trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Honesty: Beyond Internal Truth
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-06-06T02:59:00.296Z

When I expect to meet new people who have no idea who I am, I often wear a button on my shirt that says:

SPEAK THE TRUTH,
EVEN IF YOUR VOICE TREMBLES

Honesty toward others, it seems to me, obviously bears some relation to rationality. In practice, the people I know who seem to make unusual efforts at rationality, are unusually honest, or, failing that, at least have unusually bad social skills.

And yet it must be admitted and fully acknowledged, that such morals are encoded nowhere in probability theory. There is no theorem which proves a rationalist must be honest - must speak aloud their probability estimates. I have said little of honesty myself, these past two years; the art which I've presented has been more along the lines of:

SPEAK THE TRUTH INTERNALLY,
EVEN IF YOUR BRAIN TREMBLES

I do think I've conducted my life in such fashion, that I can wear the original button without shame. But I do not always say aloud all my thoughts. And in fact there are times when my tongue emits a lie. What I write is true to the best of my knowledge, because I can look it over and check before publishing. What I say aloud sometimes comes out false because my tongue moves faster than my deliberative intelligence can look it over and spot the distortion. Oh, we're not talking about grotesque major falsehoods - but the first words off my tongue sometimes shade reality, twist events just a little toward the way they should have happened...

From the inside, it feels a lot like the experience of un-consciously-chosen, perceptual-speed, internal rationalization. I would even say that so far as I can tell, it's the same brain hardware running in both cases - that it's just a circuit for lying in general, both for lying to others and lying to ourselves, activated whenever reality begins to feel inconvenient.

There was a time - if I recall correctly - when I didn't notice these little twists. And in fact it still feels embarrassing to confess them, because I worry that people will think: "Oh, no! Eliezer lies without even thinking! He's a pathological liar!" For they have not yet noticed the phenomenon, and actually believe their own little improvements on reality - their own brain being twisted around the same way, remembering reality the way it should be (for the sake of the conversational convenience a...
My concerns about the term 'rationalist'
by JamesCole — 2009-06-04T15:31:10.649Z

I've noticed that here on Less Wrong people often identify themselves as rationalists (and this community as a rationalist one -- searching for 'rationalist' on the site returns exactly 1000 hits). I'm a bit concerned that this label may work against our favour.

Paul Graham recently wrote a nice essay Keep Your Identity Small in which he argued that identifying yourself with a label tends to work against reasonable -- rational, you might say -- disscusions about topics that are related to it. The essay is quite short and if you haven't read it I highly reccommend doing so.

If his argument is correct, then identifying with a label like Rationalist may impede your ability to be rational.

My thinking is that once you identify yourself as an X, you have a tendancy to evaluate ideas and courses of action in terms of how similar or different they appear to your prototypical notion of that label - as a shortcut for genuinely thinking about them and instead of evaluating them on their own merits.

Aside from the effect such a label may have on our own thinking, the term 'rationalist' may be bad PR. In the wider world 'rational' tends to be a bit of a dirty word. It has a lot of negative connotations.

Outside communities like this one, presenting yourself a rationalist is likely to get other people off on the wrong foot. In many people's minds, it'd strike you out before you'd even said anything. It's a great way for them to pigeonhole you.

And we should be interested in embracing the wider world and communicating our views to others.

If I was to describe what we're about, I'd probably say something like that we're interested in knowing the truth, and want to avoid deluding ourselves about anything, as much as either of these things are possible. So we're studying how to be less wrong. I'm not sure I'd use any particular label in my description.

Interestingly, those goals I described us in terms of -- wanting truth, wanting to avoid deluding ourselves -- are not really what separates "us" from "them". I think the actual difference is that we are simply more aware of the fact that there are many ways our thinking can be wrong and lead us astray.

Many people really are -- or at least start out -- interested in the truth, but get led astray by flawed thinking because they're not...
Probability distributions and writing style
by dclayh — 2009-06-04T06:17:41.549Z

In his recent post, rhollerith wrote,

I am more likely than not vastly better off than I would have been if <I had made decision X>

This reminded me of the slogan for the water-filtration system my workplaces uses,

We're 100% sure it's 99.9% pure!

because both sentences make a claim and give an associated probability for it. Now in this second example, the actual version is better than the expectation-value-preserving "We're 99.9% sure it's 100% pure", because the actual version implies a lower variance in outcomes (and expectation values being equal, a lower variance is nearly always better). But this leads to the question of why rhollerith didn't write something like "I am almost certainly at least somewhat better off than I would have been...".

So I ask: when writing nontechnically, do you prefer to give a modest conclusion with high confidence, or a strong conclusion with moderate confidence? And does this vary with whether you're trying to persuade or merely describe?

(Also feel free to post other examples of this sort of statement from LW or elsewhere; I'd search for them myself if I had any good ideas on how to do so.)
Post Your Utility Function
by taw — 2009-06-04T05:05:17.958Z

A lot of rationalist thinking about ethics and economy assumes we have very well defined utility functions - knowing exactly our preferences between states and events, not only being able to compare them (I prefer X to Y), but assigning precise numbers to every combinations of them (p% chance of X equals q% chance of Y). Because everyone wants more money, you should theoretically even be able to assign exact numerical values to positive outcomes in your life.

I did a small experiment of making a list of things I wanted, and giving them point value. I must say this experiment ended up in a failure - thinking "If I had X, would I take Y instead", and "If I had Y, would I take X instead" very often resulted in a pair of "No"s. Even thinking about multiple Xs/Ys for one Y/X usually led me to deciding they're really incomparable. Outcomes related to similar subject were relatively comparable, those in different areas in life were usually not.

I finally decided on some vague numbers and evaluated the results two months later. My success on some fields was really big, on other fields not at all, and the only thing that was clear was that numbers I assigned were completely wrong.

This leads me to two possible conclusions:

I don't know how to draw utility functions, but they are a good model of my preferences, and I could learn how to do it.

Utility functions are really bad match for human preferences, and one of the major premises we accept is wrong.

Anybody else tried assigning numeric values to different outcomes outside very narrow subject matter? Have you succeeded and want to share some pointers? Or failed and want to share some thought on that?

I understand that details of many utility functions will be highly personal, but if you can share your successful ones, that would be great.
Third London Rationalist Meeting
by taw — 2009-06-04T03:19:03.981Z

The Third London Rationalist Meeting will take place on Sunday, 2009-06-07, 14:00, at the usual location - cafe on top of Waterstones bookstore near Piccadilly Circus Tube Station.

Here's map how to get to the venue.

There were some suggestions of trying alternative venue, but as nobody took the time to scout for alternative locations, I'd like to take the safe way and go for the usual one, even if it's less than optimal (by the way they have evaluation forms there, you might want to give them your feedback).
Mate selection for the men here
by rhollerith — 2009-06-03T23:05:25.181Z

The following started as a reply to a request for relationship advice (http://lesswrong.com/lw/zj/open_thread_june_2009/rxy) but is expected to be of enough general interest to justify a top-level post. Sometimes it is beneficial to have older men in the conversation, and this might be one of those times. (I am in my late 40s.)

I am pretty sure that most straight men strong in rationality are better off learning how the typical woman thinks than holding out for a long-term relationship with a women as strong in rationality as he is. If you hold out for a strong female rationalist, you drastically shrink the pool of women you have to choose from -- and people with a lot of experience with dating and relationships tend to consider that a bad move. A useful data point here is the fact (http://lesswrong.com/lw/fk/survey_results/cee) that 95%-97% of Less Wrongers are male. If on the other hand, women currently (*currently* -- not in some extrapolated future after you've sold your company and bought a big house in Woodside) find you extremely attractive or extremely desirable long-term-relationship material, well, then maybe you should hold out for a strong female rationalist if you are a strong male rationalist.

Here is some personal experience in support of the advice above to help you decide whether to follow the advice above.
My information is incomplete because I have never been in a long-term relationship with a really strong rationalist -- or even a scientist, programmer or engineer -- but I have been with a woman who has years of formal education in science (majored in anthropology, later took chem and bio for a nursing credential) and her knowledge of science did not contribute to the relationship in any way that I could tell. Moreover, that relationship was not any better than the one I am in now, with a woman with no college-level science classes at all.
The woman I have been with for the last 5 years is not particularly knowledgeable about science and is not particularly skilled in the art of rationality. Although she is curious about most areas of science, she tends to give up and to stop paying attention if a scientific explanation fails to satisfy her curiosity within 2 or 3 minutes. If there is a strong emotion driving her inquiry, though, she will focus longer. E.g., she sat still for at least 15 or 20 m...
With whom shall I diavlog?
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-06-03T03:20:53.548Z

Bloggingheads.tv can't exactly call up, say, the President of France and get him to do a diavlog, but they have some street cred with mid-rank celebrities and academics. With that in mind, how would you fill in this blank?

"I would really love to see a diavlog between Yudkowsky and ____________."
Would You Slap Your Father?  Article Linkage and Discussion
by Annoyance — 2009-06-02T18:49:25.107Z

I said that my next post would discuss why IQ tests don't measure frontal executive functions, but I've found something tangential yet extremely topical which I think should be discussed first.

A reader sent me a link to this Opinion column written by New York Times writer Nicholas D. Kristof: Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You're A Liberal.

The title is clearly meant to grab attention; don't let its provocative nature dissuade you from reading the article. Most of it is remarkably free from partisan bias, although there are one or two bits which are objectionable. Far more important is that it addresses the relationships between 'emotional' reactions, political positions and affiliations, and reason.

It's a short article, brief enough that I don't think I need to sum it up, and of sufficient quality that I can recommend that you peruse it yourself with a clear conscience. Take the two or three minutes required to read it, please, and then comment your thoughts below.
Bioconservative and biomoderate singularitarian positions
by Roko — 2009-06-02T13:19:04.275Z

Let us define a singularitarian as a person who considers it likely that some form of smarter than human intelligence will be developed in a characteristic timeframe of a century, and that the manner in which this event occurs is important enough to expend effort altering. Given this definition, it is perfectly possible to be a bioconservative singularitarian - that is someone who:

opposes genetic modification of food crops, the cloning and genetic engineering of livestock and pets, and, most prominently, rejects the genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification of human beings to overcome what are broadly perceived as current human biological and cultural limitations.

- one can accept the (at present only suggestive) factual arguments of Hanson, Yudkowsky, Bostrom etc that smarter than human intelligence is the only long-term alternative to human extinction (this is what one might call an "attractor" argument - that our current state simply isn't stable), whilst taking the axiological and ethical position that our pristine, unenhanced human form is to be held as if it were sacred, and that any modification and/or enhancement of the human form is to be resisted, even if the particular human in question wants to be enhanced. A slighly more individual-freedoms-oriented bioconservative position would be try very hard to persuade people (subject to certain constraints) to decide not to enhance themselves, or to allow people to enhance themselves only if they are prepared to face derision and criticism from society. A superintelligent singleton could easily implement such a society.

This position seems internally consistent to me, and given the seemingly unstoppable march of technological advancement and its rapid integration into our society (smartphones, facebook, online dating, youtube, etc) via corporate and economic pressure, bioconservative singularitarianism may become the only realistic bioconservative position.

One can even paint a fairly idyllic bioconservative world where human enhancement is impossible and people don't interact with advanced technology any more, they live in some kind of rural or hunter-gatherer world where the majority of suffering and disease (apart from death, perhaps) is eliminated by a superintelligent singleton, and the singleton takes care to ensure that this world is not "disturbed" by too much technology being ...
Concrete vs Contextual values
by  — 2009-06-02T09:47:30.233Z

The concept of recursive self-improvement is not an accepted idea outside of the futurist community. It just does not seem right in some fashion to some people. I am one of those people, so I'm going to try and explain the kind of instinctive skepticism I have towards it. It hinges on the difference between two sorts of values, whose difference I have not seen made explicit before (although likely it has somewhere). This difference is that of the between a concrete and contextual value.

So lets run down the argument so I can pin down where it goes wrong in my view.

There is a value called intelligence that roughly correlates with the ability to achieve goals in the world (if it does not then we don't care about intelligence explosions as they will have negligible impact on the real worldTM)

All things being equal a system with more compute power will be more capable than one with less (assuming they can get the requisite power supply). Similarly systems that have algorithms with better run time complexities will be more capable.

Computers will be able to do things to increase the values in 2. Therefore they will form a feedback loop and become progressively more and more capable at an ever increasing rate.

The point where I become unstuck is in the phrase "all things being equal". Especially what the "all" stands for. Let me run down a similar argument for wealth.

There is a value called wealth that roughly correlates with the ability to acquire goods and services from other people.

All things being equal a person with more money will be more wealthy than one with less.

You are able to put your money in the bank and get compound interest on your money, so your wealth should be exponential in time (ignoring taxes).

3 can be wrong in this, dependent upon the rate of interest and the rate of inflation. Because of inflation, each dollar you have in the future is less able to buy goods. That is the argument in 3 ignores that at different times and in different environments money is worth different amounts of goods. Hyper inflation is a stark example of this. So the "all things being equal" references the current time and state of the world and 3 breaks that assumption by allowing time and the world to change.

Why doesn't the argument work for wealth, but you can get stable recursive growth on neutrons in a reactor? It is because wealth is a contextual v...
The Frontal Syndrome
by Annoyance — 2009-06-01T16:10:30.632Z

Neuroscientists have a difficult time figuring out which parts of the brain are involved in different functions. Naturally-occurring lesions to the brain are rarely specific to a particular anatomical region, the complications involved with the injury and treatment act as a smokescreen, and finding a patient who's damaged the particular spot you want to learn about is frustrating at best and nigh-impossible at worst.

Fortunately for researchers, inappropriate surgical interventions of the past can shed light on neurological questions.

The strange and horrifying history of psychosurgery is a topic beyond the scope of this site, and certainly beyond this post. Interested readers can easily find a great wealth of relevant discussion on the Net and in libraries, even (in more extensive collections) works written by the physicians involved in such surgeries during the era in which they were popular. Even a casually-curious individual can find lots of non-technical analysis and history to read - for such people, I particularly recommend Great and Desperate Cures by Elliot Valenstein.

Of especial relevance is the prefrontal leukotomy, more commonly (if somewhat imprecisely) known as the lobotomy. There are several features in particular that are of interest to people interested in the nature of effective thought:

To begin, people with frontal lobe damage have problems with impulse control. And by 'problems', I mean they're pretty much incapable of it. It would be more precise to say that lobotomized patients display a remarkable degree of rigid, stereotyped behavior patterns. Give one patient a broom, and she'll begin to sweep the floor; show another a room with a bed, and he'll lie down on it. And do the same thing every time the stimulus is presented. The precise response varies from person to person, but the general reaction is consistent and replicable. Whatever the strongest association with the stimuli is in their mind, that's what they do when they encounter it - and every time they encounter it.

For this reason, it was at one time suggested that only patients with a reputation for rigorously moral behavior be lobotomized, because people who would characteristically break social mores would do so ostentatiously after the surgery. Shoplifters and petty thieves who might have tried to steal particula...
Taking Occam Seriously
by steven0461 — 2009-05-29T17:31:52.268Z

Paul Almond's site has many philosophically deep articles on theoretical rationality along LessWrongish assumptions, including but not limited to some great atheology, an attempt to solve the problem of arbitrary UTM choice, a possible anthropic explanation why space is 3D, a thorough defense of Occam's Razor, a lot of AI theory that I haven't tried to understand, and an attempt to explain what it means for minds to be implemented (related in approach to this and this).
A social norm against unjustified opinions?
by Kaj_Sotala — 2009-05-29T11:25:47.886Z

A currently existing social norm basically says that everyone has the right to an opinion on anything, no matter how little they happen to know about the subject.
But what if we had a social norm saying that by default, people do not have the right to an opinion on anything? To earn such a right, they ought to have familiarized themselves on the topic. The familiarization wouldn't necessarily have to be anything very deep, but on the topic of e.g. controversial political issues, they'd have to have read at least a few books' worth of material discussing the question (preferrably material from both sides of the political fence). In scientific questions where one needed more advanced knowledge, you ought to at least have studied the field somewhat. Extensive personal experience on a subject would also be a way to become qualified, even if you hadn't studied the issue academically.
The purpose of this would be to enforce epistemic hygiene. Conversations on things such as public policy are frequently overwhelmed by loud declarations of opinion from people who, quite honestly, don't know anything on the subject they have a strong opinion on. If we had in place a social norm demanding an adequate amount of background knowledge on the topic before anyone voiced an opinion they expected to be taken seriously, the signal/noise ratio might be somewhat improved. This kind of a social norm does seem to already be somewhat in place in many scientific communities, but it'd do good to spread it to the general public.
At the same time, there are several caveats. As I am myself a strong advocate on freedom of speech, I find it important to note that this must remain a *social* norm, not a government-advocated one or anything that is in any way codified into law. Also, the standards must not be set *too* high - even amateurs should be able to engage in the conversation, provided that they know at least the basics. Likewise, one must be careful that the principle isn't abused, with "you don't have a right to have an opinion on this" being a generic argument used to dismiss any opposing claims.