trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Is Equality Really about Diminishing Marginal Utility?
by Ghatanathoah — 2012-12-04T23:03:31.297Z

In Robert Nozick's famous "Utility Monster" thought experiment he proposes the idea of a creature that does not receive diminishing marginal utility from resource consumption, and argues that this poses a problem for utilitarian ethics. Why? Utilitarian ethics, while highly egalitarian in real life situations, does not place any intrinsic value on equality. The reason utilitarian ethics tend to favor equality is that human beings seem to experience diminishing returns when converting resources into utility. Egalitarianism, according to this framework, is good because sharing resources between people reduces the level of diminishing returns and maximizes the total amount of utility people generate, not because it's actually good for people to have equal levels of utility.

The problem the Utility Monster poses is that, since it does not receive diminishing marginal utility, there is no reason, under traditional utilitarian framework, to share resources between it and the other inhabitants of the world it lives in. It would be completely justified in killing other people and taking their things for itself, or enslaving them for its own benefit. This seems counter-intuitive to Nozick, and many other people.

There seem to be two possible reasons for this. One, of course, is that most people's intuitions are wrong in this particular case. The reason I am interesting in exploring, however, is the other one, namely that equality is valuable for its own sake, not just as a side effect of diminishing marginal utility.

Now, before I go any further I should clarify what I mean by "equality." There are many different types of equality, not all of which are compatible with each other. What I mean is equality of utility, everyone has the same level of satisfied preferences, happiness, and whatever else "utility" constitutes. This is not the same thing as fiscal equality, as some people may differ in their ability to convert money and resources into utility (people with horrible illnesses, for instance, are worse at doing so than the general population). It is also important to stress that "lifespan" should be factored in as part of the utility that is to be equalized (i.e. killing someone increases inequality). Otherwise one could achieve equality of utility by killing all the poor people.

So if equa...
How to Avoid the Conflict Between Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology?
by diegocaleiro — 2012-12-04T22:22:17.382Z

I don't mean to claim that there should be a conflict.

Most likely the conflict arises because of many things, such as 1)Women having been ostracized for much of our society's existence 2)People failing at the is-ought problem, and committing the Naturalistic Fallacy 3)Lots of media articles saying unbelievably naïve evolutionary statements as scientific fact 4)Feminists as a group being defensive 5)Specially defensive when it comes to what is said to be natural. 6) General disregard by people, and politically engaged people (see The Blank Slate, by Steve Pinker) of the existence of a non Tabula Rasa nature. 7) Lack of patience of Evolutionary Psychologists to make peace and explain themselves for the things that journalists, not them, claimed. and others...

But the fact is, the conflict arose. It has only bad consequences as far as I could see, such as people fighting over each other, breaking friendships, and prejudice of great intensity on both sides.

How to avoid this conflict? Should someone write a treatise on Feminist Evolutionary Psychology? Should we get Leda Cosmides to talk about women liberation?

There are obviously no incompatibilities between reality and the moral claims of feminism. So whichever facts about evolutionary psychology are found to be true with the science's development, they should be made compatible. Compatibilism is possible.

But will the scientific community pull it off?

Related: Pinker Versus Spelke - The Science of Gender and Science

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html

David Buss and Cindy Meston - Why do Women Have Sex?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0sqg3EHm8
The Worst Problem You've Ever Encountered and Solved. And the One You Didn't, Yet!
by diegocaleiro — 2012-12-04T20:43:07.437Z

EDIT: No one was doing what the post suggests, so I accepted an idea from one of the comments, and embedded my response in a comment, not the post itself

I'd like to ask this question to you, and I'll respond it myself as well.

What Is The Worst Problem You've Ever Encountered and Solved? And the One You Didn't, Yet!

Some prior considerations:

1) I mean "problem" in a very general sense, it could be a math problem, an existential problem, a social problem, an akrasia problem, a disease problem etc...

2) I'd like people to give informative/didactic responses. Try not only to state the facts, but also to help someone who'd encounter similar situations to be able to deal with them.

3) When talking about the one you didn't, give enough specifics that someone would actually be able to help you.

The general idea is to teach people how to Win by example, taking in consideration all the shortcomings of biases etc...

Well, that is all. One solved, one not yet solved. State your own issues and help others here. Someone else's rationality is always welcome.
Politics Discussion Thread December 2012
by OrphanWilde — 2012-12-04T20:19:47.625Z

I skipped October and November owing to election season, but opening back up:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.

Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.

A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.

In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.
Meetup : Montreal LessWrong Meetup - More Biases and Biased Board Gaming
by Paul_G — 2012-12-04T19:51:40.201Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal LessWrong Meetup - More Biases and Biased Board Gaming

WHEN:
10 December 2012 06:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
655 President Kennedy, Montreal

We discussed lots of biases last week, so this week we're going to actually whip out the board games! We have a copy or two of Pandemic, and one of Shadowrift to play with.

We'll be upstairs. See you then!

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal LessWrong Meetup - More Biases and Biased Board Gaming
Mini advent calendar of Xrisks: synthetic biology
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-12-04T11:15:08.254Z

The FHI's mini advent calendar: counting down through the big five existential risks. The second one is a new, exciting risk: synthetic biology.
Synthetic biology
Current understanding: medium-low
Most worrying aspect: hackers experimenting with our basic biology
Synthetic biology covers many inter-related fields, all concerned with the construction and control of new biological systems. This area has already attracted the attention of bio-hackers, experimenting with DNA and other biological systems to perform novel tasks – and gaining kudos for exotic accomplishments. The biosphere is filled with many organisms accomplishing specific tasks; combining these and controlling them could allow the construction of extremely deadly bioweapons, targeted very narrowly (at all those possessing a certain gene, for instance). Virulent virus with long incubation periods could be constructed, or common human bacteria could be hacked to perform a variety of roles in the body. And humans are not the only potential targets: whole swaths of the ecosystem could be taken down, either to gain commercial or economic advantages, for terrorist purposes, or simply by accident.
Moreover, the medical miracles promised by synthetic biology are not easily separated from the danger: the targeted control needed to, for instance, kill cancer cells, could also be used to target brain cells or the immune system. This would not be so frightening if the field implemented safety measures commensurate with the risks; but synthetic biology has been extremely lax in its precautions and culturally resistant to regulations.
Mini advent calendar of Xrisks: nuclear war
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-12-04T11:13:06.794Z

The FHI's mini advent calendar: counting down through the big five existential risks. The first one is an old favourite, forgotten but not gone: nuclear war.
Nuclear War
Current understanding: medium-high
Most worrying aspect: the missiles and bombs are already out there
It was a great fear during the fifties and sixties; but the weapons that could destroy our species lie dormant, not destroyed.

There has been some recent progress: the sizes of the arsenals have been diminishing, fissile material is more under control than it used to be, and there is more geo-political peace and cooperation.
But nuclear weapons still remain the easiest method for our species to destroy itself. Recent modelling have confirmed the old idea of nuclear winter: soot rising from burning human cities destroyed by nuclear weapons could envelop the world in a dark cloud, disrupting agriculture and the food supplies, and causing mass starvation and death far beyond the areas directly hit. And a creeping proliferation has spread these weapons to smaller states in unstable areas of the world, increasing the probability that nuclear weapons could get used, leading to potential escalation. The risks are not new, and several times (the Cuban missile crisis, the Petrov incident) our species has been saved from annihilation by the slimmest of margins. And yet the risk seems to have slipped off the radar for many governments: emergency food and fuel reserves are diminishing, and we have few “refuges” designed to ensure that the human species could endure a major nuclear conflict.
Prediction Sources
by lukeprog — 2012-12-04T05:48:43.389Z

I'd like to become better calibrated via PredictionBook and other tools, but coming up with well-specified predictions can be very time-consuming. It's handy to be provided with a stock of specific claims to make predictions (or post-dictions) about, as with CFAR's Credence Game.

Therefore, I asked Jake Miller and Gwern put together a list of prediction sources. Feel free to suggest others!

Prediction Sites

PredictionBook.com (new) (upcoming)

DAGGRE

Bets of Bitcoin (new) (upcoming)

Inkling (new) (upcoming)

NITLE (new) (upcoming)

Foresight Exchange (new: "Sort order: date created") (upcoming: "Sort order: date due")

LongBets (new)

Intrade (new)

Hollywood Stock Exchange (upcoming)

Iowa Electronic Markets

Betfair

IARPA forecasting challenge

the simExchange

BETDAQ

Nadex (private; logged-in-only access)

Saunder School of Business Prediction Markets (opens 2013)

Predict Wall Street

Prediction Machine

iPredict (new) (upcoming)

SBRodds

TeamRankings

Vitibet

ScoresPro

Betting Advice

Soccer Vista

Lee's Movie Predictions

GoldDerby
[SEQ RERUN] Recursive Self-Improvement
by MinibearRex — 2012-12-04T02:44:47.828Z

Today's post, Recursive Self-Improvement was originally published on 01 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When you take a process that is capable of making significant progress developing other processes, and turn it on itself, you should either see it flatline, or FOOM. The likelihood of it doing anything that looks like human-scale progress is unbelievably low.

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 I Heart CYC, 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.
Meetup : Atlanta LessWrong Meetups REBOOT
by Nova_Division — 2012-12-03T23:56:57.625Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta LessWrong Meetups REBOOT

WHEN:
09 December 2012 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
1314 Hosea L. Williams Drive, Atlanta, 30307

This meeting is a REBOOT of Atlanta LessWrong meetups. That means no experience is necessary and everyone is welcome!

The agenda is:
-Introductions (including personal motivations for rationality for those who would like to discuss this),
-Discussion of interesting fallacies, biases, and scientific studies that relate to practical rationality,
-Rationality exercises and games!

The after-meetup-party will include other games (Set, Telestrations, Dixit, Apples To Apples, etc).

A few snacks and drinks will be provided, but you are welcome to bring your favorites!

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta LessWrong Meetups REBOOT
Two Anki plugins to reinforce reviewing (updated)
by D_Malik — 2012-12-03T22:04:47.099Z

This post is about two Anki plugins I just wrote. I've been using them for a few months as monkey patches, but I thought it might help people here (or at least the 20% that are awesome enough to use SRSs) to have them as plugins. They're ugly and you may have to fiddle for a while to get them to work.

1. Music-Fiddler

To use this, play music while doing Anki revs. (I also recommend that you try playing music only while doing Anki, as a way of making Anki more pleasant.) While you're reviewing a card, the music volume will gradually decrease. As soon as you pass or fail the card, the volume will go back up, then start gradually decreasing again. So whenever you stop paying attention and instead start thinking about all the awesome things you could do if only you were able to sit down and work, the program punishes you by stopping the music. And whenever you concentrate fully on your work and so go through cards quickly, you have a personal soundtrack!

To use this plugin:

- If you do not have Linux, you'll need to modify the code somehow.

- Ensure that the "amixer" command works on your computer. If it doesn't, you're going to need to modify the code somehow.

- Make sure you have the new Anki 2.0.

- Download the plugin.

- Change all lines (in the plugin source) marked with "CHANGEME" according to your preferences.

- You might want to disable convenient ways of increasing the volume, like keyboard shortcuts.

This plugin provides psychological reinforcement, but is not proper intermittent reinforcement, because it is predictable and regular instead of intermittent. I'm not sure whether this should be fixed; I haven't yet gotten around to trying it with only intermittent volume increases.

2. Picture-Flasher

After answering a card, this plugin selects, with some probability, a random image from a folder and flashes it onto your screen briefly. This gives intermittent reinforcement.

To use this plugin:

- I haven't tested it on non-Linux operating systems, but I can't see any obvious places it'll fail.

- Make sure you have the new Anki 2.0.

- Get pictures from someplace; see below.

- Download the plugin.

- Change all lines (in the plugin source) marked with "CHANGEME" according to your preferences. Be sure especially to put in your picture directory and the number of pictures you have.

To get pictures, I downloaded high-scoring pic...
Factions, inequality, and social justice
by John_Maxwell — 2012-12-03T19:37:49.972Z

Robin Hanson has wondered why folks seem concerned about inequality based on some stuff, like race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and disability, but not other stuff, like height, appearance, intelligence, sleep, conscientiousness, and perhaps most importantly, happiness.

My explanation: Race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and disability are fairly discrete ways of classifying people. Most people (though not all) can be categorized fairly neatly in to a single race, birth gender, desired gender, and sexual orientation. By contrast, looks, smarts, and happiness all vary in a continuous fashion. For some/all of these characteristics, there's a bell curve--many people in the middle and fewer people at the extremes.

Why should this matter? One of the things that comes up a lot on this blog is how irrational people tend to get when talking about politics. For a really rousing political argument, you need group identification--hence the Greens and the Blues in Eliezer's original politics essay. How would that essay be different if everyone was a different shade of turquoise, somewhere on a continuum between blue and green?

Or here's another thought experiment: Instead of height varying in a continuous fashion, everyone in society is either a Tall or a Short. Just like in the real world, taller people tend to make more money and assume more leadership roles, but instead of saying "he got the job because he's taller", people would say "he got the job because he's a Tall". How well do you think society would handle this? (BTW, looks like shorter people live longer, so height inequality may actually favor shorter folks on balance.)

Speculation on factional conflict and social distance

The hypotheses I'm advancing here is that an argument between, say, a radical feminist and a men's rights activist, is not all that different in kind from an argument between a Democrat and a Republican, an Israeli and a Palestinian, or a Hutu and a Tutsi. (Regarding gender in particular: factional conflicts may be harder to spot when almost every human is a member of one relevant faction or another. There's no big, neutral third party to say stuff like "wow, this is getting kinda out of hand".)

Why do people think about competing factions this way? Well, humans are social animals that evolved to live in tribes.&nb...
[LINK] AmA by computational neuroscientists behind 'the world's largest functional brain model'
by  — 2012-12-03T19:35:06.045Z

Not sure if this has been covered on LW, but it seems highly relevant to WBE development. Link here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/147gqm/we_are_the_computational_neuroscientists_behind/

A few questioners mention the Singularity and make Skynet jokes.
The abstract from their paper in Science:

A central challenge for cognitive and systems neuroscience is to relate the incredibly complex behavior of animals to the equally complex activity of their brains. Recently described, large-scale neural models have not bridged this gap between neural activity and biological function. In this work, we present a 2.5-million-neuron model of the brain (called “Spaun”) that bridges this gap by exhibiting many different behaviors. The model is presented only with visual image sequences, and it draws all of its responses with a physically modeled arm. Although simplified, the model captures many aspects of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and psychological behavior, which we demonstrate via eight diverse tasks.

I'm curious to see LWers' perspectives on the project.
Most Likely Cause of an Apocalypse on December 21
by DeevGrape — 2012-12-03T17:10:54.794Z

Note: This post is almost completely tongue-in-cheek. Obviously the chances of December 21, 2012 heralding in an apocalypse, definable maybe as an event causing billions of deaths and/or global catastrophic infrastructure damage, are slim to none.

But they aren't actually none.

Let's say there's a 5% chance of a superhuman General AI being developed in the next 10 years and ushering in the singularity. Let's say 4/5 of those scenarios would lead to a Bad End which could reasonably be called an apocalypse (or an "AI-pocalypse", perhaps). And let's say the distribution of probability isn't linear, but is exponentially skewed somehow so that given the emergence of AI in the next 120 months, the chances of it happening in this very month are 1 in 100,000. Then let's divide that by 30 so we can get our apocalypse rolling on the right day.

5/100 * 4/5 * 1/100000 * 1/30 = 1 in 75,000,000

Admittedly, low odds. This comports with the fact that there would have to be a lot of unknown development progress being made already on the problem for an intelligence explosion to be anywhere on the horizon.

But compared to some of the scenarios debunked by NASA (http://www.space.com/18678-2012-mayan-apocalypse-fears-nasa.html), such as a collision with the rogue planet Nibaru, or Earth being sucked into the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way 30,000 light years away, the AI-doomsday scenario starts to seem relatively plausible.

I think the only other (relatively) plausible contenders would be the release of a pandemic-causing biological weapon, or the start of an international nuclear war. I haven't done any Fermi calculations on those, but I'm sure their probability exceeds that of solar flares scourging the surface of the Earth.
A solvable Newcomb-like problem - part 2 of 3
by Douglas_Reay — 2012-12-03T16:49:38.161Z

This is the second part of a three post sequence on a problem that is similar to Newcomb's problem but is posed in terms of probabilities and limited knowledge.

Part 1 - stating the problem
Part 2 - some mathematics
Part 3 - towards a solution

In game theory, a payoff matrix is a way of presenting the results of two players simultaneously picking options.

For example, in the Prisoner's Dilemma, Player A gets to choose between option A1 (Cooperate) and option A2 (Defect) while, at the same time Player B gets to choose between option B1 (Cooperate) and option B2 (Defect). Since years spent in prison are a negative outcome, we'll write them as negative numbers:

So, if you look at the bottom right hand corner, at the intersection of Player A defecting (A2) and Player B defecting (B2) we see that both players end up spending 4 years in prison. Whereas, looking at the bottom left we see that if A defects and B cooperates, then Player A ends up spending 0 years in prison and Player B ends up spending 5 years in prison.

Another familiar example we can present in this form is the game Rock-Paper-Scissors.

We could write it as a zero sum game, with a win being worth 1, a tie being worth 0 and a loss being worth -1:

But it doesn't change the mathematics if we give both players 2 points each round just for playing, so that a win becomes worth 3 points, a tie becomes worth 2 points and a loss becomes worth 1 point. (Think of it as two players in a game show being rewarded by the host, rather than the players making a direct bet with each other.)

If you are Player A, and you are playing against a Player B who always chooses option B1 (Rock), then your strategy is clear. You choose option A2 (Paper) each time. Over 10 rounds, you'd expect to end up with $30 compared to B's $10.

Let's imagine a slightly more sophisticated Player B, who always picks Rock in the first round, and then for all other rounds picks whatever would beat Player A's choice the previous round. This strategy would do well against someone who always picked the same option each round, but it is deterministic and, if we guess it correctly in advance, we can design a strategy that beats it every time. (In this case, picking Paper-Rock-Scissors then repeating back to Paper). In fact whatever strategy ...