trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
On Lottery Tickets
by SeventhNadir — 2010-11-29T08:20:17.002Z

I've often seen the issue of lottery tickets crop up on LessWrong and the [consensus](http://lesswrong.com/lw/hl/lotteries_a_waste_of_hope/) seems to be that the behaviour is irrational. It highlights for me a confusion that I've had about what it means for something to be "rational" and I'm seeking clarification. I think it might be useful to break the term down into the distinction I learnt about here, epistemic and instrumental rationality.

Epistemic rationality - This seems to be the most common failure of people who play the lottery. It might be an overt failure of probabilistic reasoning like someone believing their chances of winning to be 50-50 because they can imagine two potential outcome. Maybe they believe that they're "due" to win some money as they commit "the gamblers fallacy". Or it might be a more subtle failure resulting from correct knowledge of probability, but a fundamental inability to represent that number we call "scope insensitivity". I think in the cases where these errors are committed, no-one would argue that these people are being "rational".

However, what if someone had a perfect knowledge of the probabilities involved? If this person bought a lottery ticket would we still consider this a failure of epistemic rationality? You might say that anyone with perfect information of these probabilities would know that lottery tickets are poor financial investments, but we're not talking about instrumental rationality just yet.

Instrumental rationality - Now we're talking about it. The criteria for rationality in this case is, acting in a way that achieves your goals. If your goals in buying a lottery ticket are as one dimensional as making money, then the lottery is a (very) poor investment and I don't think anyone else would disagree. Here is where I start getting confused though, because what happens when a lottery ticket satisfies goals other than financial gain? It is conceivable that I could get more than $5's worth (here meaning my subjective and relative sense of what money is worth) of entertainment out of a $5 lottery ticket. What happens here? I hope you can see the more general problem that arises if you'd answer "It's still instrumentally irrational".

I'm not arguing that the lottery is a good idea or that it's socially desirable. I think that it does tend to drain capitol from the people that can least afford it. If you've argu...
Belief in Belief vs. Internalization
by Desrtopa — 2010-11-29T03:12:10.614Z

Related to Belief In Belief

Suppose that a neighbor comes to you one day and tells you “There’s a dragon in my garage!” Since all of us have been through this before at some point or another, you may be inclined to save time and ask “Is the dragon by any chance invisible, inaudible, intangible, and does it convert oxygen to carbon dioxide when it breathes?”

The neighbor, however, is a scientific minded fellow and responds “Yes, yes, no, and maybe, I haven’t checked. This is an idea with testable consequences. If I try to touch the dragon it gets out of the way, but it leaves footprints in flour when I sprinkle it on the garage floor, and whenever it gets hungry, it comes out of my garage and eats a nearby animal. It always chooses something weighing over thirty pounds, and you can see the animals get snatched up and mangled to a pulp in its invisible jaws. It’s actually pretty horrible. You may have noticed that there have been fewer dogs around the neighborhood lately.”

This triggers a tremendous number of your skepticism filters, and so the only thing you can think of to say is “I think I’m going to need to see this.”

“Of course,” replies the neighbor, and he sets off across the street, opens the garage door, and is promptly eaten by the invisible dragon.

Tragic though it is, his death provides a useful lesson. He clearly believed that there was an invisible dragon in his garage, and he was willing to stick his neck out and make predictions based on it. However, he hadn’t internalized the idea that there was a dragon in his garage, otherwise he would have stayed the hell away to avoid being eaten. Humans have a fairly general weakness at internalizing beliefs when we don’t have to come face to face with their immediate consequences on a regular basis.

You might believe, for example, that starvation is the single greatest burden on humanity, and that giving money to charities that aid starving children in underdeveloped countries has higher utility than any other use of your surplus funds. You might even be able to make predictions based on that belief. But if you see a shirt you really like that’s on sale, you’re almost certainly not going to think “How many people will go

...
Fine-Tuned Mind Projection
by Alexandros — 2010-11-29T00:08:07.800Z

The Fine-Tuning Argument (henceforth FTA) is the pet argument of many a religious apologist, allowing them as it does to build support for their theistic thesis on the findings of cosmology. The basic premise is this: The laws of nature appear to contain constants that if changed slightly would yield universes inhospitable to life. Even though a lot can be said about this premise, Let's assume it true for the purposes of this article.

Luke Muehlhauser over at Common Sense Atheism recently wrote an article pointing out what I think is a central flaw of the FTA. To summarise, he notes that there are multitudes of propositions that are true for this universe and would not be true in a different universe. For instance galaxies, or, Luke's tongue-in-cheek example: iPads. If you accept that the universe is fine-tuned for life, you also have to accept that it's fine-tuned for galaxies, and iPads, given that some changes in the fine-tuned constants would not produce galaxies, and certainly not iPads.

So the question posed to defenders of the FTA is 'why life'? Why focus on this particular fact? What is it that sets life apart from all the other propositions true about our universe but not other the other possible universes? The usual answer is that life stands out, being valuable in ways that galaxies, iPads, and all the other true propositions are not. It seems that this is an unstated premise of the FTA. But where does that premise come from? Physics gives us no instrument to measure value, so how did this concept get in what was supposed to be a cosmology-based argument?

I present the FTA here as an argument that while seemingly complex, simply evaporates in light of the Mind Projection Fallacy. Knowing that humans tend to confuse 'I see X as valuable' with 'x is valuable', the provenance of the hidden premise 'life is valuable' is laid bare, as is the identity of the agent who is doing the valuing, and it is us. With the mystery solved, explaining why humans find life valuable does not require us to go to the extreme lengths of introducing a non-naturalistic cause for the universe.

Without any support for life being special in some way, the FTA devolves into a straightforward case of Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: There exists life, our god would have wanted to create life, therefore our god is real! Not quite as compelling.
"Nahh, that wouldn't work"
by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) — 2010-11-28T21:32:09.936Z

After having it recommended to me for the fifth time, I finally read through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It didn't seem like it'd be interesting to me, but I was really mistaken. It's fantastic.

One thing I noticed is that Harry threatens people a lot. My initial reaction was, "Nahh, that wouldn't work."

It wasn't to scrutinize my own experience. It wasn't to do a google search if there's literature available. It wasn't to ask a few friends what their experiences were like and compare them.

After further thought, I came to realization - almost every time I've threatened someone (which is rarely), it's worked. Now, I'm kind of tempted to write that off as "well, I had the moral high ground in each of those cases" - but:

1. Harry usually or always has the moral high ground when he threatens people in MOR.

2. I don't have any personal anecdotes or data about threatening people from a non-moral high ground, but history provides a number of examples, and the threats often work.

This gets me to thinking - "Huh, why did I write that off so fast as not accurate?" And I think the answer is because I don't want the world to work like that. I don't want threatening people to be an effective way of communicating.

It's just... not a nice idea.

And then I stop, and think. The world is as it is, not as I think it ought to be.

And going further, this makes me consider all the times I've tried to explain something I understood to someone, but where they didn't like the answer. Saying things like, "People don't care about your product features, they care about what benefit they'll derive in their own life... your engineering here is impressive, but 99% of people don't care that you just did an amazing engineering feat for the first time in history if you can't explain the benefit to them."

Of course, highly technical people hate that, and tend not to adjust.

Or explaining to someone how clothing is a tool that changes people's perceptions of you, and by studying the basics of fashion and aesthetics, you can achieve more of your aims in life. Yes, it shouldn't be like that in an ideal world. But we're not in that ideal world - fashion and aesthetics matter and people react to it.

I used to rebel against that until I wizened up, studied a little fashion and aesthetics, and started dressing to produce outcomes. So I ask, what's my goal here? Okay, what kind of fir...
What would an ultra-intelligent machine make of the great filter?
by James_Miller — 2010-11-28T18:47:52.503Z

Imagine that an ultra-intelligent machine emerges from an intelligence explosion. The AI (a) finds no trace of extraterrestrial intelligence, (b) calculates that many star systems should have given birth to star faring civilizations so mankind hasn’t pass through most of the Hanson/Grace great filter, and (c) realizes that with trivial effort it could immediately send out some self-replicating von Neumann machines that could make the galaxy more to its liking.

Based on my admittedly limited reasoning abilities and information set I would guess that the AI would conclude that the zoo hypothesis is probably the solution to the Fermi paradox and because stars don’t appear to have been “turned off” either free energy is not a limiting factor (so the Laws of Thermodynamics are incorrect) or we are being fooled into thinking that stars unnecessarily "waste” free energy (perhaps because we are in a computer simulation).
Singularity Non-Fiction Compilation to be Written
by MichaelVassar — 2010-11-28T16:49:14.250Z

Call for Essays:<http://singularityhypothesis.blogspot.com/p/submit.html>
The Singularity Hypothesis
A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment
Edited volume, to appear in The Frontiers Collection<http://www.springer.com/series/5342>, Springer

Does an intelligence explosion pose a genuine existential risk, or did Alan Turing, Steven Hawking, and Alvin Toffler delude themselves with visions 'straight from Cloud Cuckooland'? Should the notions of superintelligent machines, brain emulations and transhumans be ridiculed, or is it that skeptics are the ones who suffer from short sightedness and 'carbon chauvinism'? These questions have remained open because much of what we hear about the singularity originates from popular depictions, fiction, artistic impressions, and apocalyptic propaganda.

Seeking to promote this debate, this edited, peer-reviewed volume shall be concerned with scientific and philosophical analysis of the conjectures related to a technological singularity. We solicit scholarly essays offering a scientific and philosophical analysis of this hypothesis, assess its empirical content, examine relevant evidence, or explore its implications. Commentary offering a critical assessment of selected essays may also be solicited.

Important dates:

* Extended abstracts (500–1,000 words): 15 January 2011
* Full essays: (around 7,000 words): 30 September 2011
* Notifications: 30 February 2012 (tentative)
* Proofs: 30 April 2012 (tentative)
We aim to get this volume published by the end of 2012.

Purpose of this volume
· Please read: Purpose of This Volume<http://singularityhypothesis.blogspot.com/p/theme.html>
Central questions
· Please read: Central Questions<http://singularityhypothesis.blogspot.com/p/central-questions.html>:
Extended abstracts are ideally short (3 pages, 500 to 1000 words), focused (!), relating directly to specific central questions<http://singularityhypothesis.blogspot.com/p/central-questions.html> and indicating how they will be treated in the full essay.

Full essays are expected to be short (15 pages, around 7000 words) and focused, relating directly to specific cent...
Superintelligent AI mentioned as a possible risk by Bill Gates
by Roko — 2010-11-28T11:51:50.475Z

"There are other potential problems in the future that Mr. Ridley could have addressed but did not. Some would put super-intelligent computers on that list. My own list would include large-scale bioterrorism or a pandemic ... But bioterrorism and pandemics are the only threats I can foresee that could kill over a billion people."

- Bill Gates

From

Africa Needs Aid, Not Flawed Theories

One wonders where Bill Gates read that superintelligent AI could be (but in his estimation, in fact isn't) a GCR. It couldn't have been Kurzweil, because Kurzweil doesn't say that. The only realistic possibilities are that the influence came via Nick Bostrom, Stephen Hawking or Martin Rees or possibly Bill Joy(See comments).

It seems that Bill is also something of a Bayesian with respect to global catastrophic risk:

"Even though we can't compute the odds for threats like bioterrorism or a pandemic, it's important to have the right people worrying about them and taking steps to minimize their likelihood and potential impact. On these issues, I am not impressed right now with the work being done by the U.S. and other governments."
We're all forgetting how to read analog clocks. Or are we?
by Relsqui — 2010-11-28T06:19:01.899Z

I was thinking about this phenomenon today. Digital clocks are so common now that I don't often need to read an analog one, much less in a hurry. I worry that I'm losing the ability to do so. (The worry is a little bit because I might still need it at some point, and much more because being able to quickly read analog clocks makes me feel like a grown-up.) In particular, when I am called upon to read one, I'm embarrassed by how long it takes me to do so. It's only several seconds, but that's enough to make it clear to anyone watching that I had to stop and think about it.

But then I caught myself, and thought, wait a moment. Am I actually much slower at this than I used to be? Or is reading an analog clock really just a noticeably slower action than reading a digital one? This is intuitively plausible; it has more mental steps. Rather than comparing my current analog-clock-reading speed with a previous one (which I don't really remember), I'm comparing it to my digital-clock-reading speed, which doesn't make sense. I was going to ask how you'd design an experiment to test this. Then I remembered that not everyone is young enough to have to speculate about what it's like not having mostly digital clocks around. :P So if you're old enough to have significantly more practice reading analog clocks than digital, how long does it take you to read one? Is it noticeably longer than reading a digital clock? If you aren't, and have a significantly different experience from mine, I'm interested in that too.
Link: Compare your moral values to the general population
by SK2 — 2010-11-28T03:21:59.940Z

Jonathan Haidt, a professor at UVA, runs an online lab with quizzes that will compare your moral values to the rest of the population. I have found the test results useful for avoiding the typical mind fallacy. When someone disagrees with me on a belief/opinion I feel certain about, it's often difficult to tease apart how much of this disagreement stems from them not "getting it", and how much stems from them having a different fundamental value system. One of the tests alerted me that I am an outlier in certain aspects of how I judge morality (green = me; blue = liberals; red = conservatives):

Another benefit of these quizzes is that they can point out potential blind spots. For example, one quiz asks for opinions about punishment for crimes. If I discover I'm an outlier w.r.t. the population, I should reconsider whether my opinions are based on solid evidence (or did I see one study that found tit-for-tat punishment effective in a certain context, and take that as gospel?).

Extra reading: Haidt wrote a WSJ article last month that applied the learnings of these moral quizzes to better understanding the Tea Party.
META: Misleading error message on using wrong username
by RolfAndreassen — 2010-11-27T22:07:52.104Z

I attempted to log in from a computer I don't usually use, and entered my username as "Rolf Andreassen", two words; in fact it's "RolfAndreassen", one word. The error message I got back was "Incorrect password", which is misleading. Not until I tried to recover my password did I realise my mistake. Clearly this is an unusual edge case, but I suggest updating the code to give back "No such user" when someone makes this mistake.
The Sin of Persuasion
by Desrtopa — 2010-11-27T21:44:06.794Z

Related to Your Rationality is My Business

Among religious believers in the developed world, there is something of a hierarchy in terms of social tolerability. Near the top are the liberal, nonjudgmental, frequently nondenominational believers, of whom it is highly unpopular to express disapproval. At the bottom you find people who picket funerals or bomb abortion clinics, the sort with whom even most vocally devout individuals are quick to deny association.

Slightly above these, but still very close to the bottom of the heap, are proselytizers and door to door evangelists. They may not be hateful about their beliefs, indeed many find that their local Jehovah’s Witnesses are exceptionally nice people, but they’re simply so annoying. How can they go around pressing their beliefs on others and judging people that way?

I have never known another person to criticize evangelists for not trying hard enough to change others’ beliefs.

And yet, when you think about it, these people are dealing with beliefs of tremendous scale. If the importance of saving a single human life is worth so much more than our petty discomforts with defying social convention or our own cognitive biases, how much greater must be the weight of saving an immortal soul from an eternity of hell? Shouldn’t they be doing everything in their power to change the minds of others, if that’s what it takes to save them? Surely if there is a fault in their actions, it’s that they’re doing too little given the weight their beliefs should impose on them.

But even if you believe you believe this is a matter of eternity, of unimaginable degrees of utility, if you haven’t internalized that belief, then it sure is annoying to be pestered about the state of your immortal soul.

This is by no means exclusive to religion. Proselytizing vegans, for instance, occupy a similar position on the scale of socially acceptable dietary positions. You might believe that nonhuman animals possess significant moral worth, and by raising them in oppressive conditions only to slaughter them en masse, humans are committing an enormous moral atrocity, but may heaven forgive you if you try to convince other people of this so that they can do their part in reversing the situation. Far more common are vegans

...
Link: Writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics
by Vladimir_Golovin — 2010-11-27T16:28:24.651Z

15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics:

Think about the things that are important to you. Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or three of these values and write a few sentences about why they are important to you. You have fifteen minutes. It could change your life.

This simple writing exercise may not seem like anything ground-breaking, but its effects speak for themselves. In a university physics class, Akira Miyake from the University of Colorado used it to close the gap between male and female performance. In the university’s physics course, men typically do better than women but Miyake’s study shows that this has nothing to do with innate ability. With nothing but his fifteen-minute exercise, performed twice at the beginning of the year, he virtually abolished the gender divide and allowed the female physicists to challenge their male peers.

The exercise is designed to affirm a person’s values, boosting their sense of self-worth and integrity, and reinforcing their belief in themselves. For people who suffer from negative stereotypes, this can make all the difference between success and failure.

The article cites a paper, but it's behind a paywall:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6008/1234
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 6
by Unnamed — 2010-11-27T08:25:52.446Z

Update: Discussion has moved on to a new thread.

After 61 chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and 5 discussion threads with over 500 comments each, HPMOR discussion has graduated from the main page and moved into the Less Wrong discussion section (which seems like a more appropriate location). You can post all of your insights, speculation, and, well, discussion about Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic here.

Previous threads are available under the harry_potter tag on the main page (or: one, two, three, four, five); this and future threads will be found under the discussion section tag (since there is a separate tag system for the discussion section). See also the author page for (almost) all things HPMOR, and AdeleneDawner's Author's Notes archive for one thing that the author page is missing.
As a reminder, it's useful to indicate at the start of your comment which chapter you are commenting on. Time passes but your comment stays the same.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it's fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that "Eliezer said X is true" unless you use rot13.