trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Joint Distributions and the Slow Spread of Good Ideas
by David_J_Balan — 2009-07-20T23:31:27.817Z

A few years ago a well-known economist named David Romer published a paper in a top economics journal* arguing that professional football teams don't "go for it" nearly often enough on fourth down. The question, of course, is how this can persist in equilibrium. If Romer is correct, wouldn't teams have a strong incentive to change their strategies? Of course it's possible that he is correct, but that no one ever knew it before the paper was published. But then would the fact that the recommendation has not been widely adopted** constitute strong evidence that he is not correct? The paper points out two possible reasons why not. First, the objective function of the decision-makers may not be to maximize the probability of winning the game. Second and more relevant for our purposes, there may be some biases at work. The key point is this quote from the article (page 362):

"Many skills are more important to running a football team than a command of mathematical and statistical tools. And it would hardly be obvious to someone without knowledge of those tools that they could have any significant value in football."

Romer's point is that what's relevant is the joint distribution of attributes in the pool of potential football coaches (or other decision-makers). Even in something like professional football where there is a very strong incentive to get better results, it may take a long time for coaches who are willing/able to adopt a good new idea to out-compete and displace those who continue to use the bad old idea if there are very few potential coaches who both have the conventional talents and understand the new idea.
I think Romer is right about this, and his point is the main take-away point of this post. But I don't think the main "joint distribution" problem is a paucity of would-be coaches who understand both conventional football stuff and math: math talent can be hired to work under a head coach who doesn't understand it, just like medical talent is. Rather, it needs to be the case that the joint distribution is unfavorable and that this can't be gotten around by just adding math talent as necessary. Maybe the problem is a paucity of potential coaches who have both conventional coaching skills and also the attitude that nerds are to be listened to rather than beaten up. This may explain why baseball seems to have been much more accepting of statistical...
Creating The Simple Math of Everything
by Matt_Simpson — 2009-07-20T22:45:31.971Z

Eliezer once proposed an Idea for a book, The Simple Math of Everything. The basic idea is to compile articles on the basic mathematics of a wide variety of fields, but nothing too complicated.

Not Jacobean matrices for frequency-dependent gene selection; just Haldane's calculation of time to fixation. Not quantum physics; just the wave equation for sound in air. Not the maximum entropy solution using Lagrange Multipliers; just Bayes's Rule.

Now, writing a book is a pretty daunting task. Luckily brian_jaress had the idea of creating an index of links to already available online articles. XFrequentist pointed out that something like this has been done before over at Evolving Thoughts. This initially discourage me, but it eventually helped me refine what I thought the index should be. A key characteristic of Eliezer's idea is that it should be worthwhile for someone who doesn't know the material to read the entire index. Many of the links at evolving thoughts point to rather narrow topics that might not be very interesting to a generalist. Also there is just plain a ton of stuff to read over there - at least 100 articles.

So we should come up with some basic criteria for the articles. Here is what I suggest (let me know what you think):

The index must be short: say 10 - 20 links. Or rather, the core of the index must be short. We can have longer lists of narrower and more in depth articles for people who want to get into more detail about, say, quantum physics or economic growth. But these should be separate from the main index.

Each article must meet minimum requirements in terms of how interesting the topic is and how important it is. Remember, this is an index for the reader to gain a general understanding of many fields

The article must include some math - at minimum, some basic algebra. Calculus is good as long as it significantly adds to the article. In fact, this should probably be the basic rule for all additions of complex math. Modularization also helps - i.e., if the relatively complicated math is in a clearly visible section that can be skipped without losing anything significant from the rest of the article, it should be ok.

This list of criteria isn't meant to be exhaustive either. If there is anything you guys think should be added, by all me

...
Counterfactual Mugging v. Subjective Probability
by MBlume — 2009-07-20T16:31:55.512Z

This has been in my drafts folder for ages, but in light of Eliezer's post yesterday, I thought I'd see if I could get some comment on it:

A couple weeks ago, Vladimir Nesov stirred up the biggest hornet's nest I've ever seen on LW by introducing us to the Counterfactual Mugging scenario.

If you didn't read it the first time, please do -- I don't plan to attempt to summarize. Further, if you don't think you would give Omega the $100 in that situation, I'm afraid this article will mean next to nothing to you.

So, those still reading, you would give Omega the $100. You would do so because if someone told you about the problem now, you could do the expected utility calculation 0.5*U(-$100)+0.5*U(+$10000)>0. Ah, but where did the 0.5s come from in your calculation? Well, Omega told you he flipped a fair coin. Until he did, there existed a 0.5 probability of either outcome. Thus, for you, hearing about the problem, there is a 0.5 probability of your encountering the problem as stated, and a 0.5 probability of your encountering the corresponding situation, in which Omega either hands you $10000 or doesn't, based on his prediction. This is all very fine and rational.

So, new problem. Let's leave money out of it, and assume Omega hands you 1000 utilons in one case, and asks for them in the other -- exactly equal utility. What if there is an urn, and it contains either a red or a blue marble, and Omega looks, maybe gives you the utility if the marble is red, and asks for it if the marble is blue? What if you have devoted considerable time to determining whether the marble is red or blue, and your subjective probability has fluctuated over the course of you life? What if, unbeknownst to you, a rationalist community has been tracking evidence of the marble's color (including your own probability estimates), and running a prediction market, and Omega now shows you a plot of the prices over the past few years?

In short, what information do you use to calculate the probability you plug into the EU calculation?
Are you crazy?
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2009-07-20T16:27:14.524Z

Followup To: Are You Anosognosic?, The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You

Over this past weekend I listened to an episode of This American Life titled Pro Se. Although the episode is nominally about people defending themselves in court, the first act of the episode was about a man who pretended to act insane in order to get out of a prison sentence for an assault charge. There doesn't appear to be a transcript, so I'll summarize here first.

A man, we'll call him John, was arrested in the late 1990s for assaulting a homeless man. Given that there was plenty of evidence to prove him guilty, he was looking for a way to avoid the likely jail sentence of five to seven years. The other prisoners he was being held with suggested that he plead insanity: he'd be put up at a hospital for several months with hot food and TV and released once they considered him "rehabilitated". So he took bits and pieces about how insane people are supposed to act from movies he had seen and used them to form a case for his own insanity. The court believed him, but rather than sending him to a cushy hospital, they sent him to a maximum security asylum for the criminally insane.

Within a day of arriving, John realized the mistake he had made and sought to find a way out. He tries a variety of techniques: engaging in therapy, not engaging in therapy, dressing like a sane person, acting like a sane person, acting like an incurably insane person, but none of it works. Over a decade later he is still being held.

As the story unravels, we learn that although John makes a convincing case that he faked his way in and is being held unjustly, the psychiatrists at the asylum know that he faked his way in and continue to hold him anyway, though John is not aware of this. The reason: through his long years of documented behavior John has made it clear to the psychiatrists that he is a psychopath/sociopath and is not safe to return to society without therapy. John is aware that this is his diagnosis, but continues to believe himself sane.

Similar to trying to determine if you are anosognosic, how do you determine if you are insane? Some kinds of insanity can be self diagnosed, but in John's case he has lots of evidence (he has access to read all of his own medical records) that he is insane, yet continues to b...
Being saner about gender and rationality
by Roko — 2009-07-20T07:17:13.855Z

It seems that LessWrong has a nascent political problem brewing. Firstly, let me re-iterate why politics is bad for our rationality:

People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed. Being on the right side of the argument could let you kill your hated rival!

Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back - providing aid and comfort to the enemy. People who would be level-headed about evenhandedly weighing all sides of an issue in their professional life as scientists, can suddenly turn into slogan-chanting zombies when there's a Blue or Green position on an issue.

Politics is especially bad for the community if people begin to form political factions within the community. Specifically, if LessWrong starts to polarize along a "feminist/masculinist" fault-line, then every subsequent debate will become a proxy war for the crusade between the masculinist jerks and the femenazis.

Alicorn has contributed in several ways to the emerging politicization of LessWrong. She has started name-calling against the other side ("Jerkitude" "disincentivize being piggish"), started to attempt to form a political band of feminist allies ("So can I get some help? Some lovely people have thrown in their support,"), implicitly asked these new allies to downvote anyone who disagrees with her position ("There is still conspicuous karmic support for some comments that perpetuate the problems"), and asks her faction to begin enforcing her ideas, specifically by criticising, ostracizing or downvoting anyone who engages in a perfectly standard use of langage and thought: modeling the generic human female as a mechanical system and using that model to make predictions about reality. She has billed this ...
An Akrasia Anecdote
by Matt_Simpson — 2009-07-20T03:10:40.135Z

About a month ago I committed myself to an anti-akrasia resolution, inspired by Yvain and ZM. I won't repost the resolution here, but if you want to see it, click the first link. The essence of my resolution was to commit myself to practice math to prepare for graduate school in the fall. The resolution was valid from June 18 to 28 - I ended it there because the next day I was on a plane to Orange, CA to start an internship (in experimental economics, if anyone's interested). Now, I'm going to provide a lot of anecdotal evidence and speculation. Please do not fall prey to the typical mind fallacy. The structure of my brain may be sufficiently different from yours that nothing I say here generalizes. I also could be deluding myself. This is only anecdotal evidence, and I have no real way of knowing whether or not my perception of what happened is biased.

With that being said, there is some objective evidence, namely how much I deviated from my resolution. There is also what happened after my resolution while here at Chapman University. Here, again, the evidence is mostly subjective with the exception of how much I stuck to the old resolution.

To start with the beginnning, the first day my resolution was in effect I worked diligently for well over two hours - probably closer to 4 - working through multiple chapters of my old probability text... actually, that was a lie. I had planned a date with my girlfriend that day, and she assumed that the date day continued on through the evening. It was a fair assumption on her part, so I used my one free day on the first day of my resolution. Great start, eh?

From that day on, I did pretty well. It wasn't until near the end that I finally broke the resolution. Twice I did it because I realized I needed a second loophole - a way to trade an extra two hours one day for a free day at a later date. On the last day I broke the resolution because I didn't have the foresight to plan a full day with my girlfriend before leaving for six weeks. So I broke my resolution 33% of the non-free days (total days minus the one free day I gave myself). If we count the extra long sessions as compensating for the first two days, that reduces to 11%. Not bad, considering that this summer I had opened a textbook up exactly twice...
Timeless Decision Theory: Problems I Can't Solve
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-07-20T00:02:59.721Z

Suppose you're out in the desert, running out of water, and soon to die - when someone in a motor vehicle drives up next to you. Furthermore, the driver of the motor vehicle is a perfectly selfish ideal game-theoretic agent, and even further, so are you; and what's more, the driver is Paul Ekman, who's really, really good at reading facial microexpressions. The driver says, "Well, I'll convey you to town if it's in my interest to do so - so will you give me $100 from an ATM when we reach town?"

Now of course you wish you could answer "Yes", but as an ideal game theorist yourself, you realize that, once you actually reach town, you'll have no further motive to pay off the driver. "Yes," you say. "You're lying," says the driver, and drives off leaving you to die.

If only you weren't so rational!

This is the dilemma of Parfit's Hitchhiker, and the above is the standard resolution according to mainstream philosophy's causal decision theory, which also two-boxes on Newcomb's Problem and defects in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Of course, any self-modifying agent who expects to face such problems - in general, or in particular - will soon self-modify into an agent that doesn't regret its "rationality" so much. So from the perspective of a self-modifying-AI-theorist, classical causal decision theory is a wash. And indeed I've worked out a theory, tentatively labeled "timeless decision theory", which covers these three Newcomblike problems and delivers a first-order answer that is already reflectively consistent, without need to explicitly consider such notions as "precommitment". Unfortunately this "timeless decision theory" would require a long sequence to write up, and it's not my current highest writing priority unless someone offers to let me do a PhD thesis on it.

However, there are some other timeless decision problems for which I do not possess a general theory.

For example, there's a problem introduced to me by Gary Drescher's marvelous Good and Real (OOPS: The below formulation was independently invented by Vladimir Nesov; Drescher's book actually contains a related dilemma in which box B is transparent, and only contains $1M if Omega predicts you will one-box whether B appears full or empty, and Omega has a 1% error rate) which runs as follows:

Suppose Omega (the same superagent from Newcomb's Problem, who is known to b...
Sayeth the Girl
by Alicorn — 2009-07-19T22:24:32.947Z

Disclaimer: If you are prone to dismissing women's complaints of gender-related problems as the women being whiny, emotionally unstable girls who see sexism where there is none, this post is unlikely to interest you.

For your convenience, links to followup posts: Roko says; orthonormal says; Eliezer says; Yvain says; Wei_Dai says

As far as I can tell, I am the most active female poster on Less Wrong. (AnnaSalamon has higher karma than I, but she hasn't commented on anything for two months now.) There are not many of us. This is usually immaterial. Heck, sometimes people don't even notice in spite of my girly username, my self-introduction, and the fact that I'm now apparently the feminism police of Less Wrong.

My life is not about being a girl. In fact, I'm less preoccupied with feminism and women's special interest issues than most of the women I know, and some of the men. It's not my pet topic. I do not focus on feminist philosophy in school. I took an "Early Modern Women Philosophers" course because I needed the history credit, had room for a suitable class in a semester when one was offered, and heard the teacher was nice, and I was pretty bored. I wound up doing my midterm paper on Malebranche in that class because we'd covered him to give context to Mary Astell, and he was more interesting than she was. I didn't vote for Hilary Clinton in the primary. Given the choice, I have lots of things I'd rather be doing than ferreting out hidden or less-than-hidden sexism on one of my favorite websites.

Unfortunately, nobody else seems to want to do it either, and I'm not content to leave it undone. I suppose I could abandon the site and leave it even more masculine so the guys could all talk in their own language, unimpeded by stupid chicks being stupidly offended by completely unproblematic things like objectification and just plain jerkitude. I would almost certainly have vacated the site already if feminism were my pet issue, or if I were more easily offended. (In general, I'm very hard to offend. The fact that people here have succeeded in doing so anyway without even, apparently, going out of their way to do it should be a great big red flag that something's up.) If you're wondering why half of the potential audience of the site seems to be conspicuously not here, t...
Article upvoting
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-07-19T17:03:06.180Z

Except in rare cases (like Wei Dai's Fair Division of Black-Hole Negentropy) I'm still using article upvotes to partially determine whether to promote articles to the front page - some informal mixture of "number of upvotes" + "editor's judgment". I mention this because while comment voting is still healthy, the amount of article voting seems to be dropping off. As of now I'm still drawing the inference that no one thinks "Are You Anosognosic?" worthy of promotion, or wants to see similar articles from me in the future - since other articles have at least gotten more votes than 0. But as the amount of article voting diminishes, it becomes harder to trust such inferences. Maybe people liked that article (or others I haven't promoted) and just didn't bother to upvote.

I'm posting this observation just in case people figure that upvoting articles doesn't make a difference. It does. It also encourages authors to write similar posts in the future, or alternatively not.
Are You Anosognosic?
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-07-19T04:35:05.961Z

Followup to: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You

Brain damage patients with anosognosia are incapable of considering, noticing, admitting, or realizing even after being argued with, that their left arm, left leg, or left side of the body, is paralyzed. Again I'll quote Yvain's summary:

After a right-hemisphere stroke, she lost movement in her left arm but continuously denied it. When the doctor asked her to move her arm, and she observed it not moving, she claimed that it wasn't actually her arm, it was her daughter's. Why was her daughter's arm attached to her shoulder? The patient claimed her daughter had been there in the bed with her all week. Why was her wedding ring on her daughter's hand? The patient said her daughter had borrowed it. Where was the patient's arm? The patient "turned her head and searched in a bemused way over her left shoulder".

A brief search didn't turn up a base-rate frequency in the population for left-arm paralysis with anosognosia, but let's say the base rate is 1 in 10,000,000 individuals (so around 670 individuals worldwide).

Supposing this to be the prior, what is your estimated probability that your left arm is currently paralyzed?

Added: This interests me because it seems to be a special case of the same general issue discussed in The Modesty Argument and Robin's reply Sleepy Fools - when pathological minds roughly similar to yours update based on fabricated evidence to conclude they are not pathological, under what circumstances can you update on different-seeming evidence to conclude that you are not pathological?
Zwicky's Trifecta of Illusions
by thomblake — 2009-07-17T16:59:41.901Z

Linguist Arnold Zwicky has named three linguistic 'illusions' which seem relevant to cognitive bias. They are:

Frequency Illusion - Once you've noticed a phenomenon, it seems to happen a lot.

Recency Illusion - The belief that something is a recent phenomenon, when it has actually existed a long time.

Adolescent Illusion - The belief that adolescents are the cause of undesirable language trends.

Zwicky talks about them here, and in not so many words links them to the standard bias of selective perception.

As an example, here is an exerpt via Jerz's Literacy Weblog (originally via David Crystal), regarding text messages:

Text messages aren't full of abbreviations - typically less than ten percent of the words use them. [Frequency Illusion]

These abbreviations aren't a new language - they've been around for decades. [Recency Illusion]

They aren't just used by kids - adults of all ages and institutions are the leading texters these days. [Adolescent Illusion]

It is my conjecture that these illusions are notable in areas other than linguistics. For example, history is rife with allusions that the younger generation is corrupt, and such speakers are not merely referring to their use of language. Could this be the adolescent illusion in action?

So, are these notable biases to watch out for, or are they merely obvious instances of standard biases?