trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[Link] Anti-Groupism 
by  — 2012-10-21T19:24:42.074Z

A short argument from an interesting blog.

Anti-Groupism

Basic Aretaevian talking points:

Human brains are effectively populated by rabbits. Your conscious mind is like a very small person attempting to ride a large herd of rabbits, which aren't all going the same direction. Your job is to pretend to be in control, and make shit up to explain where the rabbits went, and what you did.

Humans bunny brains are optimized for social activity, not intellectual activity. If your brain thinks principles first, instead of groups first, it's broken, and not just a little bit.

Of course, this means that anyone thinking group first is almost completely full of crap regarding their reasoning process. They're (99.86% certainty) making shit up that makes the group look good, and the actual rational value of the statement is near zero. The nominal process "A->B->C" is actually C, now let's backfill with B and A.

Therefore I'm almost only interested in listening to folks who are group-free. If your brain is broken in the kind of way that prohibits group-attachment...then you're far far more likely to be thinking independently, and shifting perspectives.

Aside: FWIW, this is the core (unsolvable?) problem that inhabits rationalist groups. There is a deep and abiding conflict between groupism and thinking. The Randians have encountered this most loudly, but it's also there in the libertarians, the extropians, the David Deutch-led popperian rationalists, and the LessWrongers.

New discovery, shouldn't have been as surprising as it was. When looking for folks who are group-avoidant, I seem to have phenomenally good luck finding great people when talking with Gays from non-leftist areas (rural Texas, Tennessee, downstate Illinois). Because they don't/can't fit in with their local culture, and often can't conveniently exit, they become interesting people. It's a surprisingly good metric.
Decision theory question
by bryjnar — 2012-10-21T12:23:52.769Z

I'm sure I remember reading somewhere that an informal slogan for (some brand of decision theory) was:

"Act in accordance with the precommittment you wish you had made."

i.e. when faced with Newcomb's problem, you would wish you had precommitted to one-box, and so you should one-box. This is entirely predictable, so you get the money.

However, I couldn't find where I saw this, and I can't remember which decision theory it was meant to exemplify - and I don't actually understand the maths of the various competitors enough to figure out which it is.

Could someone who knows the area better point me in the right direction? In general, the idea of making a kind of "fully general precommitment" seems like an intuitive way of explaining how you can improve on, say, CDT.
Causal Reference
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2012-10-20T22:12:30.227Z

Followup to: The Fabric of Real Things, Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen

Previous meditation: "Does your rule forbid epiphenomenalist theories of consciousness that consciousness is caused by neurons, but doesn't affect those neurons in turn? The classic argument for epiphenomenal consciousness is that we can imagine a universe where people behave exactly the same way, but there's nobody home - no awareness, no consciousness, inside the brain. For all the atoms in this universe to be in the same place - for there to be no detectable difference internally, not just externally - 'consciousness' would have to be something created by the atoms in the brain, but which didn't affect those atoms in turn. It would be an effect of atoms, but not a cause of atoms. Now, I'm not so much interested in whether you think epiphenomenal theories of consciousness are true or false - rather, I want to know if you think they're impossible or meaningless a priori based on your rules."

Is it coherent to imagine a universe in which a real entity can be an effect but not a cause?

Well... there's a couple of senses in which it seems imaginable. It's important to remember that imagining things yields info primarily about what human brains can imagine. It only provides info about reality to the extent that we think imagination and reality are systematically correlated for some reason.

That said, I can certainly write a computer program in which there's a tier of objects affecting each other, and a second tier - a lower tier - of epiphenomenal objects which are affected by them, but don't affect them. For example, I could write a program to simulate some balls that bounce off each other, and then some little shadows that follow the balls around.

But then I only know about the shadows because I'm outside that whole universe, looking in. So my mind is being affected by both the balls and shadows - to observe something is to be affected by it. I know where the shadow is, because the shadow makes pixels be drawn on screen, which make my eye see pixels. If your universe has two tiers of causality - a tier with things that affect each other, and another tier of things that are affected by the first tier without affecting them - then could you know that fact from inside that universe?

Again, this seems easy to imagine&nbs...
Meetup : Vancouver Fermi Estimation
by  — 2012-10-20T20:17:21.022Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Fermi Estimation

WHEN:
25 October 2012 06:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
885 west georgia vancouver,bc

Hi LW, you should come to our meetup.

As usual, we meet downtown in the HSBC building lobby at 18:00, on Thursday. Try to be there before 18:30.

This time, I have something for you. I've determined that Fermi estimation and quantitative intuition in general are super valuable
rationality skills, so I'm going to attempt to learn us some fermi
estimation. It will be hopefully a well prepared lesson full of
excercises, concepts and optional homework. Can't find the right word
for it. Is it a lesson? An excercise? Activity? Drill? We'll see. I
promise fun and math. Come on out.

Everyone is welcome and encouraged to come. If I can and it makes sense, I'll post some optional prepatory material before the meetup and all my notes after.

There will probably be other exciting things happening too. Good stuff happens when you get a bunch of aspiring rationalists together.

Our mailing list is vancouver-rationalists on google groups.

Be there.

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Fermi Estimation
A probability question
by PhilGoetz — 2012-10-19T22:34:20.512Z

Suppose you have a property Q which certain objects may or may not have. You've seen many of these objects; you know the prior probability P(Q) that an object has this property.

You have 2 independent measurements of object O, which each assign a probability that Q(O) (O has property Q). Call these two independent probabilities A and B.

What is P(Q(O) | A, B, P(Q))?

To put it another way, expert A has opinion O(A) = A, which asserts P(Q(O)) = A = .7, and expert B says P(Q(O)) = B = .8, and the prior P(Q) = .4, so what is P(Q(O))? The correlation between the opinions of the experts is unknown, but probably small. (They aren't human experts.) I face this problem all the time at work.

You can see that the problem isn't solvable without the prior P(Q), because if the prior P(Q) = .9, then two experts assigning P(Q(O)) < .9 should result in a probability lower than the lowest opinion of those experts. But if P(Q) = .1, then the same estimates by the two experts should result in a probability higher than either of their estimates. But is it solvable or at least well-defined even with the prior?

The experts both know the prior, so if you just had expert A saying P(Q(O)) = .7, the answer must be .7 . Expert B's opinion B must revise the probability upwards if B > P(Q), and downwards if B < P(Q).

When expert A says O(A) = A, she probably means, "If I consider all the n objects I've seen that looked like this one, nA of them had property Q."

One approach is to add up the bits of information each expert gives, with positive bits for indications that Q(O) and negative bits that not(Q(O)).
[LINK] blog on cryonics by someone who freezes things in a cell bio lab
by mwengler — 2012-10-19T18:35:10.303Z

http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/walker/walker12.html

Came across it pretty randomly, I found it quite intriguing. Cryonics is "routine" for human embryos, not far-fetched for humans at all. Makes the whole thing seem potentially very reasonable (and me someone who hasn't signed up and doesn't plan to).
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Berlin, Brussels, Chicago, Madison, Melbourne, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2012-10-19T15:41:23.654Z

This summary was posted to LW main on October 12th, and has been moved to discussion. The more recent meetup summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

(Chicago) Zendo in the West Loop: 12 October 2012 06:30PM
Brussels meetup: 13 October 2012 01:00PM
Washington DC Show and tell meetup: Economics: 14 October 2012 03:00PM
Berlin Meetup: 16 October 2012 07:30PM
Bratislava meetup: 20 October 2012 05:30PM
Munich Meetup, EDIT: October 28th: 28 October 2012 03:00PM
Sofia, Bulgaria Meetup: 09 December 2012 05:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 13 October 2018 01:30PM
Madison: Prospect Theory: 14 October 2012 07:00PM
Melbourne social meetup: 19 October 2012 07:00PM
Cambridge (MA) third-Sundays Meetup: 21 October 2012 02:00PM
Winter Solstice Megameetup - NYC: 15 December 2012 05:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern Ca...
[LINK] AI-boxing Is News, Somehow
by MugaSofer — 2012-10-19T12:34:27.117Z

Tech News Daily have published an article advocating AI-boxing, which namechecks Eliezer's AI-Box Experiment. It seems to claim AI-Boxes are a revolutionary new idea; is covered in pictures of fictional, evil AIs; and worries that a superintelligent AI might develop psychic powers.

Seems like a good reminder of the state of reporting on such matters.
[SEQ RERUN] Lawful Uncertainty
by MinibearRex — 2012-10-19T04:21:56.325Z

Today's post, Lawful Uncertainty was originally published on 10 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Facing a random scenario, the correct solution is really not to behave randomly. Faced with an irrational universe, throwing away your rationality won't help.

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 Lawful Creativity, 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.
2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions
by Scott Alexander — 2012-10-19T01:12:48.113Z

The first draft of the 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey is complete (see 2011 here). I will link it below if you promise not to try to take the survey because it's not done yet and this is just an example!

2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey Draft

I want three things from you.

First, please critique this draft. Tell me if any questions are unclear, misleading, offensive, confusing, or stupid. Tell me if the survey is so unbearably long that you would never possibly take it. Tell me if anything needs to be rephrased.

Second, I am willing to include any question you want in the Super Extra Bonus Questions section, as long as it is not offensive, super-long-and-involved, or really dumb. Please post any questions you want there. Please be specific - not "Ask something about abortion" but give the exact question you want me to ask as well as all answer choices.

Try not to add more than five or so questions per person, unless you're sure yours are really interesting. Please also don't add any questions that aren't very easily sort-able by a computer program like SPSS unless you can commit to sorting the answers yourself.

Third, please suggest a decent, quick, and at least somewhat accurate Internet IQ test I can stick in a new section, Unreasonably Long Bonus Questions.

I will probably post the survey to Main and officially open it for responses sometime early next week.
Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2012-10-18T10:49:26.516Z

Followup to: Causality: The Fabric of Real Things

Previous meditation:

"You say that a universe is a connected fabric of causes and effects. Well, that's a very Western viewpoint - that it's all about mechanistic, deterministic stuff. I agree that anything else is outside the realm of science, but it can still be real, you know. My cousin is psychic - if you draw a card from his deck of cards, he can tell you the name of your card before he looks at it. There's no mechanism for it - it's not a causal thing that scientists could study - he just does it. Same thing when I commune on a deep level with the entire universe in order to realize that my partner truly loves me. I agree that purely spiritual phenomena are outside the realm of causal processes that can be studied by experiments, but I don't agree that they can't be real."

Reply:

Fundamentally, a causal model is a way of factorizing our uncertainty about the universe. One way of viewing a causal model is as a structure of deterministic functions plus uncorrelated sources of background uncertainty.

Let's use the Obesity-Exercise-Internet model (reminder: which is totally made up) as an example again:

We can also view this as a set of deterministic functions Fi, plus uncorrelated background sources of uncertainty Ui:

This says is that the value x3 - how much someone exercises - is a function of how obese they are (x1), how much time they spend on the Internet (x2), plus some other background factors U3 which don't correlate to anything else in the diagram, all of which collectively determine, when combined by the mechanism F3, how much time someone spends exercising.

There might be any number of different real factors involved in the possible states of U3 - like whether someone has a personal taste for jogging, whether they've ever been to a trampoline park and liked it, whether they have some gene that affects exercise endorphins. These are all different unknown background facts about a person, which might affect whether or not they exercise, above and beyond obesity and Internet use.

But from the perspective of somebody building a causal model, so long as we don't have anything else in our causal graph that correlates with these factors, we can sum them up into a single factor of subjective uncertainty, our uncertainty U3 about all the other things that might add up to a force for or against exer...
[SEQ RERUN] Lawful Creativity
by MinibearRex — 2012-10-18T05:29:38.046Z

Today's post, Lawful Creativity was originally published on 08 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Creativity seems to consist of breaking rules, and violating expectations. But there is one rule that cannot be broken: creative solutions must have something good about them. Creativity is a surprise, but most surprises aren't creative.

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 Recognizing Intelligence, 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.
Meetup : DC Meetup: Games and Conversation
by maia — 2012-10-17T23:40:34.608Z

Discussion article for the meetup : DC Meetup: Games and Conversation

WHEN:
21 October 2012 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Kogod Courtyard

The next meetup will be at the courtyard by the Portrait Gallery at 3pm on Sunday 10/21, as per usual. The theme will be games and general conversation. Roger will bring Zendo, and Eileen is tentatively planning to bring Apples to Apples.

Other games and topics are welcome. Post here or email the list if you plan to bring one or more.

Discussion article for the meetup : DC Meetup: Games and Conversation
[LINK] The most important unsolved problems in ethics
by jefftk — 2012-10-17T20:03:46.874Z

Will Crouch has written up a list of the most important unsolved problems in ethics:

The Practical List

What’s the optimal career choice? Professional philanthropy, influencing, research, or something more common-sensically virtuous?

What’s the optimal donation area? Development charities? Animal welfare charities? Extinction risk mitigation charities? Meta-charities? Or investing the money and donating later?

What are the highest leverage political policies? Libertarian paternalism? Prediction markets? Cruelty taxes, such as taxes on caged hens; luxury taxes?

What are the highest value areas of research? Tropical medicine? Artificial intelligence? Economic cost-effectiveness analysis? Moral philosophy?

Given our best ethical theories (or best credence distribution in ethical theories), what’s the biggest problem we currently face?

The Theoretical List

What’s the correct population ethics? How should we value future people compared with present people? Do people have diminishing marginal value?

Should we maximise expected value when it comes to small probabilities of huge amounts of value? If not, what should we do instead?

How should we respond to the possibility of creating infinite value (or disvalue)? Should that consideration swamp all others? If not, why not?

How should we respond to the possibility that the universe actually has infinite value? Does it mean that we have no reason to do any action (because we don’t increase the sum total of value in the world)? Or does this possibility refute aggregative consequentialism?

How should we accommodate moral uncertainty? Should we apply expected utility theory? If so, how do we make intertheoretic value comparisons? Does this mean that some high-stakes theories should dominate our moral thinking, even if we assign them low credence?

How should intuitions weigh against theoretical virtues in normative ethics? Is common-sense ethics roughly correct? Or should we prefer simpler moral theories?

Should we prioritise the prevention of human wrongs over the alleviation of naturally caused suffering? If so, by how much?

What sorts of entities have moral value? Humans, presumably. But what about non-human animals? Insects? The natural environment? Artificial intelligence?

What additiona

...
Request for sympathy; frustrated with Dark Side
by RolfAndreassen — 2012-10-17T17:22:59.341Z

It is really quite frustrating to discuss the intersection of physics and free will with a man who is capable of posting this as his opinion:

I regard atomic motions as determined, that is, as exactly defined to an infinite degree of precision, by the laws of physics, with nothing left over or left out of the explanation, and nothing else to explain.

and then, a day later, posts this as summing up mine:

[His] axiom that the motions of atoms are determined by and only by that description of non-deliberate physical reactions to outside forces called physics. [...] This axiom is not just false, it is obviously, outrageously false.

AAAGH! *Make up your damned mind, man!*
Meetup : Different location for Berkeley meetup
by Nisan — 2012-10-17T17:19:56.746Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Different location for Berkeley meetup

WHEN:
17 October 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2128 Oxford St, Berkeley, CA

Today Zendo and I are unavailable. Several people on the mailing list have suggested that people meet at the Starbucks on Center and Oxford Street at 7pm. You should come there if your coming there acausally implies that other people will come there.

Discussion article for the meetup : Different location for Berkeley meetup
How To Have Things Correctly
by Alicorn — 2012-10-17T06:10:34.625Z

I think people who are not made happier by having things either have the wrong things, or have them incorrectly. Here is how I get the most out of my stuff.

Money doesn't buy happiness. If you want to try throwing money at the problem anyway, you should buy experiences like vacations or services, rather than purchasing objects. If you have to buy objects, they should be absolute and not positional goods; positional goods just put you on a treadmill and you're never going to catch up.

Supposedly.

I think getting value out of spending money, owning objects, and having positional goods are all three of them skills, that people often don't have naturally but can develop. I'm going to focus mostly on the middle skill: how to have things correctly1.

1. Obtain more-correct things in the first place.

If you and I are personal friends, you probably know that I have weird gift-receiving protocols. This is partly because I hate surprises. But it's also because I don't want to have incorrect things, cluttering my space, generating guilt because they're gifts that I never use, and generally having high opportunity cost because the giver could have gotten me something else.

This problem isn't only with gifts. People get themselves incorrect things all the time - seduced by marketing, seized by impulse, or too hurried to think about which of several choices is the best one for their wants and needs. I have some incorrect clothes, which I got because I was sick of shopping and needed a new pair of pants even if it was terrible; as soon as I found better pants (or whatever) those clothes were never worn again and now they're just waiting for my next haul to Goodwill. I bet a lot of people have incorrect printers, mostly because printers in general are evil, but partly because it's irritating and dull to investigate them ahead of time. Cars may also tend to fall into this category, with a lot of people neutral or ambivalent about their self-selected objects that cost thousands of dollars.

If you are not currently living in a cluttered space, or feeling guilty about not using your objects enough, or tending to dislike the things that you have, or finding yourself wanting things that you "can't" get because you already have an inferior item in the same reference class, or just buying too many not-strict-necessities than is a...