trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[SEQ RERUN] Thou Art Godshatter
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-26T03:05:56.549Z

Today's post, Thou Art Godshatter was originally published on 13 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Describes the evolutionary psychology behind the complexity of human values - how they got to be complex, and why, given that origin, there is no reason in hindsight to expect them to be simple. We certainly are not built to maximize genetic fitness.

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 Protein Reinforcement and DNA Consequentialism, 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.
How to Build Your Post
by Shmi — 2011-10-25T23:39:08.923Z

LWers often wonder how to write a good post. Many great tips and resources have been suggested already, mostly on the style and substance, not on the post structure. This is an attempt to fill some of the void using a construction toy metaphor: nested state-explain-summarize blocks.

First, there is a convenient and versatile building block of non-fiction writing, often called the inverted pyramid in the news business, though I think of it as more of a diamond when applied to technical writing in general:

I have alluded to this previously in the context of an elevator pitch. It is how most news stories are structured, and it follows the rule of three: the main point is first stated, then explained in some detail, then summarized. This is similar to how an oral presentation ought to be structured.

If any of these three gets too large, it can, in turn, be constructed of smaller diamonds. These building blocks can be combined and/or nested to build a complete post. If you want to make several points, it is a good idea to dedicate a diamond to each, and nest them into a larger one that provides the context, states the points at the top and summarizes them at the end:

Why repeat the same point three times? I am no evolutionary psychologist or a cognitive scientist, but my feeling is that it is because people have to be primed to accept new information (hence the first two times). The third time is to make sure they retain what you've told them. In any case, what I tell you three times is true tends to work.

I am not pushing this format as the one true way of writing a post, just as a reliable way to get your point across. There are many ways of constructing short articles, this is a good place to learn one of them. If you think that a short article format is too restrictive, then maybe the LW Discussion section is not the best venue for what you are writing. Consider starting your own blog (or writing a Wikipedia article) and linking to it. That said, I am yet to see a long non-fiction LW post (likely including this one) that cannot be improved by some ruthless trimming.

The "non-fiction" qualifier is important: it is entirely possible to engage the reader using a fictional narrative. Eliezer does it quite successfully in the sequences, even in the long posts. However, this is an art, not ...
Deviant argumentation regarding Monty Hall problem
by Craig_Heldreth — 2011-10-25T23:27:19.126Z

In class number four of the online Artificial Intelligence course from Stanford, Peter Norvig explains "one of the most popular problems in the subject of probability theory, the Monty Hall problem". His presentation was exactly what I have always been taught, and I got the right answer on the quiz.

Hold; P(goat) = 2/3; P(car) = 1/3;

Switch; P(goat) = 1/3; P(car) = 2/3.

Since the last time I looked at that wikipedia article, a number of qualifications and stipulations and elaborations have been added. Apparently this problem has kept its popularity and controversy with undiminished vitality since around 20 years ago, when it was popularized by a national Sunday newspaper magazine columnist Marilyn Vos Savant. Her answer is the one above, which is also what I would call the least complicated wikipedia page answer (as the page sits today.)

Now there is one probable error in Norvig's lecture. He claimed that Monty Hall didn't know the answer to his own problem, and quotes a letter he says was written by Monty Hall in 1990. If this is true, I find it impossible to follow the following New York Times story, from 1991 where Monty explains all the subtleties of the problem in much shorter order than all of the complications on wikipedia. To summarize Monty's take: he is the carnival barker; it's his game; and he can change the rules in the middle of the game if he feels like making it more complicated than your five minute presentation for your students.

But there is one critical element missing from all of the discussions I have seen to date, except for one which was told to me by a playfully deviant fellow many years ago. His argument is simple: if by this strategy a player can double his chances of winning, the players would have figured this out forthwith; everybody would have switched every time; and the drama and the fun would have been drained from the game. The fact is the show was the most popular game show in it's hay day. Ergo there cannot possibly be an easy way to game this strategy. My deviant probability theorist pal had confidence in Monty's game players to find any available edge.

Also the data is in the archives. All you have to do is watch every episode and count the holds and switches and wins and losses and you will have a really high confidence estimation whether the correct answer is closer to 2/3 and 1/3 or is closer to .5 -- .5. If no statisticia...
[FICTION] Hamlet and the Philosopher's Stone
by HonoreDB — 2011-10-25T22:31:15.700Z

So I did actually write it.

Its first title was Rationalist Hamlet, back when it was a short fan contribution to the Alternate Parallels section of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. When I found myself actually trying to write the full thing, its working title became A Will Most Incorrect to Heaven. When I realized I was going to try to make it something approaching marketable, I saw that the only logical title was Hamlet and the Philosopher's Stone. But the actual, official title is, simply, The Tragedy of Prince Hamlet and the Philosopher's Stone, or, A Will Most Incorrect to Heaven by William Shakespeare.

It's a full-length play. I wrote it to be performable, but mostly I wrote it to be read. As of today, I'm self-publishing it and selling it as an e-book for $3.00 (that's the standard e-book price of $2.99, plus a cent to help people make a more rational purchasing decision). If you don't have a bank account and you have 50+ karma on this site, send me a private message with your email address. But I would prefer people paid for it (here's the link again, and here's an excerpt). Charging may seem gauche, but I suspect there's the illusion of a social norm against charging for fanfiction just because it's normally illegal. This work is an exception: the Harry Potter content is purely allusive, and Shakespeare won't be complaining.

The mission statement of the play is roughly the same as that of Methods of Rationality or Alicorn's Twilight re-imagining Luminosity. The philosophy in it is of course my own, but I don't disagree on any major points with Eliezer. As with Methods, I've written it to be enjoyable to people who have no direct exposure to Shakespeare's Hamlet and also to Shakespeare aficionados who have never heard of Less Wrong or even of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The play is a rewrite of Hamlet that preserves much of the original style, language, and plot, while injecting references to modern culture, epistemology, and ethics. It's perhaps what Shakespeare would have written, had he been simultaneously trying to appeal to audiences of both his time and our own. The Philosopher's Stone, for example, would be familiar to subjects of either Queen Elizabeth. The play's formatting is modeled after the way most of us encounter written Shakespeare: the spelling is...
Is math subjective?
by TheatreAddict — 2011-10-25T20:25:57.423Z

I was arguing with a friend over whether reality is objective or subjective. He says subjective, because of the double-slit experiment, and that reality changes depending on whether we observe it or not, so it only exists in our minds.

I know this is right.. But something still seems off to me.

I said, well math is objective. But then he said that no, math is relative depending to where we are. In a black hole, math is different from on earth.

So reality changes... depending on our location... Yes? No?

I'm confused. I'm trying to write an essay on objective versus subjective reality, but I just keep getting mind-fucked.

And yes, I've read some articles on LessWrong on this topic, but I couldn't exactly find one that fit my question completely. :/
How Much Rent
by  — 2011-10-25T19:53:28.982Z

Make beliefs pay rent. How much rent? Is it enough that they have some theoretical use in designing a GPS or predicting the cosmos? How much rent can actually be extracted from a belief?

In a certain fantasy series, there is a special knowledge of a thing, called the name of the thing, that gives one predictive and manipulative power over it. For example, the protagonist, a young rationalist arcanist named Kvothe, learns the name of the wind and uses it to predict the movements of the leaves of a razor-sharp 'sword tree' well enough to walk through without getting cut.

Another character, which we would recognize as a boxed malicious superintelligence, has the ability to predict everything. Simply talking to it allows it to manipulate your future to its twisted ends.

At first these seem like the usual impossible fantasy magic, but why impossible? If a path exists, a good predictive model should find it.

There's nothing that says the map can't match the territory to arbitrary precision. There's nothing that says beliefs have to just sit passively until they are brought up at a dinner party. But how much rent can we extract?

We are not omniscient superintelligences, so the second power is closed to us for now. The first also seems off-limits, but consider that we do know the name of the wind. Our name of the wind and Kvothe's name of the wind are mathematically equivalent (in that the motion of the sword tree could be predicted by simulation of the wind using the NS equation). So why is it that Kvothe can walk through the leaves of the sword tree, but you, even knowing the NS equations as facts in your map, can not?

Optimization. Algorithmization. Kvothe's name of the wind is optimised and algorithmised for practical use. Your name of the wind is sitting in your cache as a dumb fact ready to guess the password for "how does wind work". Kvothe is reeling in rent utilons while you congradulate yourself for having correct beliefs.

So to collect rent from your beliefs, it is not enough to simply know some fact about the world. It has to be implemented by a good algorthim on the intuitive level. You have to be able to act and see through the wind the way a machinist can act through a lathe and a woodsman can see through footprints in the dirt. The way a surfer or skater can act through his board and see through the subtle vibrations and accelerations.

I don't know if we can...
[SEQ RERUN] Protein Reinforcement and DNA Consequentialism
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-25T03:00:45.814Z

Today's post, Protein Reinforcement and DNA Consequentialism was originally published on 13 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Brains made of proteins can learn much faster than DNA, but DNA does seem to be more adaptable. The complexity of the evolutionary hypothesis is so enormous that no species, other than humans, is capable of thinking it, and yet DNA seems to implicitly understand it. This happens because DNA is learns through the actual consequences, but protein brains can simply imagine the consequences.

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 Evolutionary Psychology, 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.
Naming the Highest Virtue of Epistemic Rationality
by Ronny Fernandez — 2011-10-24T23:00:37.924Z

Edit: Looking back at this a few years later. It is pretty embarrassing, but I'm going to leave it up.

Why don't we start treating the log2 of the probability — conditional on every available piece of information — you assign to the great conjunction, as the best measure of your epistemic success? Let's call: log_2(P(the great conjunction|your available information)), your "Bayesian competence". It is a deductive fact that no other proper scoring rule could possibly give: Score(P(A|B)) + Score(P(B)) = Score(P(A&B)), and obviously, you should get the same score for assigning P(A|B) to A, after observing B, and assigning P(B) to B a priori, as you would get for assigning P(A&B) to A&B a priori. The great conjunction is the conjunction of all true statements expressible in your idiolect. Your available information may be treated as the ordered set of your retained stimulus.

If this doesn't make sense, or you aren't familiar with these ideas, checkout Technical Explanation after checking out Intuitive Explanation.

It is standard LW doctrine that we should not name the highest value of rationality, and it is often defended quite brilliantly:

You may try to name the highest principle with names such as “the map that reflects the territory” or “experience of success and failure” or “Bayesian decision theory”. But perhaps you describe incorrectly the nameless virtue. How will you discover your mistake? Not by comparing your description to itself, but by comparing it to that which you did not name.

and of course also:

How can you improve your conception of rationality? Not by saying to yourself, “It is my duty to be rational.” By this you only enshrine your mistaken conception. Perhaps your conception of rationality is that it is rational to believe the words of the Great Teacher, and the Great Teacher says, “The sky is green,” and you look up at the sky and see blue. If you think: “It may look like the sky is blue, but rationality is to believe the words of the Great Teacher,” you lose a chance to discover your mistake.

These quotes are from the end of Twelve Virtues

Should we really be wondering if there's a virtue higher than bayesian competence? Is there really a probability worth worrying about that the description of bayesian competence above is mis...
Better Disagreement
by lukeprog — 2011-10-24T21:13:46.568Z

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

- Gandhi

Now that most communication is remote rather than face-to-face, people are comfortable disagreeing more often. How, then, can we disagree well? If the goal is intellectual progress, those who disagree should aim not for name-calling but for honest counterargument.

To be more specific, we might use a disagreement hierarchy. Below is the hierarchy proposed by Paul Graham (with DH7 added by Black Belt Bayesian).1

DH0: Name-Calling. The lowest form of disagreement, this ranges from "u r fag!!!" to "He’s just a troll" to "The author is a self-important dilettante."

DH1: Ad Hominem. An ad hominem ('against the man') argument won’t refute the original claim, but it might at least be relevant. If a senator says we should raise the salary of senators, you might reply: "Of course he’d say that; he’s a senator." That might be relevant, but it doesn’t refute the original claim: "If there’s something wrong with the senator’s argument, you should say what it is; and if there isn’t, what difference does it make that he’s a senator?"

DH2: Responding to Tone. At this level we actually respond to the writing rather than the writer, but we're responding to tone rather than substance. For example: "It’s terrible how flippantly the author dimisses theology."

DH3: Contradiction. Graham writes: "In this stage we finally get responses to what was said, rather than how or by whom. The lowest form of response to an argument is simply to state the opposing case, with little or no supporting evidence." For example: "It’s terrible how flippantly the author dismisses theology. Theology is a legitimate inquiry into truth."

DH4: Counterargument. Finally, a form of disagreement that might persuade! Counterargument is "contradiction plus reasoning and/or evidence." Still, counterargument is often directed at a minor point, or turns out to be an example of two people talking past each other, as in the parable about a tree falling in the forest.

DH5: Refutation. In refutation, you quote (or paraphrase) a precise claim or argument by the author and explain why the claim is false, or why the argument doesn’t work. With refutation, you're sure to engage exactly what the author said, and offer a direct counterargument with evidence and reason.

D...
Let Your Workers Gather Food
by D_Malik — 2011-10-24T19:51:25.001Z

Crocker's rules apply to this post, and to everything I post.

Also, after writing this post and googling LW for links I came up with this post, which presents the same ideas. #!@$%

When I was younger, I often played real-time strategy (RTS) computer games. These usually involve running an empire successfully enough to conquer all the other empires. To win, you would have to gather resources like food, stone, wood and gold for use in research, construction and recruitment. Gathering resources is done by worker units. To construct worker units you need food. Do you see the hack?

I know, the title gives it away. You can construct a bunch of workers and tell them all to gather food. Use the food they gather to make more workers, and put those on food as well. You set up a positive feedback loop and quickly have vast numbers of workers. When you have crazy amounts of food, then you can get to the business of putting lots of workers on each other resource, and using all your resources to take over the world.

Of course, among RTS players this isn't a new idea, and various forces have arisen to counterbalance it. For instance, players build up small soldier squads and attack right at the start of the game, destroying any player who has only defenceless worker units. Marginal costs of worker recruitment increase with the number of workers you have. There are population limits. But the initial development boom still plays an important role, and the key to winning is often to balance those actions which help directly (building an army) with those actions which help with actions which help directly (making more workers).

Now consider this. If you want to, say, ensure we're not all dead in 100 years, what do you do? You could become a fireman and save a few lives. Or you could donate to some worthy organization. Or you could get other people to donate to said organization. Or convince people to convince people to donate to the organization. And so on. That's one orbit under the meta function, but it's not the one I want to talk about.

Say you decide to throw money at a worthy organization. To do that you need to get money, and to get money you need time. How much buck-for-the-time you get depends on how efficient you are at converting time into money. But time isn't just useful for conversion into money. It can also b...
Footage of the Michael Fox lecture
by PhilGoetz — 2011-10-24T19:43:07.300Z

Reto Schneider acquired, and has posted on his blog, footage of the Dr. Fox lecture experiment from 1976. Experimenters prepared a nonsensical lecture on 'Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education', and taught it to an actor, Michael Fox, who delivered it to three different audiences of 55 different professionals who asked questions and gave the lecture positive evaluations. Details here, including the results of the 8-question evaluation.

The 3 groups were

11 attendees of a teacher training conference in continuing education

11 a group of mental health educators

33 educators and administrators enrolled in a graduate level university educational philosophy course

(BTW, feel free not to vote this up. I'm just relaying a link I found interesting.)
Podcast Recommendations
by David Althaus — 2011-10-24T16:49:28.124Z

I know, books or blogs are often more informative than podcasts. But reading a book while going grocery shopping, bicycling or driving is kinda hard. And the last post on this topic didn't generate much discussion.

So, I ask again: Does anyone know of some interesting podcasts out there?

I'll go ahead and list some of my favorites:

- Econtalk by Russ Roberts.

- Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot by Lukeprog.

- Rationally Speaking by Julia Galef and Massimo Pigliucci.

- Singularity 1 on 1 by Nikola Danaylov.

- Big Ideas and TEDtalks are sometimes worthwhile.

Lectures on ItunesU are of course great, too.
Meetup : Houston Meetup
by Cog — 2011-10-24T06:27:25.177Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Houston Meetup

WHEN:
30 October 2011 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
2010 Commerce St, Houston, Tx. 77002

After a temporary hiatus, the Houston LW meetup group will reconvene on 10/30 at 2:00 PM. I will be presenting a paper from within my field of research, theoretical neuroscience. The paper, "Adaptive Drift-Diffusion Process to Learn Time Intervals", can be found at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.2382 While somewhat interesting in its own right, I'll use it as a jumping off point to discuss the methods and goals of theoretical neuroscience as a whole. It's an exciting field that crosses over on a lot of themes covered on LW. As always, new members are welcome and encouraged to PM me before the meetup.

Discussion article for the meetup : Houston Meetup
[SEQ RERUN] Evolutionary Psychology
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-24T02:17:57.276Z

Today's post, Evolutionary Psychology was originally published on 11 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The human brain, and every ability for thought and emotion in it, are all adaptations selected for by evolution. Humans have the ability to feel angry for the same reason that birds have wings: ancient humans and birds with those adaptations had more kids. But, it is easy to forget that there is a distinction between the reason humans have the ability to feel anger, and the reason why a particular person was angry at a particular thing. Human brains are adaptation-executors, not fitness maximizers.

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 Adaptation-Executors, not Fitness Maximizers, 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.