trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Doing Your Good Deed For The Day
by Scott Alexander — 2009-10-27T00:36:20.553Z

A few months ago, researchers at the University of Toronto published a very interesting study on moral behavior. The one sentence summary of the most interesting part is that people who did one good deed were less likely to do another good deed in the near future. They had, quite literally, done their good deed for the day.

In the first part of the study, they showed that people exposed to environmentally friendly, "green" products were more likely to behave nicely. Subjects were asked to rate products in an online store; unbeknownst to them, half were in a condition where the products were environmentally friendly, and the other half in a condition where the products were not. Then they played a Dictator Game. Subjects who had seen environmentally friendly products shared more of their money.
In the second part, instead of just rating the products, they were told to select $25 worth of products to buy from the store. One in twenty five subjects would actually receive the products they'd purchased. Then they, too, played the Dictator Game. Subjects who had bought environmentally friendly products shared less of their money.
In the third part, subjects bought products as before. Then, they participated in a "separate, completely unrelated" experiment "on perception" in which they earned money by identifying dot patterns. The experiment was designed such that participants could lie about their perceptions to earn more. People who purchased the green products were more likely to do so.
This does not prove that environmentalists are actually bad people - remember that whether a subject purchased green products or normal products was completely randomized. It does suggest that people who have done one nice thing feel less of an obligation to do another.

This meshes nicely with a self-signalling conception of morality. If part of the point of behaving morally is to convince yourself that you're a good person, then once you're convinced, behaving morally loses a lot of its value.
By coincidence, a few days after reading this study, I found this article by Dr. Beck, a theologian, complaining about the behavior of churchgoers on Sunday afternoon lunches. He says that in his circles, it's well known that people having lunch after church tend to abuse the waitstaff and tip poorly. And he blames the same mechanism identified by Mazar and Zhong in their Dictator Game. He says ...
Doing Your Good Deed For The Day
by Scott Alexander — 2009-10-27T00:28:12.781Z

A few months ago, researchers at the University of Toronto published a very interesting study on moral behavior. The one sentence summary of the most interesting part is that people who did one good deed were less likely to do another good deed in the near future. They had, quite literally, done their good deed for the day.

In the first part of the study, they showed that people exposed to environmentally friendly, "green" products were more likely to behave nicely. Subjects were asked to rate products in an online store; unbeknownst to them, half were in a condition where the products were environmentally friendly, and the other half in a condition where the products were not. Then they played a Dictator Game. Subjects who had seen environmentally friendly products shared more of their money.
In the second part, instead of just rating the products, they were told to select $25 worth of products to buy from the store. One in twenty five subjects would actually receive the products they'd purchased. Then they, too, played the Dictator Game. Subjects who had bought environmentally friendly products shared less of their money.
In the third part, subjects bought products as before. Then, they participated in a "separate, completely unrelated" experiment "on perception" in which they earned money by identifying dot patterns. The experiment was designed such that participants could lie about their perceptions to earn more. People who purchased the green products were more likely to do so.
This does not prove that environmentalists are actually bad people - remember that whether a subject purchased green products or normal products was completely randomized. It does suggest that people who have done one nice thing feel less of an obligation to do another.

This meshes nicely with a self-signalling conception of morality. If part of the point of behaving morally is to convince yourself that you're a good person, then once you're convinced, behaving morally loses a lot of its value.
By coincidence, a few days after reading this study, I found this article by Dr. Beck, a theologian, complaining about the behavior of churchgoers on Sunday afternoon lunches. He says that in his circles, it's well known that people having lunch after church tend to abuse the waitstaff and tip poorly. And he blames the same mechanism identified by Mazar and Zhong in their Dictator Game. He says ...
Computer bugs and evolution
by PhilGoetz — 2009-10-26T22:06:38.945Z

Last Friday, I finally packaged up the quarterly release of JCVI's automatic prokaryote functional annotation pipeline and distributed it to the other 3 sequencing centers for the Human Microbiome Project. It looks at genes found in newly-sequenced bacterial genomes and guesses what they do. As often happens when I release a new version, shortly afterwards, I discovered a major bug that had been hiding in the code for years.

The program takes each new gene and runs BLAST against a database of known genes, and produces a list of identifiers of genes resembling the new genes. It then takes these identifiers, and calls a program to look in a database for all of the synonyms for these identifiers used in different gene databases. This lookup step takes 90% of the program's runtime.

I found that the database lookup usually failed, because most identifiers didn't match the regular expression used in the lookup program to retrieve identifiers. Nobody had noticed this, because nobody had checked the database log files. I fixed the program so that the database lookup would always work correctly, and re-ran the program. It produced exactly the same output as before, but took five times as long to run.

So instead of going dancing as I'd planned, I spent Friday evening figuring out why this happened. It turned out that the class of identifiers that failed to match the regular expression were a subset of a set of identifiers for which the lookup didn't have to be done, because some previously-cached data would give the same results. Once I realized this, I was able to speed the program up more, by excluding more such identifiers, and avoiding the overhead of about a million subroutine calls that would eventually fail when the regular expression failed to match. (Lest you think that the regular expression was intentionally written that way to produce that behavior, the regular expression was inside a library that was written by someone else. Also, the previously-cached data would not have given the correct results prior to a change that I made a few months ago.)

A bug in a program is like a mutation. Bugs in a computer program are almost always bad. But this was a beneficial bug, which had no effect other than to make the program run much faster than it had been designed to. I was delighted to...
Circular Altruism vs. Personal Preference
by Vladimir_Nesov — 2009-10-26T01:43:16.174Z

Suppose there is a diagnostic procedure that allows to catch a relatively rare disease with absolute precision. If left untreated, the disease if fatal, but when diagnosed it's easily treatable (I suppose there are some real-world approximations). The diagnostics involves an uncomfortable procedure and inevitable loss of time. At what a priori probability would you not care to take the test, leaving this outcome to chance? Say, you decide it's 0.0001%.

Enter timeless decision theory. Your decision to take or not take the test may be as well considered a decision for the whole population (let's also assume you are typical and everyone is similar in this decision). By deciding to personally not take the test, you've decided that most people won't take the test, and thus, for example, with 0.00005% of the population having the condition, about 3000 people will die. While personal tradeoff is fixed, this number obviously depends on the size of the population.

It seems like a horrible thing to do, making a decision that results in 3000 deaths. Thus, taking the test seems like a small personal sacrifice for this gift to others. Yet this is circular: everyone would be thinking that, reversing decision solely to help others, not benefiting personally. Nobody benefits.

Obviously, together with 3000 lives saved, there is a factor of 6 billion accepting the test, and that harm is also part of the outcome chosen by the decision. If everyone personally prefers to not take the test, then inflicting the opposite on the whole population is only so much worse.

Or is it? What if you care more about other people's lives in proportion to their comfort than you care about your own life in proportion to your own comfort? How can caring about other people be in exact harmony with caring about yourself? It may be the case that you prefer other people to take the test, even if you don't want to take the test yourself, and that is the position of the whole population. What is the right thing to do then? What wins: personal preference, or this "circular altruism", preference about other people that not a single person accepts for oneself?

If altruism wins, then it seems that the greater the population, the less personal preference should matter, and the more the structure of altruistic preference takes over the personal decision-making. Person disappears, with everyone going through the mo...
Natural cultural relativists?
by KatjaGrace — 2009-10-25T21:53:44.000Z

When given the same ability to punish anyone, cooperative people want to punish members of groups they identify with more than they do outsiders, while less cooperative people want to punish outsiders more. From the Journal of Evolution and Human Behavior:

One of the most critical features of human society is the pervasiveness of cooperation in social and economic exchanges. Moreover, social scientists have found overwhelming evidence that such cooperative behavior is likely to be directed toward in-group members. We propose that the group-based nature of cooperation includes punishment behavior. Punishment behavior is used to maintain cooperation within systems of social exchange and, thus, is directed towards members of an exchange system. Because social exchanges often take place within groups, we predict that punishment behavior is used to maintain cooperation in the punisher’s group. Specifically, punishment behavior is directed toward in-group members who are found to be noncooperators. To examine this, we conducted a gift-giving game experiment with third-party punishment. The results of the experiment (N=90) support the following hypothesis: Participants who are cooperative in a gift-giving game punish noncooperative in-group members more severely than they punish noncooperative out-group members.

..[W]e predict that … punishment behavior is directed toward in-group members who are found to be noncooperators. To examine this, we conducted a gift-giving game experiment with third-party punishment. The results of the experiment (N=90) support the following hypothesis: Participants who are cooperative in a gift-giving game punish noncooperative in-group members more severely than they punish noncooperative out-group members.

The researchers’ conclusion is that punishment is just an extension of cooperation, and so applies in the same areas. They were not expecting, and haven’t got a good explanation for, uncooperative people’s interest in specifically punishing outsiders.

This provides a potential explanation for something I was wondering about. Middle class people often seem to talk about poor people and people from other cultures in terms of their actions being caused by bad external influences, in contrast to the language of free will and responsibility for their own kind. Discussion of Aboriginals in Australia regularly exemplifies ...
The Value of Nature and Old Books
by David_J_Balan — 2009-10-25T18:14:43.990Z

People have always had a religious or quasi-religious reverence for nature. In modern times, some people have started to see nature more as an enemy to be conquered than as a god to be worshiped. Such people point out that uncontrolled nature causes a tremendous amount of human suffering (to say nothing of all the misery that it causes other creatures), and that vast improvements to human welfare have largely been the result of us ceasing to love and fear nature and starting to control it.
There are several common responses to this. One response is that it is solipsistic for humans to measure the value of nature in terms of what is and is not good for us. This strikes me as right only insofar as it ignores the welfare of non-human creatures who have enough going on in terms of consciousness and/or sentience to matter; I think the objection would be without merit if one were to broaden the scope of concern to something like all creatures, present and future, capable of having experiences (who else is there to care about?). A second response is that seeing ourselves as highly effective lords over nature leads to dangerous overconfidence, which leads to costly mistakes in how we deal with nature. This is a very fair point, but what it really amounts to is a claim that we shouldn't underestimate the enemy, not that the enemy is really a friend. Anyway, the solution to that problem is to become better rationalists and get better at being skeptical regarding our powers, not to retreat into quasi-mystical Gaia worship. A third response is that getting into a "conquer nature" frame of mind puts people into a "conquer everything" frame of mind and leads to aggression against other people. This might have merit historically, but that problem is also best confronted directly, in this case by more effectively promulgating liberal humanistic values.
So what, if anything, is left to the idea that there is something special about nature worthy of particular regard? And by special I mean something beyond the fact that many people just plain enjoy it the way they enjoy lots of other things that nevertheless have no claim to any special status. I would say that the main thing that makes nature special in this sense is that when you are in nature or contemplating nature, you can be confident that the resulting thoughts and feelings are uncontaminated by all of the (visib...
Arrow's Theorem is a Lie
by alyssavance — 2009-10-24T20:46:07.942Z

Suppose that we, a group of rationalists, are trying to come to an agreement on which course of action to take. All of us have the same beliefs about the world, as Aumann's Agreement Theorem requires, but everyone has different preferences. What decision-making procedure should we use? We want our decision-making procedure to satisfy a number of common-sense criteria:

- Non-dictatorship: No one person should be able to dictate what we should do next. The decision-making process must take multiple people's preferences into account.

- Determinism: Given the same choices, and the same preferences, we should always make the same decisions.

- Pareto efficiency: If every member of the group prefers action A to action B, the group as a whole should also prefer A to B.

- Independence of irrelevant alternatives: If we, as a group, prefer A to B, and a new option C is introduced, then we should still prefer A to B, regardless of what we think about C.

Arrow's Theorem says that: Suppose we have a list of possible courses of action, {A, B, C, D... Q}. Everyone gets a pencil and a piece of paper, and writes down what their preferences are. Eg., if you thought that Q was the best, D was the second best, and A was the worst, you would write down Q > D > (...) > A. We then collect all the slips of paper, and put them in a big bin. However, we can't take all these slips of paper and produce a set of preferences for the group as a whole, eg., {H > E > I > C > ... > D > A}, in a way that satisfies all of the above criteria.

Therefore, (so the story goes), much woe be unto us, for there is no way we can make decisions that satisfies this entirely reasonable list of requirements. Except, this isn't actually true. Suppose that, instead of writing down a list of which actions are preferred to which other actions, we write down a score next to each action, on a scale from 0-10. (For simplicity, we allow irrationals as well as integers, so, say, sqrt(2) or 7/3 are perfectly valid scores). We add up the numbers that each person puts down for each action. Say, if person A puts down 5 for action A, and person B puts down 7 for action A, then A has a total score of 12. We then decree: we will, as a group, prefer any action with a higher total score to any action with a lower total score. This procedure does satisfy all of the desired criteria:

- Non-dictatorship: Sup...
What is hope?
by KatjaGrace — 2009-10-24T19:00:51.000Z

At first it seems like a mixture of desire and belief in a possibility. It’s not just desire because you can ‘have your hopes too high’, though the hoped for outcome is well worthy of desire, or ‘abandon hope’ when something reaches some level of unlikelihood. But hope is also not linked to a particular level of chance. It implies uncertainty about the outcome, but nothing beyond that.

Is it a mixture of significant uncertainty and a valuable outcome then? No, you can consider something plausible and wonderful, but not worth hoping for. Sometimes it is worse to hope for the most marvelous things. No matter how likely, folks ‘don’t want to get their hopes up’ or ‘can’t bear to hope’ .

So there is apparently a cost to hoping. Hopes can bring you unhappiness if they fail, while another possibility with similar chances and desirability which was not hoped for would cause no distress. So hope is to do with something other than value or likelihood.

A hope sounds like a goal which you can’t necessarily influence then. Failing in a goal is worse than failing in something you did not intend to achieve. A hope or a goal seems to be particular point in outcome space where you will be extra happy if it is reached or surpassed and extra unhappy otherwise. We seem to choose goals according to a trade-off of ease and desirability, which is reminiscent of our seemingly choosing hopes according to likelihood and desirability. Unlike hopes though, we pretty much always try harder for goals when the potential gains are big. This probably makes sense; trying harder at a goal increases the likelihood of success, whereas hoping more does not, yet still gives you the larger misery of failure.

Why hope at all then? Why not just have smooth utility functions? Goals help direct actions, which is extremely handy. Hopes seem to be outcomes you cheer for from the sidelines. Is this useful at all? Is it just a side effect of having goals? Is it so we can show others what would be our goals if we had the power? In which case should we expect declared hopes to be less honest than declared goals? Why are hopes so ubiquitous?
Pound of Feathers, Pound of Gold
by Annoyance — 2009-10-23T17:48:43.336Z

Which weighs more: a pound of feathers, or a pound of gold?

Close consideration of this riddle - and the conditions under which people tend to get it wrong - is helpful in understanding the limits of human rationality. It is a specific example which leads us to general principles of rationality failure.

These sorts of riddles and similar interpersonal language tricks (such as "Stupid says what?") are especially popular among children but not among adults. Why is this the case? Partly because adults are more likely to have previously encountered and become familiar with their patterns, but there are other factors - including one very relevant one. Children tend to have less-developed capacities of impulse control.

It takes very little analysis to discover the 'trick' in the question; the concepts involved are relatively simple. But we're confronted with the fact that people do answer it incorrectly, and that by manipulating aspects of the context in which the question is delivered, we can significantly increase the chance people will fall for it. What does this imply? That analysis is not being conducted in the erroneous cases, and that context is a contributing factor to whether people successfully engage in conceptual analysis. Specifically, that context determines whether people will counter their impulses long enough for analysis to be completed.

The key to these sorts of riddles is time pressure. If people feel free to take as much time as they like thinking over the question, they rarely fall for the trick. But if they're trying to answer rapidly, they'll screw up. Examples of situations that often result in such behavior include: competing against others to see who can be correct first, trying to demonstrate competence by investing little effort in answering, or encountering the question as part of a limited-duration examination. If several superficially-similar questions whose answer depends on retrieving facts from memory rather than performing logical analysis of the question are asked before the riddle is presented, that also tends to result in a wrong response.

The error occurs because of our weight-related associations with the concepts of 'feathers' and 'gold', our conditioned assumptions about the sorts of questions people are likely to ask, and a failure to inhibit ...
Extreme risks: when not to use expected utility
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2009-10-23T14:40:48.084Z

Would you prefer a 50% chance of gaining €10, one chance in a million off gaining €5 million, or a guaranteed €5? The standard position on Less Wrong is that the answer depends solely on the difference between cash and utility. If your utility scales less-than-linearly with money, you are risk averse and should choose the last option; if it scales more-than-linearly, you are risk-loving and should choose the second one. If we replaced €’s with utils in the example above, then it would simply be irrational to prefer one option over the others.

There are mathematical proofs of that result, but there are also strong intuitive arguments for it. What’s the best way of seeing this? Imagine that X1 and X2 were two probability distributions, with mean u1 and u2 and variances v1 and v2. If the two distributions are independent, then the sum X1 + X2 has mean u1 + u2, and variance v1 + v2.

Now if we multiply the returns of any distribution by a constant r, the mean scales by r and variance scales by r2. Consequently if we have n probability distributions X1, X2, ... , Xn representing n equally expensive investments, the expected average return is (Σni=1 ui)/n, while the variance of this average is (Σni=1 vi)/n2. If the vn are bounded, then once we make n large enough, that variance must tend to zero. So if you have many investments, your averaged actual returns will be, with high probability, very close to your expected returns.

Thus there is no better strategy than to always follow expected utility. There is no such thing as sensible risk-aversion under these conditions, as there is no actual risk: you expect your returns to be your expected returns. Even if you yourself do not have enough investment opportunities to smooth out the uncertainty in this way, you could always aggregate your own money with others, through insurance or index funds, and achieve the same result. Buying a triple-rollover lottery ticket may be unwise; but being part of a consortium that buys up every ticket for a triple rollover lottery is just a dull, safe investment. If you have altruistic preferences, you can even aggregate results across the planet simply by encouraging more people to follow expected returns. So, case closed it seems; departing from expected returns is irrational.

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