

The large scale coordination in expressing approval for a thing seems potentially useful for strengthening social norms around that thing. That ...
What Rate of Return Should You Expect?
by jefftk — 2013-04-07T13:40:41.264Z

If you invest money, perhaps because you want to give money in the future, you want a good estimate of the real rate of return so you can compare it to just giving now. Small differences in this estimate have very large effects over decades, and just today I've seen people giving numbers as far apart as 2% and 8%, which over 40 years mean 2.2x growth and 22x growth respectively.

What is reasonable here? If you look around online at personal finance sites you'll see numbers like 6%, 7%, 10%, 11%, and even 12%. First off, these all ignore inflation, which has averaged about 3%. Naively subtracting, this gives us real rates of 3%, 4%, 7%, and 9%. There's also a lot of cherry-picking: if you're willing to choose specific years and specific indexes you can get quite good numbers.

There's an even bigger cherry-picking problem, however, in that they're all based on US returns. Other countries have had worse economic performance, or have even had their stock markets wiped out. Dimson, Marsh, and Staunton (2013) (pdf) (summary) conclude that investors should expect much lower returns:

We have estimated that over the next 20-30 years, global investors, paying low levels of witholding tax and management fees, can expect to earn an annualized real return of no more than 3.5% on an all-equity fund and 2% on a fund split equally between equities and government bonds.

The difference between 7% interest and 3.5% interest is the difference between 60x and 8x over 60 years. This is really important if you're trying to decide whether you do better to save money now and donate later after several decades of compound interest. [1]

[1] If you're saving for your own retirement tax incentives are probably more important than interest rates.

Cross-posted from my blog
[SEQ RERUN] Helpless Individuals
by MinibearRex — 2013-04-07T06:47:17.470Z

Today's post, Helpless Individuals was originally published on 30 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When you consider that our grouping instincts are optimized for 50-person hunter-gatherer bands where everyone knows everyone else, it begins to seem miraculous that modern-day large institutions survive at all. And in fact, the vast majority of large modern-day institutions simply fail to exist in the first place. This is why funding of Science is largely through money thrown at Science rather than donations from individuals - research isn't a good emotional fit for the rare problems that individuals can manage to coordinate on. In fact very few things are, which is why e.g. 200 million adult Americans have such tremendous trouble supervising the 535 members of Congress. Modern humanity manages to put forth very little in the way of coordinated individual effort to serve our collective individual interests.

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 Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes, 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.
[Link] Values Spreading is Often More Important than Extinction Risk
by Pablo — 2013-04-07T05:14:44.154Z

In a recent essay, Brian Tomasik argues that meme-spreading has higher expected utility than x-risk reduction. His analysis assumes a classical utilitarian ethic, but it may be generalizable to other value systems. Here's the summary:

I personally do not support efforts to reduce extinction risk because I think space colonization would potentially give rise to astronomical amounts of suffering. However, even if I thought reducing extinction risk was a good idea, I would not work on it, because spreading your particular values has generally much higher leverage than being one more voice for safety measures against extinction in a world where reducing extinction risk is hard and almost everyone has some incentives to invest in the issue.
Meetup : LessWrong Montreal Biweekly Meetup
by Paul_G — 2013-04-07T01:01:13.477Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Montreal Biweekly Meetup

WHEN:
09 April 2013 06:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
655 Ave. Du President Kennedy Montreal

Meetups are now Tuesday, and biweekly!

See you there.

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong Montreal Biweekly Meetup
Game for organizational structure testing
by  — 2013-04-06T22:16:33.429Z

Say we want to try out new organizational structures. Zaine suggests that a game might be a good method. However rather than a game to test a specific method of organizing people, I'm going to make a game where different organizational structures can be pitted against each other and statistics about their operation over time can be collected to inform new organisation designs.

Some organizational structures that might be tested include Democracy, Futarchy, Control Markets, Histocracy, some form of Meritocracy and Direct Democracy.

The conditions under which organizations suffer from corruption of purpose more frequently are when the people inside the organization are generally selfish and only moderately interested in the goals of the organization. So it makes sense to concentrate on these sorts of conditions.

I will be using the terminology defined in this article to talk about different facets of an organization.

One other bit of terminology: Team, a group of players given an organizational structure to test.

Although to simplify things we shall ignore Stakeholders, unless they are strictly necessary, instead relying on how well the teams perform in the game as Feedback.

Social Condition Creation

In order to make people selfish we need at least an individual high score table. Also people should be anonymous, assigned their teams randomly and communication restricted between them so that they interact with each other like strangers. This would avoid camaraderie, team spirit and reputation management being organisational factors.

Game play

The design of the game is a tricky subject in itself.

It would need to be:

Interesting - so that people played it.

Deep - so that people with more skill did better and there wasn't a dominant strategy.

Require team work - so that one person can't do everything themselves.

It would be split into matches and rounds. Each match would create new teams randomly and be composed of a few rounds. Each round each team would be scored by the game acting as Feedback. Between rounds there would be elections for Democracies or auctions for Control Markets. Futarchies might be harder to fit in you would need a vote and then a period of actions being suggested by the leader and trading on the outcome of those actions.

A team vs team game would seem to be the best way forward, as creating an

...
Meetup : London Meetup, 14th April: Hedonic hacks
by philh — 2013-04-06T19:35:42.067Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Meetup, 14th April: Hedonic hacks

WHEN:
14 April 2013 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Holborn, London

A fortnightly meetup in the Shakespeare's Head pub by Holborn tube station. We meet every other Sunday at 2pm.

The theme for this meetup is hedonic hacks: what simple things can you do to become happier?

Everyone is welcome to attend: we're a friendly group and we don't bite. If you're on the fence about coming, err on the side of showing up. It's probably safe to assume that we'd like to meet you.

We also have a Google group.

Discussion article for the meetup : London Meetup, 14th April: Hedonic hacks
Meetup : LessWrong/HPMoR Harvard
by atucker — 2013-04-06T19:24:44.217Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong/HPMoR Harvard

WHEN: 07 April 2013 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: Sever 105

Are you a Harvard student who's reading this?

Relocated to Sever 105, since Leverett classroom D is filled.

Cheers, Aaron

Discussion article for the meetup : LessWrong/HPMoR Harvard
Intelligence Metrics and Decision Theories
by Squark — 2013-04-06T16:29:21.197Z

In this article I review a few previously proposed mathematical metrics of general intelligence and propose my own approach. This approach has a peculiar relation to decision theory, different decision theories corresponding to different notions of "maximally intelligent agent". I propose a formalization of UDT in this context.

Background

The first (to my knowledge) general intelligence metric was proposed by Legg and Hutter in "Universal Intelligence". Their proposal was to consider an agent A interacting with environment V where A exerts a sequence of actions ai on V and in turn receives from V the observations oi. Their original proposal was including in the observations a special utility channel ui, so that the utility of A is defined by

This is essentially reinforcement learning. However, general utility functions of the form can be just as easily accommodated by the method.

The Legg-Hutter intelligence metric is given by

Where the expectation value is taken with respect to a Solomonoff distribution for V.

The maximally intelligent agent w.r.t. this metric is the famous AIXI.

This definition suffers from a number of problems:

Efficiency problem: The are no constraints on the function implemented by A. The computing resources allowed for evaluating it are unlimited and it can even be uncomputable (as it is in the case of AIXI).

Duality (Anvil) problem: A is not a part of the physical universe (V) it attempts to model. A is "unbreakble" i.e. nothing that happens in V can modify it as far as the evaluation of U is concerned.

Ontology problem1: U is defined in terms of actions and observations rather than in terms of intrinsic properties of the universe. A Legg-Hutter intelligent A with a naively constructed U would be inclined to wirehead itself.

Degeneracy problem (my own observation): This problem is superficially absent in the original (reinforcement learning) formulation, but for a general U the question arises whether this truly corresponds to the intuitive notion of intelligence. It is clear that for some "degenerate" choices of U very simple agents would be optimal which wouldn't do any of the things we commonly ascribe to intelligence (e.g. modeling the external universe). In other words, it might make sense to ask whether a given agent is intelligent without specifying U in advance.

Verifiability problem (my own observation): A descriptive model of

...
Weirdos and foreigners
by KatjaGrace — 2013-04-06T06:47:45.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

Maybe this is old advice, or so obvious that everyone figures it out. But handy tip for if you are strange, and you want others to not think you are strange: hang out with foreigners.

To foreigners, everyone from your culture is strange. It could easily take them years to realize that some of your peculiarities are actually your peculiarities, not quaint oddities of your backward culture.

They don’t need to be actually foreign in the national sense for this, but they do need to be at least fairly unfamiliar with your culture. People from a distant generation or social set should also work.

I have tried out this advice a bit when house-sharing. Usually I find sharing houses somewhat uncomfortable. One reason is that I have fairly obsessive-compulsive kitchen-use tendencies. When I first moved to Pittsburgh I lived with two of my Chinese colleagues. Amongst the mutually alien methods of cooking, and alien foods, and alien eating arrangements, and alien hygiene protocols in general, who bats an eyelid if you happen to wash things a couple of times more than the usual American? This made things more comfortable, modulo the fact that some foreign cooking habits don’t mix well with OCD.

Of course, the foreigners you hang out with are unusually likely to be following the same strategy. If you rudely want to avoid hanging out with strange foreigners while gaining the benefits of hiding your own strangeness, you should hang out with more foreigners. That way you can compare foreigners against one another and distinguish individual strangeness from cultural strangeness. Relatedly, you should avoid hanging out with more locals at the same time.
When seeing X suggests ‘generally ¬X’
by KatjaGrace — 2013-04-06T06:43:32.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

Suppose nobody has ever told you that they like you. Suppose you are relatively uncertain about how often people like other people, and also about how often they will disclose it when they do. Suppose you are confident that these facts about your ignorance and social inexperience do not bear on whether other people like you. So as it stands you are fairly uncertain about your popularity. Suppose also that you have a deep and insatiable need for people to like you, and your pleasure is roughly linear in the number of people who like you.

Suppose one day a person tells you that they like you. If you are given to expressing emotions or making inferences, one thing you might wonder is whether this should be cause for happiness.

This is not as obvious as it first seems. A person telling you that they like you is more probable if:

This specific person likes you.

People like you in general

People are given to expressing their liking for other people

The first two are promising. The third makes the fact that nobody else has ever said they like you a bit more damning. Just how much more damning depends on your probability distribution over different possible states of affairs. For an extreme example, suppose you had even odds on two extreme cases – people always saying they like people who they like, and people never doing so – and that many people have had a chance by now to tell you if they like you. Then you should be extremely sad if anyone tells you that they like you. The apparent update in favor of people liking you in general will be completely overwhelmed by the reverse update from flatly ruling out the possibility that all those people you have already met like you.

In general, seeing an instance of X can make X less likely, by indicating that X tends to be visible:

Hearing your neighbors have loud sex might lower your estimate of how often they have sex.

Finding a maggot in your dinner might reassure you that maggots in dinners are relatively visible (this is just a hypothetical example – in fact they are not, especially if your dinner is rice)

Conversely, failing to see X can make X more likely, by increasing the probability that it is invisible:

If you have never observed a person lying, it might be more likely that they are an excellent and prolific liar than it would be if you had seen them lie aw

...