trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
POSITION: Design and Write Rationality Curriculum
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2012-01-19T06:50:04.438Z

Update March 2012: We are still accepting and processing applications for this work on an ongoing basis.

Imagine trying to learn baseball by reading essays about baseball techniques. [1]

We're trying to make the jump to teaching people rationality by, metaphorically speaking, having them throw, catch, and hit baseballs in the company of friends. And as we develop curriculum to do that, we're noticing that we often improve quite a lot ourselves in the course of coming up with 20 examples of the sunk cost fallacy. This suggests that the best of us have a lot to gain from practicing basic skills more systematically. Quoth Anna Salamon:

There are huge numbers of basic, obviously useful rationality habits that I do about 10% as often as it would be useful to do them. Like "run cheap experiments/tests often”, and “notice mental flinches, and track down the thought you’re avoiding”.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, Anna Salamon, several others paid on an hourly basis, and a few volunteers, have been designing exercises and exercise-sets for a rationality curriculum. Our current working point is on the exercises for "Motivated Cognition". Currently the only completed session is "Sunk Costs", which is still being tested - yes, we're actually testing these things repeatedly as we build them. The main purpose of the sessions is to be performed in person, not read online, but nonetheless the current version of the Sunk Costs material - presentation and exercise booklets - is available as a sample: [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. This is a presentation on sunk costs in which background explanations are interspersed with "do as many of these exercises as you can in 3 minutes", followed by "now pair up with others to do the 'transfer step' parts where you look for instances in your past life and probable future life."

We're looking for 1-2 fulltime employees who can help us build more things like that (unless the next round of tests shows that the current format doesn't work), and possibly a number of hourly contractors (who may be local or distant). We will definitely want to try your work on an hourly or monthly basis before making any full-time hires.

The complete labor for building a rationality kata - we are not looking for someone who can do all of this work at once, we are looking for anyone who can do one or more steps - looks something like this:

Select an importa...
How to un-kill your mind - maybe.
by APMason — 2012-01-19T06:36:25.414Z

It has been the case since I had opinions on these things that I have struggled to identify my “favourite writer of all time”. I've thought perhaps it was Shakespeare, as everyone does – who composed over thirty plays in his lifetime, from any of which a single line would be so far beyond my ability as to make me laughable. Other times I've thought it may be Saul Bellow, who seems to understand human nature in an intuitive way I can't quite reach, but which always touches me when I read his books. And more often than not I've thought it was Raymond Chandler, who in each of his seven novels broke my heart and refused to apologise – because he knew what kind of universe we live in. But since perhaps the year 2007, I have, or should I say had, not been in the slightest doubt as to who my favourite living writer was – Christopher Eric Hitchens.

This post is not about how much I admired him. It's not about how surprisingly upset I was about his death (I have since said that I didn't know him except through his writing – a proposition something like “I didn't have sex with her except through her vagina”) - although I must say that even now thinking about this subject is having rather more of an effect on me than I would like. This post is about a rather strange change that has come over me since his death on the 15th of December. Before that time I was a staunch defender of the proposition that the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq was an obvious boon to the human race, and that the war in Iraq was therefore a wise and moral undertaking. Since then, however, I have found my opinion softening on the subject – I have found myself far more open to cost/ benefit analyses that have come down on the side of non-intervention, and much less indignant when others disagreed. It still seems to me that there are obvious benefits that have arisen from the war in Iraq – by no means am I willing to admit that it was an utter catastrophe, as so many seem convinced it was – but I have found my opinion shifting toward the non-committal middle ground of “I dunno”.

Well, Mrs. Mason didn't raise all that many fools. It could be that what's happening here is I'm identifying closely with the Ron Paul campaign, and that since I agree with Paul on many things but not on American f...
[SEQ RERUN] Disputing Definitions
by MinibearRex — 2012-01-19T04:05:45.033Z

Today's post, Disputing Definitions was originally published on 12 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You allow an argument to slide into being about definitions, even though it isn't what you originally wanted to argue about. If, before a dispute started about whether a tree falling in a deserted forest makes a "sound", you asked the two soon-to-be arguers whether they thought a "sound" should be defined as "acoustic vibrations" or "auditory experiences", they'd probably tell you to flip a coin. Only after the argument starts does the definition of a word become politically charged.

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 How An Algorithm Feels From Inside, 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.
The problem with too many rational memes
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2012-01-19T00:56:07.321Z

Like so many of my posts, this one starts with a personal anecdote.

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend was invited to a community event through Meetup.com. The purpose of the meetup was to watch the movie The Elegant Universe and follow up with a discussion. As it turns out, this particular meetup was run by a man who I’ll call ‘Charlie’, the leader of some local Ottawa group designed to help new immigrants to Canada find a social support net. Which, in my mind, is an excellent goal.

Charlie turned out to be a pretty neat guy, too: charismatic, funny, friendly, encouraging everyone to share his or her opinion. Criticizing or shutting out other people’s views was explicitly forbidden. It was a diverse group, as he obviously wanted it to be, and by the end everyone seemed to feel pretty comfortable.

My boyfriend, an extremely social being whose main goal in life is networking, was raving by the end about what a neat idea it was to start this kind of group, and how Charlie was a really cool guy. I was the one who should have had fun, since I’m about 100 times more interested in physics than he is, but I was fuming silently.

Why? Because, at various points in the evening, Charlie talked about his own interest in the paranormal and the spiritual, and the books he’d written about it. When we were discussing string theory and its extra dimensions, he made a comment, the gist of which was ‘if people’s souls go to other dimensions when they die, Grandma could be communicating with you right now from another dimension by tapping spoons.’

Final straw. I bit my tongue and didn’t say anything and tried not to show how irritated I was. Which is strange, because I’ve always been fairly tolerant, fairly agreeable, and very eager to please others. Which is why, when my brain responded ‘because he’s WRONG and I can’t call him out on it because of the no criticism rule!’ to the query of ‘why are you pissed off?’, I was a bit suspicious of that answer.

I do think that Charlie is wrong. I would have thought he was wrong a long time ago. But it wouldn’t have bothered me; I know that because I managed to attend various churches for years, even though I thought a lot of their beliefs were wrong, because it didn’t matter. They had certain goals

...
The Singularity Institute's Arrogance Problem
by lukeprog — 2012-01-18T22:30:56.058Z

I intended Leveling Up in Rationality to communicate this:

Despite worries that extreme rationality isn't that great, I think there's reason to hope that it can be great if some other causal factors are flipped the right way (e.g. mastery over akrasia). Here are some detailed examples I can share because they're from my own life...

But some people seem to have read it and heard this instead:

I'm super-awesome. Don't you wish you were more like me? Yay rationality!

This failure (on my part) fits into a larger pattern of the Singularity Institute seeming too arrogant and (perhaps) being too arrogant. As one friend recently told me:

At least among Caltech undergrads and academic mathematicians, it's taboo to toot your own horn. In these worlds, one's achievements speak for themselves, so whether one is a Fields Medalist or a failure, one gains status purely passively, and must appear not to care about being smart or accomplished. I think because you and Eliezer don't have formal technical training, you don't instinctively grasp this taboo. Thus Eliezer's claim of world-class mathematical ability, in combination with his lack of technical publications, make it hard for a mathematician to take him seriously, because his social stance doesn't pattern-match to anything good. Eliezer's arrogance as evidence of technical cluelessness, was one of the reasons I didn't donate until I met [someone at SI in person]. So for instance, your boast that at SI discussions "everyone at the table knows and applies an insane amount of all the major sciences" would make any Caltech undergrad roll their eyes; your standard of an "insane amount" seems to be relative to the general population, not relative to actual scientists. And posting a list of powers you've acquired doesn't make anyone any more impressed than they already were, and isn't a high-status move.

So, I have a few questions:

What are the most egregious examples of SI's arrogance?

On which subjects and in which ways is SI too arrogant? Are there subjects and ways in which SI isn't arrogant enough?

What should SI do about this?
[Meta] No LessWrong Blackout?
by CaveJohnson — 2012-01-18T19:48:58.375Z

Our sister site apparently is:

Overcoming Bias will resume normal service on Jan 18 8:00pm (Eastern Time).

Today Overcoming Bias joins Wikipedia and many other sites in protesting proposed legislation — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECTIP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate.

If passed, SOPA and PIPA will give the US Justice Department and courts tremendous power to shut down entire sites. These bills endanger free speech both in the United States and abroad, potentially setting a frightening precedent of Internet censorship for the world.

You can find out more about the impact of SOPA and PIPA from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Interesting, my model of Robin Hanson had him say something about the blackout and how it shows people are hypocrites. Though obviously he has strong opinions on intellectual property. I think it would have been a good idea to Blackout LessWrong today. It would have given us a status boost in most of the communities we frequent.
Meetup : Austin, TX
by Vaniver — 2012-01-18T18:35:18.867Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX

WHEN:
21 January 2012 01:30:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
2222B Guadalupe St Austin, Texas 78705

Welcome back! UT is back in full swing and so are we. We sit on the second floor to the left, near (or often on) the stage. Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX
[SEQ RERUN] How An Algorithm Feels From Inside
by MinibearRex — 2012-01-18T05:53:32.129Z

Today's post, How An Algorithm Feels From Inside was originally published on 11 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You argue about a category membership even after screening off all questions that could possibly depend on a category-based inference. After you observe that an object is blue, egg-shaped, furred, flexible, opaque, luminescent, and palladium-containing, what's left to ask by arguing, "Is it a blegg?" But if your brain's categorizing neural network contains a (metaphorical) central unit corresponding to the inference of blegg-ness, it may still feel like there's a leftover question.

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 Neural Categories, 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.
Histocracy: Open, Effective Group Decision-Making With Weighted Voting
by HonoreDB — 2012-01-17T22:35:42.774Z

The following is slightly edited from a pitch I wrote for a general audience. I've added blog-specific content afterwards.

Information technology allows for unprecedented levels of collaboration and debate. When an issue arises people communicate freely, are held accountable for misrepresentations, and are celebrated for cogent analysis. We share information and opinion better than ever before. And then we leave the actual decision up to one person, or a tiny committee, or a poll of a population that for the most part wasn't paying attention, or at best an unpredictably irrational market. The one thing we still don't aggregate in a sophisticated way is human judgment.

Organizations evolve complex decision-making structures because variance in human judgement is complicated. We try to put the most competent person in charge—but there is wisdom in crowds, and so a wise leader gets buy-in from a broad pool of competent subordinates. We must constantly try to evaluate who has the best record, to see who's been right in the past...and we get it wrong all the time. We overestimate our own competence. In hindsight, we misremember the right decision as being obvious. We trust the man with the better hair. Any organization with group buy-in on decisions amasses a solid amount of data on the competence of its members, but it does not curate or use this data effectively.

We can do better, using current technology, some simple software, and some relatively simple math. The solution is called histocracy. It is most easily explained with a use case.

The H Foundation is a hypothetical philanthropic organization, with a board of twelve people overseeing a large fund. Each year, they receive and review several hundred grant applications, and choose a few applicants to give money to. Sometimes these applicants use the money effectively, and sometimes they fail. Often an applicant they turn down will get funding elsewhere and experience notable success or failure. In short, it is often obvious to the board in hindsight whether they made the right decision. For each application, the yay or nay of each board member is recorded. If and when, later, the board reaches a consensus on whether that application should have been approved, this consensus is recorded as well. The result is that each board member accumulates a score. Alice's votes have been right 331 times and wrong...
[Link] Five ways to classify belief systems 
by  — 2012-01-17T21:08:38.646Z

On recommendation from several LessWrongers I've been over the past year or so occasionally digging into the many long posts to be found in the archives of Unqualified Reservations (archive links best accessed from here). It is written by Mencius Moldbug, who is probably familiar to many of us here as well as to readers of Overcoming Bias. He is an erudite, controversial and most of all contrarian social critic and writer.

He sometimes repeats and often refines his key ideas. He uses his writing style as a barrier to entry (it is debatable if this does more harm than good for his quality of thought and communication, but it is an interesting way to aim for the correct contrarian cluster), thus he is an acquired taste, posters have recommended the gentle introduction series as good place to start reading him. This series is similar, while this one and The Formalist Manifesto focus more on summarizing his political thought, which may also be useful in itself.

Link to topical entry is here. Link to discussion on previous entry I read is here.

Five ways to classify belief systems

I use the word kernel to mean "belief system." Kernels, like Gaul, are divided into three parts: assertions about the real world (Hume's "is"), moral judgments about the real world (Hume's "ought"), and paranormal or other metaphysical propositions (such as David Stove's wonderful ruminations on the number 3).
Everyone, no matter how smart or stupid, has exactly one kernel. However, kernels are not assigned randomly, as if in some weird Buddhist boot process. For example, your kernel is likely to show similarities to that of your parents, friends, teachers, karate masters, favorite anchormen, etc, etc.
Let's call a kernel pattern which many people share a prototype. Methodism, environmentalism, firearms practice, snake handling and Burning Man attendance are all prototypes. While there are few Methodist environmentalists who are also snake-handling marksmen and never miss a burn, various subcombinations are not uncommon.
In general we are most interested in complete prototypes, that is, kernel patterns that are broad enough to serve as identities. It is common to describe someone as "a Methodist," or (not quite in the same way) as "an environmentalist." People who match the other prototypes above may use nouns for themselves, but they're must less likely to be described or introduced as su

...
Gambler's Reward: Optimal Betting Size
by b1shop — 2012-01-17T20:32:31.003Z

I've been trying my hand at card counting lately, and I've been doing some thinking about how a perfect gambler would act at the table. I'm not sure how to derive the optimal bet size.

Overall, the expected value of blackjack is small and negative. However, there is high variance in the expected value. By varying his bet size and sitting out rounds, the player can wager more money when expected value is higher and less money when expected value is lower. Overall, this can result in an edge.

However, I'm not sure what the optimal bet size is. Going all-in with a 60 percent chance of winning is EV+, but the 40 percent chance of loss would not only destroy your bankroll, it would also prevent you from participating in future EV+ situations. Ideally, one would want to not only increase EV, but also decrease variance.

Objective: Given a distribution of expected values, develop a function that transforms the current expected value into the percentage of the bankroll that should be placed at risk.

I'm not sure how to begin. Even if I had worked out the distribution of expected values. Are other inputs required (i.e. utility of marginal dollar won, desired risk of ruin)? Should the approach perhaps be to maximize expected value after one playing session? Why not a month of playing sessions, or a billion? Is there any chance the optimal betting size would produce behavior similar to the behavior predicted by prospect theory?

I eagerly await an informative discussion. If you have something against gambling, just pretend we're talking about how much of your wealth you plan on investing in an oil well with positive expected value.
[Placeholder] Against dystopia, rally before Kant
by Multiheaded — 2012-01-17T13:44:24.539Z

I was just sitting there studying for an exam today (passed fine btw), when my mind, eh, made up its mind on a subject. I've been pondering Robin Hanson's happy resignation to a distant efficiency-obsessed dystopia. Then it struck me that, one meta level up, it's no different from the milder, blander current incarnation of the (neoliberal or whatever) Church of Efficiency - which LWians who work as small cogs in big corporations must be all to familliar with. And that creed, although unattractive in itself, is part of a proud tradition: utopian or generally "far-mode" thinking which clearly spelt disaster even in its inception to any thinking contemporary who held the complexity, richness and beauty of the human condition as their absolute and overriding value.

Such was the case of Dostoevsky, who rose far above his attacks on everyday anti-humanist thought when he wrote his Legend of The Grand Inquisitor. This short story, probably the most significant one in world literature, makes a thorough, convincing and compelling case for the opposition, the likes of which LW holds to be the best standard of argument. Moreover, he doesn't just hack apart the rather average faux-Nietzchean, utopian socialist, right-wing Catholic and other brands of thought, then makes a stronger enemy out of them in his Inquisitor. He, identifying with Christ, refuses to use any postulate of a benevolent God to shut down the opposition. And does his corpus of work present a convincing response to the Inquisitor's icy wall of reason? Not in any single point, as far as I've found. Yet a great idea - nearly flawless in itself, once you get rid of any debatable or weakening connotations - was already found by Kant (and reused by Dostoevsky and others from different standpoints). Importantly, the meta-meta-meta-rule of "treating humanity as an end in itself and not just the means" does not, by itself, require any connection with deontologism. My view is that any utilitarian who likes the existence of beings like themselves and is concerned about them adopt the Second Formulation without caveats, as a recipe against false second-order values like "hedons" or "efficiency" that would undermine the quality not merely of human life, but of human condition in itself if left to reign unchecked and taken to their absurd/logical conclusion. Would Calvinism, the Reign of Terror, Stalin's policy or Po...