trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-11-27T05:08:14.668Z

Note: Originally posted in Discussion, edited to take comments there into account.

Yes, politics, boo hiss. In my defense, the topic of this post cuts across usual tribal affiliations (I write it as a liberal criticizing other liberals), and has a couple strong tie-ins with main LessWrong topics:

It's a tidy example of a failure to apply consequentialist / effective altruist-type reasoning. And while it's probably true that the people I'm critiquing aren't consequentialists by any means, it's a case where failing to look at the consequences leads people to say some particularly silly things.

I think there's a good chance this is a political issue that will become a lot more important as more and more jobs are replaced by automation. (If the previous sentence sounds obviously stupid to you, the best I can do without writing an entire post on that is vaguely gesturing at gwern on neo-luddism, though I don't agree with all of it.)

The issue is this: recently, I've seen a meme going around to the effect that companies like Walmart that have a large number of employees on government benefits are the "real welfare queens" or somesuch, and with the implied message that all companies have a moral obligation to pay their employees enough that they don't need government benefits. (I say mention Walmart because it's the most frequently mentioned villain in this meme, but others, like McDonalds, get mentioned.)

My initial awareness of this meme came from it being all over my Facebook feed, but when I went to Google to track down examples, I found it coming out of the mouths of some fairly prominent congresscritters. For example Alan Grayson:

In state after state, the largest group of Medicaid recipients is Walmart employees. I'm sure that the same thing is true of food stamp recipients. Each Walmart "associate" costs the taxpayers an average of more than $1,000 in public assistance.

Or Bernie Sanders:

The Walmart family... here's an amazing story. The Walmart family is the wealthiest family in this country, worth about $100 billion. owning more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people, and yet here's the incredible fact.

Because their wages and benefits are so low, they are the major welfare recipients in America, because many, many of their workers depend on Medicaid, depend on food stamps, depend on government subsidies for housing. So, if the mini

...
Meetup : Newcastle-upon-Tyne meetup, December
by bramflakes — 2013-11-26T22:00:58.828Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Newcastle-upon-Tyne meetup, December

WHEN:
07 December 2013 12:00:00PM (+0000)

WHERE:
Baltic centre for contemporary art

I have no idea how many LWers there are in the Northeast of England who would be interested in a meetup, but as Newcastle is a cool city that's easy to get to, I thought I'd post this thread and find out.
Venue would be the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. It has free admission, a nice cafe, spacious surroundings, and a nice view.

Time is 1200PM Saturday 7th. I will create a Google groups forum so we can discuss more.

Discussion article for the meetup : Newcastle-upon-Tyne meetup, December
Noticing something completely absurd about yourself
by diegocaleiro — 2013-11-26T19:24:09.578Z

I'm not sure this is something that can be consciously done, but in this post I want to prime you to consider whether something you do is really, totally, completely wacky and absurd.

We have trained ourselves a lot to notice when we are wrong. We trained ourselves even more to notice when we are confused and to tell word confusion from substance confusion.

But here is the tale of what happened to me today, and I don't think it qualifies as any of those:

I had a serious motivational problem yesterday, and got absolutely nothing done. So today I thought I should do things in a different manner, so as to decrease probability of two bad days in a row. One of the most effective things for me is going into the LW Study Hall (the password is in the group's description when you click this link). A very nice place to work that I recommend for everyone to check out, and do one or two pomo's every now and then.

And I did, I gave myself ten minutes observing others working, and I noticed something remarkable: The property of the LW chat that causes me to be motivated is "Presence of long haired people". Yes. Presence of people with a long hair. For weeks I had been trying to work out why it was efficient sometimes and not others. The most obvious initial alternative was that when there was a woman, I would feel more driven. I assumed that was the case. But I started getting false negatives and false positives. Today I finally came to terms with the fact. I am motivated by the presence of people whose hair goes to their shoulders. Women or Men.

Now why did I not notice this before? Seems to me that basically it was such a far fetched hypothesis that I simply had no prior for it. In vain hopes of being rational, I would read about how we fear the twinge of starting, how to beat procrastination, and how to get things done, and valid as those were and are, they would never have given me a complete picture of the unbelievable things my brain thinks behind my back.

Maybe there is something similar taking place in your mind. Even if there isn't, just update with me on the fact that this is true at least for someone, and how there may be millions of other tiny absurd facts controlling people's actions way beyond the scope of imagination of any economist or psychologist.

I have now one more piece of understanding about what is it like to be me, about how...
Stable and Unstable Risks
by katydee — 2013-11-25T18:12:21.336Z

Related: Existential Risk, 9/26 is Petrov Day

Existential risks—risks that, in the words of Nick Bostrom, would "either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential," are a significant threat to the world as we know it. In fact, they may be one of the most pressing issues facing humanity today.

The likelihood of some risks may stay relatively constant over time—a basic view of asteroid impact is that there is a certain probability that a "killer asteroid" hits the Earth and that this probability is more or less the same every year. This is what I refer to as a "stable risk."

However, the likelihood of other existential risks seems to fluctuate, often quite dramatically. Many of these "unstable risks" are related to human activity.

For instance, the likelihood of a nuclear war at sufficient scale to be an existential threat seems contingent on various geopolitical factors that are difficult to predict in advance. That said, the likelihood of this risk has clearly changed throughout recent history. Nuclear war was obviously not an existential risk before nuclear weapons were invented, and was fairly clearly more of a risk during the Cuban Missile Crisis than it is today.

Many of these unstable, human-created risks seem based largely on advanced technology. Potential risks like gray goo rely on theorized technologies that have yet to be developed (and indeed may never be developed). While this is good news for the present day, it also means that we have to be vigilant for the emergence of potential new threats as human technology increases.

GiveWell's recent conversation with Carl Shulman contains some arguments as to why the risk of human extinction may be decreasing over time. However, it strikes me as perhaps more likely that the risk of human extinction is increasing over time—or at the very least becoming less stable—as technology increases the amount of power available to individuals and civilizations.

After all, the very concept of human-created unstable existential risks is a recent one. Even if Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, or Queen Victoria for some reason decided to destroy human civilization, it seems almost certain that they would fail, even given all the resources of their empires.

The same cannot be said for Kennedy or Khrushchev.
Some thoughts on relations between major ethical systems
by  — 2013-11-24T21:32:01.109Z

On the recent LessWrong/CFAR Census Survey, I hit the following question:

Which of the following major ethical systems do you subscribe to:

1) Consequentialism

2) Deontology

3) Virtue Ethics

4) Other

To my own surprise, I couldn't come up with a clear answer. I certainly don't consistently apply one of these things across every decision I make in my life, and yet I consider myself at least mediocre on the scale of moral living, if not actually Neutral Good. So what is it I'm actually doing, and how can I behave more ethical-rationally?

Well, to analyze my own cognitive algorithms, I do think I can actually place these various codes of ethics in relation to each other. Basically, looked at behavioristically/algorithmically, they vary across how much predictive power I have, my knowledge of my own values, and what it is I'm actually trying to affect.

Consequentialism is the ethical algorithm I consider useful in situations of greatest predictive power and greatest knowledge of my own values. It is, so to speak, the ethical-algorithmic ideal. In such situations, the only drawback is that naive consequentialism fails to consider consequences on the person acting (ie: me). Once I make that more virtue-ethical adjustment, consequentialism offers a complete ideal for ethical action over a complete spectrum of moral values for affecting both the universe and myself (but I repeat: I'm part of the universe).

However, in almost all real situations, I don't have perfect predictive knowledge -- not of the "external" universe and not of my own values. In these situations, I can, however, use my incomplete and uncertain knowledge to find acceptable heuristics that I can expect to yield roughly monotonic behavior: follow those rules, and my actions will generally have positive effects. This kind of thinking quickly yields up recognizable, regular moral commandments like, "You will not murder" or "You will not charge interest above this-or-that amount on loans". Yes, of course we can come up with corner-case exceptions to those rules, and we can also elaborate logically on the rules to arrive at more detailed rules covering more circumstances. However, by the time we've fully elaborated out the basic commandments into a complete, obsessively-compulsively detailed legal code (oh hello Tal...
Meetup : Helsinki Meetup
by mikko — 2013-11-24T20:16:54.292Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki Meetup

WHEN:
15 December 2013 03:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Vilhonkatu 4, 00100 Helsinki

We’re having an informal meetup in Kaisla. To find us, look for someone wearing a pink elephant hat.

Topics of discussion will most likely revolve around subjects from two previous meetups: strategic thinking and habit formation, and reflections on how those were applied in practice.

Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki Meetup
'Effective Altruism' as utilitarian equivocation.
by Dias — 2013-11-24T18:35:58.342Z

Summary: The term 'effective altuist' invites confusion between 'the right thing to do' and 'the thing that most efficiently promotes welfare.' I think this creeping utilitarianism is a bad thing, and should at least be made explicit. This is not to accuse anyone of deliberate deception.
Over the last year or so, the term 'Effective Altruist' has come into use. I self-identified as one on the LW survey, so I speak as a friend. However, I think there is a very big danger with the terminology.
The term 'Effective Altruist' was born out of the need for a label for those people who were willing to dedicate their lives to making the world a better place in rational ways, even if that meant doing counter-intuitive things, like working as an Alaskan truck driver. The previous term, 'really super awesome hardcore people', was indeed a little inelegant.
However, 'Effective Altruist' has a major problem: it refers to altruism, not ethics. Altruism may be a part of ethics (though the etymology of the term gives some concern), but it is not all there is to ethics. Value is complex. Helping people is good, but so is truth, and justice, and freedom, and beauty, and loyalty, and fairness, and honor, and fraternity, and tradition, and many other things.
A charity that very efficiently promoted beauty and justice, but only inefficiently produced happiness, would probably not be considered an EA organization. A while ago I suggested to [one of the leaders of the Center for Effective Altruism] the creation of a charity to promote promise-keeping. I didn't claim such a charity would be an optimal way of promoting happiness, and to them, this was sufficient to show 1) that it was not EA - and hence 2) inferior to EA things.
Such thinking involves either a equivocation or a concealed premise. If 'EA' is interpreted literally, so 'the primary/driving goal is to help others', then something not being EA is insufficient for it to not be the best thing you could do - there is more to ethics and the good, than altruism and promoting welfare. Failure to promote one dimension of the good doesn't mean you're not the optimal way of promoting their sum. On the other hand, if 'EA' is interpreted broadly, as being concerned with 'happiness, health, justice, fairness and/or other values', then merely failing to promote welfare/happiness does not mean a cause is not EA. Much EA discussion,...
Gelman Against Parsimony
by lukeprog — 2013-11-24T15:23:32.773Z

In two posts, Bayesian stats guru Andrew Gelman argues against parsimony, though it seems to be favored 'round these parts, in particular Solomonoff Induction and BIC as imperfect formalizations of Occam's Razor.

Gelman says:

I’ve never seen any good general justification for parsimony...

Maybe it’s because I work in social science, but my feeling is: if you can approximate reality with just a few parameters, fine. If you can use more parameters to fold in more information, that’s even better.

In practice, I often use simple models–because they are less effort to fit and, especially, to understand. But I don’t kid myself that they’re better than more complicated efforts!

My favorite quote on this comes from Radford Neal‘s book, Bayesian Learning for Neural Networks, pp. 103-104: "Sometimes a simple model will outperform a more complex model . . . Nevertheless, I believe that deliberately limiting the complexity of the model is not fruitful when the problem is evidently complex. Instead, if a simple model is found that outperforms some particular complex model, the appropriate response is to define a different complex model that captures whatever aspect of the problem led to the simple model performing well."

...

...ideas like minimum-description-length, parsimony, and Akaike’s information criterion, are particularly relevant when models are estimated using least squares, maximum likelihood, or some other similar optimization method.

When using hierarchical models, we can avoid overfitting and get good descriptions without using parsimony–the idea is that the many parameters of the model are themselves modeled. See here for some discussion of Radford Neal’s ideas in favor of complex models, and see here for an example from my own applied research.
What can we learn from freemasonry?
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2013-11-24T15:18:32.272Z

I recently stumbled over the relationship between freemasons and networks of social and economic influence (e.g. nobility).

I wondered what could be learned from a society which exists so long and has ideals that are not that far away from the LW goal of refining human rationality.

It is interesting to note that the freemasons seem to have highly tolerant and rational values. The freemasons orginated from independent craft guilds but became 'speculative freemasons' during the enlightenment and this is reflected in their commitment to tolerance and reason which builds on crafts traditions of teaching, truth, reliability and craft perfection. Somewhat problematic may be their unusual customs and the prejudice they face. Nonetheless they obviously can cooperate which our kind can't.

Note: I didn't attend any freemason meetings and don't know any details. What I read on Wikipedia was mostly asbtract. I might attend a meeting but unsure about it's value of information.

What do you think: What can we learn from freemasonry? What should be avoided? Is there any freemason here who might provide insights?

Relevants comments (no posts) on LW:

LW as a cult like freemasons.

LW as exclusive phyg

Interview systems for admission to LW

Use of prejudice about freemasons

A post about an LW symbol prompted this comment about freemason icons.
Probability and radical uncertainty
by David_Chapman — 2013-11-23T22:34:22.669Z

In the previous article in this sequence, I conducted a thought experiment in which simple probability was not sufficient to choose how to act. Rationality required reasoning about meta-probabilities, the probabilities of probabilities.

Relatedly, lukeprog has a brief post that explains how this matters; a long article by HoldenKarnofsky makes meta-probability central to utilitarian estimates of the effectiveness of charitable giving; and Jonathan_Lee, in a reply to that, has used the same framework I presented.

In my previous article, I ran thought experiments that presented you with various colored boxes you could put coins in, gambling with uncertain odds.

The last box I showed you was blue. I explained that it had a fixed but unknown probability of a twofold payout, uniformly distributed between 0 and 0.9. The overall probability of a payout was 0.45, so the expectation value for gambling was 0.9—a bad bet. Yet your optimal strategy was to gamble a bit to figure out whether the odds were good or bad.

Let’s continue the experiment. I hand you a black box, shaped rather differently from the others. Its sealed faceplate is carved with runic inscriptions and eldritch figures. “I find this one particularly interesting,” I say.

What is the payout probability? What is your optimal strategy?

In the framework of the previous article, you have no knowledge about the insides of the box. So, as with the “sportsball” case I analyzed there, your meta-probability curve is flat from 0 to 1.

The blue box also has a flat meta-probability curve; but these two cases are very different. For the blue box, you know that the curve really is flat. For the black box, you have no clue what the shape of even the meta-probability curve is.

The relationship between the blue and black boxes is the same as that between the coin flip and sportsball—except at the meta level!

So if we’re going on in this style, we need to look at the distribution of probabilities of probabilities of probabilities. The blue box has a sharp peak in its meta-meta-probability (around flatness), whereas the black box has a flat meta-meta-probability.

You ought now to be a little uneasy. We are putting epicycles on epicycles. An infinite regress threatens.

Maybe at this point you suddenly reconsider the blue box… I told you that its meta-probability was uniform....
Meetup : Boston / Cambridge - The future of life: a cosmic perspective (Max Tegmark), Dec 1
by Vika — 2013-11-23T17:55:39.649Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston / Cambridge - The future of life: a cosmic perspective (Max Tegmark), Dec 1

WHEN:
01 December 2013 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Citadel, 98 Elm St, Apt 1, Somerville, MA

Max Tegmark will be giving a talk, "The future of life: a cosmic perspective", at 3pm.

We may need a larger venue depending on the turnout, so please RSVP on the meetup page: http://www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Less-Wrong-Meetup/events/151129022/

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups are every Sunday at 2pm at Citadel (98 Elm St Apt 1 Somerville, near Porter Square).

Our default schedule is as follows:

—Phase 1: Arrival, greetings, unstructured conversation.

—Phase 2: The headline event. This starts promptly at 3pm, and lasts 30-60 minutes.

—Phase 3: Further discussion. We'll explore the ideas raised in phase 2, often in smaller groups.

—Phase 4: Dinner.

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston / Cambridge - The future of life: a cosmic perspective (Max Tegmark), Dec 1
Meetup : Boston / Cambridge - Systems, Leverage, and Winning at Life
by Vika — 2013-11-23T17:48:50.403Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston / Cambridge - Systems, Leverage, and Winning at Life

WHEN:
24 November 2013 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Citadel, 98 Elm St, Apt 1, Somerville, MA, 02144

Satvik Beri will be presenting on Systems, Leverage, and Winning at Life.

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups are every Sunday at 2pm at Citadel (98 Elm St Apt 1 Somerville, near Porter Square).

Our default schedule is as follows:

—Phase 1: Arrival, greetings, unstructured conversation.

—Phase 2: The headline event. This starts promptly at 3pm, and lasts 30-60 minutes.

—Phase 3: Further discussion. We'll explore the ideas raised in phase 2, often in smaller groups.

—Phase 4: Dinner.

Discussion article for the meetup : Boston / Cambridge - Systems, Leverage, and Winning at Life
The Craft And The Community: The Basics: Apologizing
by Ritalin — 2013-11-23T16:55:25.065Z

Now, it is said we all here pride ourselves on our intelligence, rationality, and moral sense. It is also said, however, that we are a fiercely independent bunch, and that we can let this pride of ours get the better of us. There have also been comments that the live communities that appear at meetups provide much more positive interactions than what goes on on this site's discussions; this might merit further investigation.

My point is; we've done a lot of research on how to do proper ethical and metaethical calculations, and on how to achieve self-empowerment and deal with our own akrasia, which is awesome. We've also done some work on matters of gender equality, which is very positive as well. But I haven't seen us do anything about the basic details of human interaction, what one would call "politeness" and "basic human decency". And I think it might be useful if we started tackling these, for our own sakes, that of those who surround us, and that of easing our mission along, which is, as I understand it so far, to save the world (from existential risk (at the hands of (unfriendly and self-modifying) artificial intelligence))).

What inspired me to propose this post was a video I just saw from Hank Green of the famed and fabled vlogbrothers. I hold these two individuals in very high esteem, and I would expect many here to share my feelings about them, on account of their values and sensibilities largely overlapping with ours; namely the sense that intelligence, knowledge and curiosity are awesome, and that intellectuals ought to use their power to help improve themselves and the world around them.

Here it is; I hope you enjoy it