trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)
by orthonormal — 2011-12-26T22:57:21.157Z

If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as a rationalist or how you found us. You can skip right to that if you like; the rest of this post consists of a few things you might find helpful. More can be found at the FAQ.

(This is the third incarnation of the welcome thread, the first two of which which now have too many comments to show all at once.)

A few notes about the site mechanics

Less Wrong comments are threaded for easy following of multiple conversations. To respond to any comment, click the "Reply" link at the bottom of that comment's box. Within the comment box, links and formatting are achieved via Markdown syntax (you can click the "Help" link below the text box to bring up a primer).

You may have noticed that all the posts and comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have "karma" scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. This immediate easy feedback mechanism helps keep arguments from turning into flamewars and helps make the best posts more visible; it's part of what makes discussions on Less Wrong look different from those anywhere else on the Internet.

However, it can feel really irritating to get downvoted, especially if one doesn't know why. It happens to all of us sometimes, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation. (Sometimes it's the unwritten LW etiquette; we have different norms than other forums.) Take note when you're downvoted a lot on one topic, as it often means that several members of the community think you're missing an important point or making a mistake in reasoning— not just that they disagree with you! If you've any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.

Replies to your comments across the site, plus private messages from other users, will show up in your inbox. You can reach it via the little mail icon beneath your karma score on the upper right of most pages. When you have a new reply or message, it glows red. You can also click on any user's name to view all of their comments and posts.

It's definitely worth your time commenting on old posts; veteran users look through the recent comments thread quite often (there's a separate recent c

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Summary of "The Straw Vulcan"
by alexvermeer — 2011-12-26T16:29:46.539Z

Followup to: Communicating rationality to the public: Julia Galef's "The Straw Vulcan"

I wrote a summary of Julia Galef's "The Straw Vulcan" presentation from Skepticon 4. Note that it is written in my own words, but all of the ideas should be credited to Julia and her presentation (unless I unintentionally misrepresent any of them!).

---

The classic Hollywood example of rationality is the Vulcans from Star Trek. They are depicted as an ultra-rational race that has eschewed all emotion from their lives.

But is this truly rational? What is rationality?

A “Straw Vulcan”—an idea originally defined on TV Tropes—is a straw man used to show that emotion is better than logic. Traditionally, you have your ‘rational’ character who thinks perfectly ‘logically’, but then ends up running into trouble, having problems, or failing to achieve what they were trying to achieve.

These characters have a sort of fake rationality. They don’t fail because rationality failed, but because they aren’t actually being rational. Straw Vulcan rationality is not the same thing as actual rationality.

What is real rationality?

There are two different concepts that we refer to when we use the word ‘rationality’:

1. The method of obtaining an accurate view of reality. (Epistemic Rationality) — Learning new things, updating your beliefs based on the evidence, being as accurate as possible, being as close to what is true as possible, etc.

2. The method of achieving your goals. (Instrumental Rationality) — Whatever your goals are, be them selfish or altruistic, there are better and worse ways to achieve them, and instrumental rationality helps you figure this out.

These two concepts are obviously related. You want a clear model of the world to be able to achieve your goals. You also may have goals related to obtaining an accurate model of the world.

How do these concepts of rationality relate to Straw Vulcan rationality? What is the Straw Vulcan conception of rationality?

“Straw Vulcan” Rationality Principles

Straw Vulcan Principle #1: Being rational means expecting other people to be rational too.

Galef uses an example from Star Trek where Spock, in an attempt to protect the crew of the crashed ship, decides to show aggression against the local aliens so that they will be scared and run ...
Welcome to Less Wrong!, part 2?
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-12-26T10:34:52.053Z

Welcome to Less Wrong! has over 1300 comments, but the display only offers 500 newest or 500 oldest, which makes it difficult if anyone wants to look at the whole thing. At a minimum, I recommend a second Welcome! post, but it might also be good to break up the first one (Welcome 1a and 1b, perhaps), and have a policy of a new Welcome post every 700 comments or so.
[SEQ RERUN] The Allais Paradox
by MinibearRex — 2011-12-26T04:30:46.000Z

Today's post, The Allais Paradox was originally published on 19 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Offered choices between gambles, people make decision-theoretically inconsistent decisions.

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 Trust in Math, 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.
Merry Newtonmas LW. Have some rationalist music.
by Spurlock — 2011-12-25T15:41:42.370Z

Related to: So You've Changed Your Mind

Basically my band did an album whose theme was "change your mind", largely inspired by the LW sequence. It's not Bayes Theorem in rhyming form, but the subject matter and spirit of it should (hopefully) resonate with LW readers.

Anyway, for obvious reasons I'm curious what you'll think of it, and so in the spirit of giving here's a direct link to download the album for free. If you don't want to download the whole thing immediately, you can also stream each song via Bandcamp.

Sound-wise, you'll probably like it if you like 90s rock/pop/alternative.
Just another day in utopia
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2011-12-25T09:37:00.410Z

(Reposted from discussion at commentator suggestion)

Thinking of Eliezer's fun theory and the challenge of creating actual utopias where people would like to live, I tried to write a light utopia for my friends around Christmas, and thought it might be worth sharing. It's a techno-utopia, but (considering my audience) it's only a short inferential distance from normality.

Just another day in Utopia

Ishtar went to sleep in the arms of her lover Ted, and awoke locked in a safe, in a cargo hold of a triplane spiralling towards a collision with the reconstructed temple of Solomon.

Again! Sometimes she wished that a whole week would go by without something like that happening. But then, she had chosen a high excitement existence (not maximal excitement, of course – that was for complete masochists), so she couldn’t complain. She closed her eyes for a moment and let the thrill and the adrenaline warp her limbs and mind, until she felt transformed, yet again, into a demi-goddess of adventure. Drugs couldn’t have that effect on her, she knew; only real danger and challenge could do that.

Right. First, the safe. She gave the inner door a firm thud, felt it ring like a bell, heard the echo return – and felt the tumblers move. So, sound controlled lock, then. A search through her shoes produced a small pebble which sparked as she dashed it against the metal. Trying to ignore the ominous vibration as the triplane motor shook itself to pieces, she constructed a mental image of the safe’s inside from the brief flashes of light. Symmetric gold and gilded extravagances festooned her small prison – French Baroque decorations, but not yet Roccoco. So Louis XIV period. She gave the less visited parts of her mind a good dusting, trying to remember the tunes of Jean Batiste Lully, the period’s most influential composer. She hoped it wasn’t any of his ballets; she was much better with his operas. The decorations looked vaguely snake-like; so she guessed Lully’s ‘Persée’ opera, about the death of the medusa.

The engine creaked to a worrying silence as she was half-way through humming the Gorgon theme from the opera. Rushing the rest of the composition, she felt the door shift, finally, to a ten-times speeded up version of Andromeda’s response to Perseus’s proposal. She kicked the door open, exploded from the safe, took in the view of the temple of Solomon rushing up towards her, seconds

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[SEQ RERUN] Trust in Math
by MinibearRex — 2011-12-25T07:28:08.110Z

Today's post, Trust in Math was originally published on 15 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When you find a seeming inconsistency in the rules of math, or logic, or probability theory, you might do well to consider that math has rightfully earned a bit more credibility than that. Check the proof. It is more likely that you have made a mistake in algebra, than that you have just discovered a fatal flaw in math itself.

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 Beautiful Probability, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
[LINK] Lincoln on Rationality
by  — 2011-12-25T06:55:23.733Z

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/a-fateful-christmas-meeting/

But Lincoln, like Chase, harbored doubts about taking a conciliatory approach. At the conclusion of what became a four-hour meeting, the president proposed to Seward that they both draft arguments supporting their positions. He and Seward would then face off the next day like lawyers competing in court to win the jury’s verdict.

The meeting on Dec. 26 proved to be both shorter and less combative, with the cabinet quickly agreeing to the release of Mason and Slidell. Lincoln, despite his position the day before, raised no objections. Surprised that his fiercest opponent had changed his mind, Seward asked the president what had prompted the reversal. “I found that I could not make an argument that would satisfy my own mind, and that proved to me your ground was the right one,” replied the president.

This reminded me of Groupthink by Irving L. Janis (also see Wikipedia's article), which analyzed how bad decisions are made (e.g. the Bay of Pigs Invasion) and avoided (e.g. the Cuban Missile Crisis).
[SEQ RERUN] Beautiful Probability
by MinibearRex — 2011-12-24T05:33:36.277Z

Today's post, Beautiful Probability was originally published on 14 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Bayesians expect probability theory, and rationality itself, to be math. Self consistent, neat, even beautiful. This is why Bayesians think that Cox's theorems are so important.

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 Is Reality Ugly?, 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.
East Coast Megameetup II: Electric Boogalloo
by atucker — 2011-12-23T23:24:16.633Z

The last East Coast Megameetup was awesome, and people wanted to do another one.

So let's do another one?

Vision:

Primarily a social event, with some skill transfer

Meet people within the LW community, make friends, get contacts

Get people together for our mutual benefit

Informal focused discussion/teaching, people in the community know a lot about stuff that's useful to know

Help lone rationalists be part of the community

Geoff Anders has kindly agreed to host at the Leverage House.

What I want from you, East Coaster:

Bring this up at your meetup or mailing list

Select someone in your meetup group as a point of contact for the group. They should be able to represent and effectively communicate with the rest of the meetup group.

Have them email me at aarondtucker <at> gmail.com

You can always arbitrarily designate yourself to be that point of contact to keep things moving, and then figure out with the group who it should actually be.

Try to figure out if you want to attend.

I want this to happen around the end of January.

If you don't have a meetup group, you are still very much invited

Thoughts?
Historical examples of flinching away
by lukeprog — 2011-12-23T21:41:34.021Z

I'm looking for historical examples of "flinching away," so I can illustrate the concept to others and talk about motivated cognition and leaving a line of retreat and so on.

The ideal example would be one of motivated skepticism with grave consequences. Like, a military commander who shied away from believing certain reports because they implied something huge and scary was about to happen, and then the huge and scary thing happened and caused great damage. Something like that.

What examples can you think of?
Prediction is hard, especially of medicine
by gwern — 2011-12-23T20:34:13.065Z

Summary: medical progress has been much slower than even recently predicted.

In the February and March 1988 issues of Cryonics, Mike Darwin (Wikipedia/LessWrong) and Steve Harris published a two-part article “The Future of Medicine” attempting to forecast the medical state of the art for 2008. Darwin has republished it on the New_Cryonet email list.

Darwin is a pretty savvy forecaster (who you will remember correctly predicting in 1981 in “The High Cost of Cryonics”/part 2 ALCOR’s recent troubles with grandfathering), so given my standing interests in tracking predictions, I read it with great interest; but they still blew most of them, and not the ones we would prefer them to’ve.

The full essay is ~10k words, so I will excerpt roughly half of it below; feel free to skip to the reactions section and other links.

1 The Future of Medicine

1.1 Part 1

What we hope we are especially good at as cryonicists is predicting the future — particularly the future of medicine. After all, our lives depend upon it. Because that’s what cryonics is about — tomorrow’s medicine today. In order for cryonics to seem reasonable, in order for it to be reasonable, it is necessary to have some idea, at least in broad outline, of where medicine is going and of where it ultimately can go. I think that the cryonicists’ record on this point in a broad sense has been very good.

…One thing which is rarely seen in cryonics publications is an attempt to see the shape of things to come in the near or intermediate future. Oddly enough, that’s a far more difficult and dangerous undertaking than predicting ultimates. Nor is this a problem confined to cryonics or the future of medicine. Sadi Carnot (the founder of thermodynamics) could tell you all about the “perfect heat engine,” but would have no doubt had trouble giving you hard numbers on how well heat engines would be made to perform over the 20 years or so following publication of his work….When I look over predictions made in the 1950’s or the 1960’s about the future of medicine and/or technology, I always chuckle about just how far afield these guys were. A good example is a list of predictions made by Herman Kahn which was summarized in CRYONICS REPORTS in August of 1967 (volume 2, #8). They are reproduced as Table 1 below. Read

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Is every life really worth preserving?
by RationallyOptimistic — 2011-12-23T17:04:22.640Z

Singularitarians frequently lament the irrevocably dead and the lack of widespread application of cryonics. Many cryonocists feel that as many lives as possible should be (and in a more rational world, would be) cryopreserved. Eliezer Yudkowsky, in an update to the touching note on the death of his younger brother Yehuda, forcefully expressed this sentiment:

"I stand there, and instead of reciting Tehillim I look at the outline on the grass of my little brother's grave. Beneath this thin rectangle in the dirt lies my brother's coffin, and within that coffin lie his bones, and perhaps decaying flesh if any remains. There is nothing here or anywhere of my little brother's self. His brain's information is destroyed. Yehuda wasn't signed up for cryonics and his body wasn't identified until three days later; but freezing could have been, should have been standard procedure for anonymous patients. The hospital that should have removed Yehuda's head when his heart stopped beating, and preserved him in liquid nitrogen to await rescue, instead laid him out on a slab. Why is the human species still doing this? Why do we still bury our dead? We have all the information we need in order to know better..."

Ignoring the debate concerning the merits of cryopreservation itself and the feasibility of mass cryonics, I would like to question the assumption that every life is worth preserving for posterity.
Consider those who have demonstrated through their actions that they are best kept excluded from society at large. John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer would be prime examples. Many people write these villains off as evil and give their condition not a second thought. But it is quite possible that they actually suffer from some sort of mental illness and are thus not fully responsible for their crimes. In fact, there is evidence that the brains of serial killers are measurably different from those of normal people. Far enough in the future, it might be possible to "cure" them. However, they will still possess toxic memories and thoughts that would greatly distress them now that they are normal. To truly repair them, they would likely need to have many or all of their memories erased. At that point, with an amnesic brain and a cloned body, are they even really the same person, and if not, what was the point of cryopreserving them?
Forming a robust theory of mind and realizing tha...
Weekly LW Meetups: Pittsburgh, Melbourne
by FrankAdamek — 2011-12-23T16:38:04.207Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Pittsburgh Holiday Meetup: 16 December 2011 08:00PM
Indianapolis, Potential: 08 January 2012 02:00PM
Salt Lake City, Late January 2012
First Brussels meetup: 18 February 2012 11:00AM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Melbourne social meetup: 16 December 2011 07:00PM

The Mountain View meetup is taking a hiatus for the rest of December, see the mailing list for details.

Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Irvine, London, Madison, WI, Marin, CA (uses the Bay Area List), Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ottawa, Oxford, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver.
Holiday giving thread
by Kaj_Sotala — 2011-12-23T11:09:21.433Z

Since this is the season to respect the universe as a worthy foe and remember the challenges ahead of us, it felt appropriate that I should donate some money for a good cause. Then it occurred to me, why not use the opportunity to encourage somebody else to do so as well?

So, if you promise to donate money to either the Singularity Institute or the Future of Humanity Institute before the end of the year, and pledge that you wouldn't have done so without this opportunity, then I will match your donation dollar-for-dollar. Saying "I would have donated 50 dollars without this opportunity but with it I'll donate 75" is also fine - in that case I'll match the extra 25. I'll match up to a total of 100 EUR (about 130 USD at today's rate): first-come first-served, so get your matches while they're hot. EDIT: I hit my maximum total, but curiousepic is running a matching as well, see below!

Please feel free to also declare any of your (more or less) completely unrelated donations in this thread, or to set up your own matching pledges.

Matchings:

curiousepic matches up to a total of $1000 on donations to SI, SENS, or GiveWell. (Up to $800.)

Kaj Sotala matched up to a total of $130 on donations to SI or FHI. (Up to $130.)

Matched donations:

Barry_Cotter donated $25 to SI. (matched $25 each by curiousepic, Kaj Sotala)

Daniel_Burfoot donated $100 to SI. (matched $100 each by curiousepic, Kaj Sotala)

atucker donated $12/month to SI. (matched $5 by Kaj Sotala, $144? by curiousepic)

wmorgan donated $1531 to SI. (matched $531 by curiousepic)

Non-matched donations:

Dr_Manhattan donated $100 to SI.

lincolquirk donated $700 to SI, $300 to Against Malaria Foundation.

Normal_Anomaly donated $300 to Against Malaria Foundation.