trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Why you should listen to your heart
by KatjaGrace — 2009-11-16T03:12:49.000Z

Follow your heart… Trust your instincts… Listen to your feelings… You know deep inside what is right…etc

– Most people

Humans ongoingly urge and celebrate others’ trust of their ‘heart’ over their ‘head’. Why?

One explanation is that it’s just good advice. I admit I haven’t seen any research on this, though if it were true I would expect to have seen some evidence. If overly emotional people did better on IQ tests for instance we would probably have heard about it, but perhaps hearts aren’t good at that sort of question. They also aren’t good at engineering or cooking or anything else concrete and testable that I can think of except socializing. More people struggle against their inclination to do what they feel like than struggle to do more of it. Perhaps you say it isn’t their heart that likes masturbating and reading Reddit, but that really makes the advice ‘do what you feel like, if it’s admirable to me’, which is pretty vacant. Perhaps listening to your heart means doing what you want to do in the long term, rather than those things society would have you do, which are called ‘reason’ because society has bothered making up reasons for them. This seems far fetched though.

Another explanation is that we want to listen to our own hearts, i.e. do whatever we feel like without having to think of explanations agreeable to other people. We promote the general principle to justify using it to our hearts’ content. However if we are doing this to fool others, it would be strange for our strategy to include begging others to follow it too. Similarly if you want to defect in prisoners’ dilemmas, you don’t go around preaching that principle. A better explanation would explain our telling others, not our following it.

Another explanation is that this is only one side of the coin. The other half the time we compel people to listen to reason, to think in the long term, to avoid foolish whims. This seems less common to me, especially outside intellectual social groups, but perhaps I just notice it less because it doesn’t strike me as bad advice.

My favorite explanation at the moment is that we always do what our hearts tell us, but explain it in terms of abstract fabrications when our hearts’ interests do not align with those we are explaining to. Rat...
The Academic Epistemology Cross Section: Who Cares More About Status?
by Matt_Simpson — 2009-11-15T19:37:18.935Z

Bryan Caplan writes:

Almost all economic models assume that human beings are Bayesians... It is striking, then, to realize that academic economists are not Bayesians. And they're proud of it!
This is clearest for theorists. Their epistemology is simple: Either something has been (a) proven with certainty, or (b) no one knows - and no intellectually respectable person will say more...
Empirical economists' deviation from Bayesianism is more subtle. Their epistemology is rooted in classical statistics. The respectable researcher comes to the data an agnostic, and leaves believing "whatever the data say." When there's no data that meets their standards, they mimic the theorists' snobby agnosticism. If you mention "common sense," they'll scoff. If you remind them that even classical statistics assumes that you can trust the data - and the scholars who study it - they harumph.

Robin Hanson offers an explanation:

I’ve argued that the main social function of academia is to let students, patrons, readers, etc. affiliate with credentialed-as-impressive minds. If so, academic beliefs are secondary – the important thing is to clearly show respect to those who make impressive displays like theorems or difficult data analysis. And the obvious way for academics to use their beliefs to show respect for impressive folks is to have academic beliefs track the most impressive recent academic work.

...beliefs must stay fixed until an impressive enough theorem or data analysis comes along that beliefs should change out of respect for that new display. It also won’t do to keep beliefs pretty much the same when each new study hardly adds much evidence – that wouldn’t offer enough respect to the new display.

I wonder, what does this look like in the cross section? In other words, relative to other academic disciplines, which have the strongest tendency to celebrate difficult work but ignore sound-yet-unimpressive work? My hunch is that economics, along with most other social sciences, would be the worst offenders, while the fields closer to engineering will be on the other end of the spectrum. Engineers should be more concerned with truth since whatever they build has to, you know, work. What say you? More importantly, anyone have...
Respond to flying like dying?
by KatjaGrace — 2009-11-15T08:08:17.000Z

Much of my recent time has passed on aeroplanes, with intervening bits on buses, trains, taxis and dragging an embarrassing mound of luggage between them. Planes share a style of decor and organization which differs from other transport. They feel sanitized and ordered. Every passenger is given a matching set of plasticized provisions. Most things are white or the colours of the airline brand, with no other advertising or decoration. Staff are unusually uniformed. They don’t just offer drinks, but authoritatively ensure that nobody has their tray table down when landing, or their hand luggage not stored under the seat properly. They have a long ritual to explain the detail of safety procedures, as if planes were especially dangerous. All these things are unusual for transport. Why are they specific to planes? I can think of two possible reasons:

Planes were more recently expensive, high status transport. Thus they traditionally have more intensive service and a cleaner style, as those who are paying a lot already are willing to pay extra for.

Planes are more inclined to scare their guests than other forms of transport: flying is a popular phobia. An air of meticulous order might go a long way to reverse the fear induced by shuddering around in the air torrents. Especially as those in control are clearly more authoritative than you, casually commanding you to sit down or close your laptop. Obsession with safety procedures could be particularly useful for calming passengers, even if it should suggest that emergencies are more likely. Paranoia about safety matters that passengers don’t care about, such as whether their tray table bumps them, means that they can trust the airline employees to respond strongly at the hint of a real emergency. So they can remain calm as long as they can see the flight attendants are. If this theory were true, it could also explain the similarity to hospital decoration and behaviour.
Auckland meet up Saturday Nov 28th
by AndrewH — 2009-11-15T05:29:16.003Z

For any New Zealanders out there, there is a tentative meet up at the Messe bar at 2pm on the 28th of November (Saturday). Just in case you are shy, there will be at least two people there!

Write a comment and/or please contact me on my cell: 021 039 8554, if you are interested in coming.
Consequences of arbitrage: expected cash
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2009-11-13T10:32:46.512Z

I prefer the movie Twelve Monkeys to Akira. I prefer Akira to David Attenborough's Life in the Undergrowth. And I prefer David Attenborough's Life in the Undergrowth to Twelve Monkeys.

I have intransitive preferences. But I don't suffer from this intransitivity. Up until the moment I'm confronted by an avatar of the money pump, juggling the three DVD boxes in front of me with a greedy gleam in his eye. He'll arbitrage me to death unless I snap out of my intransitive preferences and banish him by putting my options in order.

Arbitrage, in the broadest sense, means picking up free money - money that is free because of other people's preferences. Money pumps are a form of arbitrage, exploiting the lack of consistency, transitivity or independence in people's preferences. In most cases, arbitrage ultimately destroys itself: people either wise up to the exploitation and get rid of their vulnerabilities, or lose all their money, leaving only players who are not vulnerable to arbitrage. The crash and burn of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund was due in part to the diminishing returns of their arbitrage strategies.

Most humans to not react to the possibility of being arbitraged by changing their whole preference systems. Instead they cling to their old preferences as much as possible, while keeping a keen eye out to avoid being taken advantage of. They keep their inconsistent, intransitive, dependent systems but end up behaving consistently, transitively and independently in their most common transactions.

The weaknesses of this approach are manifest. Having one system of preferences but acting as if we had another is a great strain on our poor overloaded brains. To avoid the arbitrage, we need to scan present and future deals with great keenness and insight, always on the lookout for traps. Since transaction costs shield us from most of the negative consequences of imperfect decision theories, we have to be especially vigilant as transaction costs continue to drop, meaning that opportunities to be arbitraged will continue to rise in future. Finally, how we exit the trap of arbitrage depends on how we entered it: if my juggling Avatar had started me on Life in the Undergrowth, I'd have ended up with Twelve Monkeys, and refused the next trade. If he'd started me on Twelve Monkeys, I've had ended up with Akira. These may not have been the options I'd have settle...
Boston meetup Nov 15 (and others)
by MichaelVassar — 2009-11-13T07:05:34.276Z

So far, only one of the less-wrong meet-ups that were discussed has been scheduled. The Boston meet-up was scheduled for:

Carberry's at 74 Prospect St Cambridge, MA
(1.5 blocks northeast from the Central Square T station)
Sunday November 15th at 2pm

though it may move after an hour or two to the Clear Conscience Cafe a couple blocks away if things get too crowded.

My cell number is (610) 213 2487 so you can contact me if there is a problem.

Regarding Philly, Florida and New Orleans there is still need for detail in the schedule. I'm leaving New Orleans at 5:10 on the 14th so the 13th is probably better but I can do early on the 14th if people want. There has been some interest in an event there but I would appreciate more interested people saying so and possibly contacting me via phone or email. If several people are interested we will have a meet-up. Just one or two and I can meet less formally.
Anti-Akrasia Technique: Structured Procrastination
by patrissimo — 2009-11-12T19:35:45.496Z

This idea has been mentioned in several comments, but it deserves a top-level post. From an ancient, ancient web article (1995!), Stanford philosophy professor John Perry writes:

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

The insightful observation that procrastinators fill their time with effort, not staring at the walls, gives rise to this form of akrasia aikido, where the urge to not do something is cleverly redirected into productivity. If you can "waste time" by doing useful things, while feeling like you are avoiding doing the "real work", then you avoid depleting your limited supply of willpower (which happens when you force yourself to do something).

In other words, structured procrastination (SP) is an efficient use of this limited resource, because doing A in order to avoid doing B is easier than making yourself do A. If A is something you want to get done, then the less willpower you can use to do it, the more you will be to accomplish. This only works if A is something that you do want to get done - that's how SP differs from...
Test Your Calibration!
by alyssavance — 2009-11-11T22:03:38.439Z

In my journeys across the land, I have, to date, encountered four sets of probability calibration tests. (If you just want to make bets on your predictions, you can use Intrade or another prediction market, but these generally don't record calibration data, only which of your bets paid out.) If anyone knows of other tests, please do mention them in the comments, and I'll add them to this post. To avoid spoilers, please do not post what you guessed for the calibration questions, or what the answers are.

The first, to boast shamelessly, is my own, at http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/tom/?p=129. My tests use fairly standard trivia questions (samples: "George Washington actually fathered how many children?", "Who was Woody Allen's first wife?", "What was Paul Revere's occupation?"), with an emphasis towards history and pop culture. The quizzes are scored automatically (by computer) and you choose whether to assign a probability of 96%, 90%, 75%, 50%, or 25% to your answer. There are five quizzes with fifty questions each: Quiz #1, Quiz #2, Quiz #3, Quiz #4 and Quiz #5.

The second is a project by John Salvatier (LW account) of the University of Washington, at http://calibratedprobabilityassessment.org/. There are three sets of questions with fifty questions each; two sets of general trivia, and one set of questions about relative distances between American cities (the fourth set, unfortunately, does not appear to be working at this time). The questions do not rotate, but are re-ordered upon refreshing. The probabilities are again multiple choice, with ranges of 51-60%, 61-70%, 71-80%, 81-90%, and 91-100%, for whichever answer you think is more probable. These quizzes are also scored by computer, but instead of spitting back numbers, the computer generates a graph, showing the discrepancy between your real accuracy rate and your claimed accuracy rate. Links: US cities, trivia #1, trivia #2.

The third is a quiz by Steven Smithee of Black Belt Bayesian (LW account here) at http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=96. There are three sets, of five questions each, about history, demographics, and Google rankings, and two sets of (non-testable) questions about the future and historical counterfactuals. (EDIT: Steven has built three more tests in addition to this one, at http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=102, http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=106, a...
Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Ask Your Questions
by MichaelGR — 2009-11-11T03:00:39.093Z

As promised, here is the "Q" part of the Less Wrong Video Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky.

The Rules

1) One question per comment (to allow voting to carry more information about people's preferences).

2) Try to be as clear and concise as possible. If your question can't be condensed to a few paragraphs, you should probably ask in a separate post. Make sure you have an actual question somewhere in there (you can bold it to make it easier to scan).

3) Eliezer hasn't been subpoenaed. He will simply ignore the questions he doesn't want to answer, even if they somehow received 3^^^3 votes.

4) If you reference certain things that are online in your question, provide a link.

5) This thread will be open to questions and votes for at least 7 days. After that, it is up to Eliezer to decide when the best time to film his answers will be. [Update: Today, November 18, marks the 7th day since this thread was posted. If you haven't already done so, now would be a good time to review the questions and vote for your favorites.]

Suggestions

Don't limit yourself to things that have been mentioned on OB/LW. I expect that this will be the majority of questions, but you shouldn't feel limited to these topics. I've always found that a wide variety of topics makes a Q&A more interesting. If you're uncertain, ask anyway and let the voting sort out the wheat from the chaff.

It's okay to attempt humor (but good luck, it's a tough crowd).

If a discussion breaks out about a question (f.ex. to ask for clarifications) and the original poster decides to modify the question, the top level comment should be updated with the modified question (make it easy to find your question, don't have the latest version buried in a long thread).

Update: Eliezer's video answers to 30 questions from this thread can be found here.
What makes you YOU? For non-deists only.
by cleonid — 2009-11-10T19:59:41.456Z

From the dawn of civilization humans believed in eternal life. The flesh may rot, but the soul will be reborn. To save the soul from the potential adverse living conditions (e.g. hell), the body, being the transient and thus the less important part, was expected to make sacrifices. To accumulate the best possible karma, pleasures of the flesh had to be given up or at least heavily curtailed.

Naturally the wisdom of this trade-off was questioned by many skeptical minds. The idea of reincarnation may have a strong appeal to imagination, but in absence of any credible evidence the Occam’s razor mercilessly cuts it into pieces. Instead of sacrificing for the sake of the future incarnations, a rationalist should live for the present. But does he really?

Consider the “incarnations” of the same person at different ages. Upon reaching the age of self-awareness, the earlier “incarnations” start making sacrifices for the benefit of the later ones. Dreams of becoming an astronaut at 25 may prompt a child of nine to exercise or study instead of playing. Upon reaching the age of 25, the same child may take a job at the bank and start saving for the potential retirement. Of course, legally all these “incarnations” are just the same person. But beyond jurisprudence, what is it that makes you who you are at the age of nine, twenty five or seventy?

Over the years your body, tastes, goals and the whole worldview are likely to undergo dramatic change. The single thing which remains essentially constant through your entire life is your DNA sequence. Through natural selection, evolution has ensured that we preferentially empathize with those whose DNA sequence is most similar to our own, i.e. our children, siblings and, most importantly, ourselves. But, instinct excepted, is there a reason why a rational self-conscious being must obey a program implanted in us by the unconscious force of evolution? If you identify more with your mind (personality/views/goals/…) than with the DNA sequence, why should you care more for someone who, living many years from now will resemble you less than some actual people living today?

P.S. I am aware that the meaning of “self” was debated by philosophers for many years, but I am really curious about the personal answers of “ordinary&r

...
Restraint Bias
by Vladimir_Nesov — 2009-11-10T17:23:53.075Z

Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science has an article on a study demonstrating "restraint bias" (reference), which seems like an important thing to be aware of in fighting akrasia:

People who think they are more restrained are more likely to succumb to temptation

In a series of four experiments, Loran Nordgren from Northwestern University showed that people suffer from a "restraint bias", where they overestimate their ability to control their own impulses. Those who fall prey to this fallacy most strongly are more likely to dive into tempting situations. Smokers, for example, who are trying to quit, are more likely to put themselves in situations if they think they're invulnerable to temptation. As a result, they're more likely to relapse.

Thus, not only do people overestimate their abilities to carry out non-immediate plans (far-mode thinking, like in planning fallacy), but also the more confident ones turn out to be least able. This might have something to do with how public commitment may be counterproductive: once you've effectively signaled your intentions, the pressure to actually implement them fades away. Once you believe yourself to have asserted self-image of a person with good self-control, maintaining the actual self-control loses priority.

See also: Akrasia, Planning fallacy, Near/far thinking.

Related to: Image vs. Impact: Can public commitment be counterproductive for achievement?
Rationality advice from Terry Tao
by Kaj_Sotala — 2009-11-10T17:17:23.357Z

Via a link on IRC, I stumbled upon the blog of the mathematician Terry Tao. I noticed that several of his posts contain useful rationality advice, part of it overlapping with content that has been covered here. Most of the posts remind us of things that are kind of obvious, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing: we often need reminders of the things that are obvious.

Advance warning: the posts are pretty well interlinked, in Wikipedia/TVTropes fashion. I currently have 15 tabs open from the site.

Some posts of note:

Be sceptical of your own work. If you unexpectedly find a problem solving itself almost effortlessly, and you can’t quite see why, you should try to analyse your solution more sceptically. Most of the time, the process for solving a major problem is a lot more complex and time-consuming.

Use the wastebasket. Not every idea leads to a success, and not every first draft forms a good template for the final draft. Know when to start over from scratch, know when you should be persistent, and do keep copies around of even the failed attempts.

Learn the limitations of your tools. Knowing what your tools cannot do is just as important as knowing what they can do.

Learn and relearn your field. Simply learning the statement and proof of a problem doesn't guarantee understanding: you should test your understanding, using methods such as finding alternate proofs and trying to generalize the argument.

Write down what you've done. Write down sketches of any interesting arguments you come across - not necessarily at a publication level of quality, but detailed enough that you can forget about the details and reconstruct them later on.