trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[SEQ RERUN] When Science Can't Help
by MinibearRex — 2012-05-07T03:38:06.205Z

Today's post, When Science Can't Help was originally published on 15 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you have an idea, Science tells you to test it experimentally. If you spend 10 years testing the idea and the result comes out negative, Science slaps you on the back and says, "Better luck next time." If you want to spend 10 years testing a hypothesis that will actually turn out to be right, you'll have to try to do the thing that Science doesn't trust you to do: think rationally, and figure out the answer before you get clubbed over the head with it.

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 Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality, 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 : Monday Madison Meetup
by fiddlemath — 2012-05-07T03:34:06.993Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Monday Madison Meetup

WHEN:
07 May 2012 06:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
1831 Monroe St, Madison, WI

I have a specific topic in mind that I would like to discuss: The illusion of control appears to be both a psychological need and a common, viewpoint-distorting bias. Are there other biases like this? How ought we handle them? Further suggestions for discussion topics are, as always, warmly welcomed.

Also, I'll bring stuff to play The Resistance and Zendo. :D

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Monday Madison Meetup
Meetup : Dallas - Fort Worth Less Wrong Meetup 5/13/12
by jumandtonic — 2012-05-06T22:06:23.296Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Dallas - Fort Worth Less Wrong Meetup 5/13/12

WHEN:
13 May 2012 01:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
America's Best Coffee, Arlington

Hello Dallas-Fort Worth LessWrongians! If you live in the area, and you haven't come out to meet us yet, you are missing out!

We currently have regular meetups every Sunday at America's Best Coffee in Arlington at 1 PM until 3 PM. We have gotten a good handful of people to show up to these events so far, and it has been very enjoyable and productive.

The current goal, or mission statement, of this group can be summarized as follows:
"We want to first understand rationality, and then learn how to apply rationality to our daily lives. During our meet-ups we wish to take advantage of having a community over what can only be accomplished alone."

We look forward to you coming out and meeting the rest of the group. Message me to ask to join our google group:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/dfw-lesswrong-meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : Dallas - Fort Worth Less Wrong Meetup 5/13/12
Betrand Russell's Ten Commandments
by quanticle — 2012-05-06T19:52:22.012Z

Betrand Russell's Ten Commandments for teachers.

Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

I find this to be of use not just for teachers but for rationalists in general. #8, especially, is an especially eloquent formulation of Aumann's Agreement Theorem.
Meetup Feedback: Topic selection and precommittments
by Joanna Morningstar — 2012-05-06T16:14:30.541Z

This post is part of the Cambridge LW meetup group's attempt to publish what works for us, and try to make good meetups easier.

Breaking the ice and topic selection

A consistent problem has been starting discussion, and more generally breaking the ice. Last week, an Execute by Default style hack was used to reduce social inhibitions (everyone danced for 30 seconds), which was highly successful, though awkward. It was proposed again this week, and there was sufficient collective laughter at the recollection to effectively break the ice. This may also have been helped by a change in room, which replaced chairs with couches.

A new algorithm for selecting a topic was used: One person proposed a (deliberately easy-to-beat) topic, and running around the group, each person proposed a alternate topic or passed. This was followed by multiple passes for people to affiliate with any proposed topic. Amongst 7 people, the first pass produced a 5-2 split, and the group of two merged into the main topic.

The topic chosen was involuntary signalling. The others are here so as to keep them salient for future meetups.

Signalling by Dress

It was observed that most people seem to react to dress, and that as a group (largely mathematicians or similarly inclined) there is a tendency not to optimise the reactions we generate. Several people asked what might work better, and checked to see whether the social status of others in the social group of mathematicians correlated with their appearance or dress. It appeared that if it did, we are insufficiently good at observing our cognitive processes to notice. As a corollary, it wasn't clear that feedback from other members of the group was likely to contain much signal.

A concrete mechanism to extract information on how other people perceive dress was made: Generate multiple photos in various styles, and then use OKCupid's "MyBestFace" or similar services to get some information back

Signalling for Access

There was some discussion of how one might present in interview; this was confounded by a lack of access to interviewers. Discussion was more productive when moved to aspects of social engineering. Specific examples raised were accessing a hospital outside of visiting hours, entering a college without being challenged by porters, or avoiding inconvenience in airports. A combination of speed, posture (head level, back straight, shoulders back) a...
Delayed Gratification vs. a Time-Dependent Utility Function
by momothefiddler — 2012-05-06T00:32:12.376Z

Ideally, a utility function would be a rational, perfect, constant entity that accounted for all possible variables, but mine certainly isn't. In fact, I'd feel quite comfortable claiming that no humans at the time of writing do.

When confronted with the fact that my utility function is non-ideal or - since there's no universal ideal to compare it to - internally inconsistent, I do my best to figure out what to change and do so. The problem with a non-constant utility function, though, is that it makes it hard to maximise total utility. For instance, I am willing to undergo -50 units of utility today in return for +1 utility on each following day indefinitely. What if I accept the -50, but then my utility function changes tomorrow such that I now consider the change to be neutral, or worse, negative per day?

Just as plausible is the idea that I be offered a trade that, while not of positive utility according to my function now, will be according to a future function. Just as I would think it a good investment to buy gold if I expected the price to go up but bad if I expected the price to go down, so I have to base my long-term utility trades on what I expect my future functions to be. (Not that dollars don't correlate with units of utility, just that they don't correlate strongly.)

How can I know what I will want to do, much less what I will want to have done? If I obtain the outcome I prefer now, but spend more time not preferring it, does that make it a negative choice? Is it a reasonable decision, in order to maximise utility, to purposefully change your definition of utility such that your expected future would maximise it?

What brings this all to mind is a choice I have to make soon. Technically, I've already made it, but I'm now uncertain of that choice and it has to be made final soon. This fall I transfer from my community college to a university, where I will focus a significant amount of energy studying Something 1 in order to become trained (and certified) to do Something 2 for a long period of time. I had thought until today that it was reasonable for Something 1 to be math and Something 2 to be teaching math. I enjoy the beauty of mathematics. I love how things fit together, barely anything can excite me as much as the definition of a derivative and its meaning, and I've shown myself to be rather good at it (which, to be fair, is by comparison...
No Value
by Raiden — 2012-05-05T22:38:31.741Z

I am still quite new to LW, so I apologize if this is something that has been discussed before (I did try and search).

I would't normally post such a thing, as I try not to make a habit of complaining my problems to others, but a solution to this would likely benefit other rationalists (at least that's the excuse I made to myself).

Essentially, I am currently in a psychological state in which I simply have no strong values. There is no state of the world that I can imagine the world being in that generates a strong emotional reaction. Ever. In fact, I rarely experience strong emotions at all. When I do, I savor them whether they're positive or negative. I do have some preferences; I would somewhat prefer the world to be some ways than others, but never strongly. I prefer to feel pleasure rather than pain; I prefer the world to be a good place than a bad one, but not by much. Even my desire to have values seems to be a mere preference in much the same way. I have nothing to protect.

Is there any good solution to this?
Test your forecasting ability, contribute to the science of human judgment
by Mike Bishop — 2012-05-05T15:07:45.655Z

As XFrequentist mentioned last August, "Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity (IARPA) with the goal of improving forecasting methods for global events of national (US) interest. One of the teams (The Good Judgement Team) is recruiting volunteers to have their forecasts tracked. Volunteers will receive an annual honorarium ($150), and it appears there will be ongoing training to improve one's forecast accuracy (not sure exactly what form this will take)."

You can pre-register here.

Last year, approximately 2400 forecasters were assigned to one of eight experimental conditions. I was the #1 forecaster in my condition. It was fun, and I learned a lot, and eventually they are going to give me a public link so that I can brag about this until the end of time. I'm participating again this year, though I plan to regress towards the mean.

I'll share the same info XFrequentist did last year below the fold because I think it's all still relevant.

Despite its importance in modern life, forecasting remains (ironically) unpredictable. Who is a good forecaster? How do you make people better forecasters? Are there processes or technologies that can improve the ability of governments, companies, and other institutions to perceive and act on trends and threats? Nobody really knows.

The goal of the Good Judgment Project is to answer these questions. We will systematically compare the effectiveness of different training methods (general education, probabilistic-reasoning training, divergent-thinking training) and forecasting tools (low- and high-information opinion-polls, prediction market, and process-focused tools) in accurately forecasting future events. We also will investigate how different combinations of training and forecasting work together. Finally, we will explore how to more effectively communicate forecasts in ways that avoid overwhelming audiences with technical detail or oversimplifying difficult decisions.

Over the course of each year, forecasters will have an opportunity to respond to 100 questions, each requiring a separate prediction, such as “How many countries in the Euro zone will default on bonds in 2011?” or “Will Southern Sudan become an independent country in 2011?” Researchers from the Good Judgment Project will look for the best ways to combine these individual forecasts to yield the most accurate &

...
[SEQ RERUN] Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality
by MinibearRex — 2012-05-05T06:37:31.042Z

Today's post, Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality was originally published on 14 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The reason Science doesn't always agree with the exact, Bayesian, rational answer, is that Science doesn't trust you to be rational. It wants you to go out and gather overwhelming experimental evidence.

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 The Dilemma: Science or Bayes?, 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.
A simple web app to create aversion to unhealthy food
by Solvent — 2012-05-05T06:07:27.916Z

At a startup camp weekend, I've made this (incredibly sketchy, amateurish) app (NSFW) which implements classical conditioning to create a negative response to candy, smoking, or meat.

After using it intensively for about a day while writing it, I certainly feel disgusted at the sight of candy or chocolate. There's a little bit of evidence that something like this could actually have an effect on people: I'm reminded of the penny jar fetish experiment and this chapter on "curing" homosexuality.

I post this here for two reasons: to get advice on how to improve the app, and to get your opinions on whether this type of program might actually be useful. I'm reminded a bit of Anki, how the science led to the effective app. In this case, I'm not sure if it will turn out to be actually useful: in the experiments which have shown an effect from aversion type stimulus like this, the unpleasant image has been causally connected to the stimulus we're conditioning against, eg unhealthy food and diseased tissue.

Go easy on the web design, I'm just an amateur. :)

Thanks

EDIT: Yeah, it should be marked NSFW. Sorry.
Low hanging fruit: analyzing your nutrition
by Alexei — 2012-05-05T05:20:14.372Z

Recently I decided to try an intermittent fasting diet. To do so, I had to figure out how much I could eat on my off/down days. I realized I didn't have a very good idea about how much calories my meals have, and as I was thinking about it, I started to get curious about my diet overall. How many calories do I get a day? How much of it is from fat? Do I get enough vitamins? Etc, etc, etc. All very basic questions, and since my meals are very regular, there was an easy way to find out!

(Note: anytime you feel curious and are about to find something out, make some predictions. I didn't, but I really wish I did, because I was very surprised by my findings.)

It took only a couple of hours, and here is the result.

If you scroll down, you can see that my usual Breakfast+Lunch+Dinner only nets about 1000 calories and gives 30% daily value of fat. No wonder I crave cookies and chocolate so much!

There are many surprising results that I got from this. And knowing that I've been eating like this for the past few years... Wow. This is the epitome of a low hanging fruit. I can't believe I didn't do this analysis earlier!

Edit: I was not trying to say that I only get 1000 calories a day. Of course I get more than that, but the rest is from cookies and post-meal sweets. I always thought I just have a sweet tooth, but the fact that I wasn't getting enough calories from my main meals can also explain this.
Meetup : Dallas - Fort Worth Less Wrong Meetup 5/6/12
by jumandtonic — 2012-05-05T01:53:00.161Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Dallas - Fort Worth Less Wrong Meetup 5/6/12

WHEN:
06 May 2012 01:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
America's Best Coffee, Arlington

We had a handful of people show up last week, and it was quite enjoyable. Not bad for our first meetup! I'll remember to bring a sign this time!

Agenda:

1:00 Introductions and call to order

1:15 Discussion of: meetup group management (roles and agenda setting), mailing list options (meetup.com, facebook, google groups, etc.)

1:30 Discussion of core sequences. Recommended that you have read through the "Map and Territory" sequence (this is a short one), and start reading the "Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions" sequence. (this is a long sequence, so may take a few meetings to get through)

2:00 Some rationality-improving games.

Discussion article for the meetup : Dallas - Fort Worth Less Wrong Meetup 5/6/12
Muehlhauser-Goertzel Dialogue, Part 2
by lukeprog — 2012-05-05T00:21:39.693Z

Part of the Muehlhauser interview series on AGI.

Luke Muehlhauser is Executive Director of the Singularity Institute, a non-profit research institute studying AGI safety.

Ben Goertzel is the Chairman at the AGI company Novamente and founder of the AGI conference series.

Continued from part 1...

Luke:

[Apr 11th, 2012]

I agree the future is unlikely to consist of a population of fairly distinct AGIs competing for resources, but I never thought that the arguments for Basic AI drives or "convergent instrumenta l goals" required that scenario to hold.

Anyway, I prefer the argument for convergent instrumental goals in Nick Bostrom 's more recent paper " The Superintelligent Will." Which parts of Nick's argument fail to persuade you?

Ben:

[Apr 12th, 2012]

Well, for one thing, I think his

Orthogonality Thesis

Intelligence and final goals are orthogonal axes along which possible agents can freely vary. In other words, more or less any level of intelligence could in principle be combined with more or less any final goal.

is misguided. It may be true, but who cares about possibility “in principle”? The question is whether any level of intelligence is PLAUSIBLY LIKELY to be combined with more or less any final goal in practice. And I really doubt it. I guess I could posit the alternative

Interdependency Thesis

Intelligence and final goals are in practice highly and subtly interdependent. In other words, in the actual world, various levels of intelligence are going to be highly correlated with various probability distributions over the space of final goals.

This just gets back to the issue we discussed already, of me thinking it’s really unlikely that a superintelligence would ever really have a really stupid goal like say, tiling the Cosmos with Mickey Mice.

Bostrom says

It might be possible through deliberate effort to construct a superintelligence that values ... human welfare, moral goodness, or any other complex purpose that its designers might want it to serve. But it is no less possible—and probably technically easier—to build a superintelligence that places final value on nothing but calculating the decimals of pi.

but he gives no evidence for this assertion. Calculating the decimals of pi may be a fairly simple mathematical operation that doesn’t have any need for superi...
Rationality and Winning
by lukeprog — 2012-05-04T18:31:25.586Z

Someone who claims to have read "the vast majority" of the Sequences recently misinterpreted me to be saying that I "accept 'life success' as an important metric for rationality." This may be a common confusion among LessWrongers due to statements like "rationality is systematized winning" and "be careful… any time you find yourself defining the [rationalist] as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility."

So, let me explain why Actual Winning isn't a strong measure of rationality.

In cognitive science, the "Standard Picture" (Stein 1996) of rationality is that rationality is a normative concept defined by logic, Bayesian probability theory, and Bayesian decision theory (aka "rational choice theory"). (Also see the standard textbooks on judgment and decision-making, e.g. Thinking and Deciding and Rational Choice in an Uncertain World.) Oaksford & Chater (2012) explain:

Is it meaningful to attempt to develop a general theory of rationality at all? We might tentatively suggest that it is a prima facie sign of irrationality to believe in alien abduction, or to will a sports team to win in order to increase their chance of victory. But these views or actions might be entirely rational, given suitably nonstandard background beliefs about other alien activity and the general efficacy of psychic powers. Irrationality may, though, be ascribed if there is a clash between a particular belief or behavior and such background assumptions. Thus, a thorough-going physicalist may, perhaps, be accused of irrationality if she simultaneously believes in psychic powers. A theory of rationality cannot, therefore, be viewed as clarifying either what people should believe or how people should act—but it can determine whether beliefs and behaviors are compatible. Similarly, a theory of rational choice cannot determine whether it is rational to smoke or to exercise daily; but it might clarify whether a particular choice is compatible with other beliefs and choices.

From this viewpoint, normative theories can be viewed as clarifying conditions of consistency… Logic can be viewed as studying the notion of consistency over beliefs. Probability… studies consistency over degrees of belief. Rational choice theory studies the consistency of beliefs and values with choices.

Thus, one could have highly rationa...