trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill Meetup
by soundchaser — 2011-04-11T14:25:35.165Z

This post's primary intent is to gauge interest and try to find a possible meeting place.

I will commit to showing up at whatever place we decide on, but I am usually only around during the week. (Though given enough time in advance I could plan for one on the weekend)

The RTP area has three research universities and a fairly large population when taken as a total of the three cities, so hopefully we have enough people. I can also post fliers in several departments at North Carolina State University if people think there would be benefit in that.
Requesting armchair analysis of Google's strategy
by cousin_it — 2011-04-11T10:13:08.381Z

(Disclaimer: I've been working at Google for about a month now. This post is on my behalf, not my employer's. Also it will not contain any secret information.)

Larry Page, one of the original founders of Google, recently came back as CEO and immediately declared that the company should focus on social stuff. This caused a lot of internet commentary, here's a typical example. And here's another example from before then. (Do read them, they're nice in a way.) As you can see, every armchair analyst paints a nice and clear picture of what's happening, and all those pictures are different. Eventually someone will end up right and beat their chest saying I told you so, and others will end up wrong and quietly forget that they ever said anything. We ought to do better.

Q1: what do you believe about Google's devious plans and their market reality?

Q2: why do you believe what you believe?
David Deutsch on How To Think About The Future
by curi — 2011-04-11T07:08:42.530Z

http://vimeo.com/22099396

What do people think of this, from a Bayesian perspective?

It is a talk given to the Oxford Transhumanists. Their previous speaker was Eliezer Yudkowsky. Audio version and past talks here: http://groupspaces.com/oxfordtranshumanists/pages/past-talks
Person moments make sense of anthropics
by KatjaGrace — 2011-04-11T02:57:35.000Z

Often people think that various forms of anthropic reasoning require you to change your beliefs in ways other than conditionalizing on evidence. This is false, at least in the cases I know of. I shall talk about Frank Arntzenius‘ paper Some Problems for Conditionalization and Reflection [gated] because it explains the issue well, though I believe his current views agree with mine.

He presents five thought experiments: Two Roads to Shangri La, The Prisoner, John Collins’s Prisoner, Sleeping Beauty and Duplication. In each of them, it seems the (arguably) correct answer violates van Fraassen’s reflection principle, which basically says that if you expect to believe something in the future without having been e.g. hit over the head between now and then, you should believe it now. For instance the thirder position in Sleeping Beauty seems to violate this principle because before the experiment Beauty believes there is a fifty percent chance of heads, and that when she wakes up she will think there is a thirty three percent chance. Arntzenius argued that these seemingly correct answers really are the correct ones, and claimed that they violate the reflection principle because credences can evolve in two ways other than by conditionalization.

First he said credences can shift, for instance through time. I know that tomorrow I will have a higher credence in it being Monday than I do today, and yet it would not be rational for me to increase my credence in it being Monday now on this basis. They can also ‘spread out’. For instance if you know you are in Fairfax today, and that tomorrow a perfect replica of your brain experiencing Fairfax will be made and placed in a vat in Canberra, tomorrow your credence will go from being concentrated in Fairfax to being spread between there and Canberra. This is despite no damage having been done to your own brain. As Arntzenius pointed out, such an evolution of credence looks like quite the opposite of conditionalization, since conditionalization consists of striking out possibilities that your information excludes – it never opens up new possibilities.

I agree that beliefs should evolve in these two ways. However they are both really conditionalization, just obscured. They make sense as conditionalization when you think of them as carried out by different momentary agents, based on the informati...
How would you respond to the Philpapers "What are your Philosophical Positions" Survey?
by InquilineKea — 2011-04-11T00:40:54.267Z

The questions are at http://philpapers.org/surveys/oquestions.html. The correlations can be intensely interesting to those who understand philosophical jargon (http://philpapers.org/surveys/linear_most.pl) - it doesn't take too long to look them up as you go - and I actually found it to be a fun way to learn new philosophy. I know that there was a LW thread about this several months ago, but it didn't have a section for people here to respond to the survey. I would be very interested to see how people here would respond.

I'll repost the questions here:

===

Original Survey Questions | PhilPapers Surveys

A priori knowledge: yes or no?

Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?

Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?

Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?

Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?

Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

God: theism or atheism?

Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?

Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?

Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?

Logic: classical or non-classical?

Mental content: internalism or externalism?

Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?

Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?

Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?

Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism?

Moral motivation: internalism or externalism?

Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes?

Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?

Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?

Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view?

Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?

Proper names: Fregean or Millian?

Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?

Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?

Time: A-theory or B-theory?

Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch?

Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?

Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?

===

And... which of the following philosophers do you identify with?

The philosophers available to choose from for the "which philosophers do you identify with?" question were:

Anscombe

Aquinas

Aristotle

Augustine

Berkeley

Ca...
Do meetups really have to go on the front page?
by InquilineKea — 2011-04-11T00:24:03.033Z

I've been browsing LessWrong less often as of late, and I believe that one of the reasons is because I don't want to get all excited all over a new insightful LW post, only to discover that it's a meetup in a city that I'm not even in.

And for newbies to the site in particular, they're not going to see all the awesomeness of this site if they simply look at the frontpage and think it's a community just for meetups.

I'm sure meetup discussions can go somewhere prominent. Maybe a separate section can be devoted to them.
How I applied useful concepts from the personal growth seminar "est" and MBTI 
by suecochran — 2011-04-10T23:49:55.337Z

I have encountered personally in conversations, and also observed in the media over the past couple of decades, a great deal of skepticism, scorn, and ridicule, if not merely indifference or dismissal, from many people in reaction to the est training, which I completed in 1983, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator tool, which I first took in 1993 or 1994. I would like to share some concrete examples from my own life where information and perspective that I gained from these two sources have improved my life, both in my own way of conceptualizing and approaching things, and also in my relationships with others. I do this with the hope and intention of showing that est and MBTI have positive value, and encouraging people to explore these and other tools for personal growth.

One important insight that I gained from the est training is an understanding and the experience that I am not my opinions, and my opinions are not me. Opinions are neutral things, and they may be something I hold, or agree with, but I can separate my self from them, and I can discuss them, and I can change or discard them, but I am still the same "me". I am not more or less "myself" in relation to what I think or believe. Before I did the est training, whenever someone would question an opinion I held, I felt personally attacked. I identified my self with my opinion or belief. My emotional response to attack, like for many other people, is to defend and/or to retreat, so when I perceived of my "self" being "attacked", I gave in to the standard fight or flight response, and therefore I did not get the opportunity to explore the opinion in question to see if the person who questioned me had some important new information or a perspective that I had not previously considered. It is not that I always remember this or that it is my first response, but once I notice myself responding in the old way, I can then take that step back and remember the separation between self and opinion. That choice is now available to me, where it wasn't before. When I find myself in conversations with another person or people who disagree with me, my response now is to draw them out, to ask them about what they believe and why they believe it. I regard myself as if I were a reporter on a fact-finding mission. I step back and I do not feel attacked. I learn sometimes from this, and other times I do not, but I no longe...
Need help searching for a quote
by  — 2011-04-10T21:43:11.585Z

Hey,

I'm trying to find a quote that I recall seeing in the sequences. It was a post by Eliezer, and near the end he made a statement to the effect that 'We don't always know what is right, but you should never physically harm someone in the course of a dispute. Argumentation is an acceptable answer, but killing is not.'

I am writing a paper about that claim, and any help finding the particular quote would be incredibly useful. I suspect that it's somewhere in the 'Politics is a Mind-Killer' sub-sequence, though I haven't found it there yet.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Thanks for the help in advance.

-Michael

UPDATE: The quote was found:

"And it is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever."
Availability bias- please help me find a study
by Vaniver — 2011-04-10T21:23:21.805Z

So, the ancient example of availability bias is "are there more words with 'r' in the first letter or third letter?" Supposedly, most people say "first" when in fact the answer is "third."

However, I remember reading somewhere recently (I believe on Less Wrong in the last month, probably in a comment?) that this is actually a pretty bad example, as people get it right for a sizable number of letters / the results aren't reliably replicated. Is that the case, and more importantly, where can I find studies that state that (or the opposite)?

The best I've been able to find is this study, which compares 1st letter and 2nd letter frequencies, finding that people are good at estimating those. While it challenges some implications of the earlier finding, it doesn't contradict it. Anyone already familiar with the literature able to point me at something more relevant, or is that the best study out there now?
Meaning of the word "the"
by Perplexed — 2011-04-10T15:53:34.159Z

I need some help tracking down a quotation. I'm pretty sure that it was an early 20th century philosopher - perhaps Russell. He was explaining that modern philosophy no longer tries to find the meaning of life. Post-Witgenstein, it has narrowed its ambitions and now seeks only to discover the meaning of words. He goes on to explain why even this is likely to prove difficult. And then (here is the part I like) he wryly comments that in spite of the difficulties, there has been some progress in working out the meaning of the word "the".

Does that ring a bell for anyone?
Reasons for SIAI to not publish in mainstream journals
by lukeprog — 2011-04-10T14:45:51.090Z

Recently, I gave some reasons for SIAI to begin publishing in mainstream journals, and outlined how it could be done.

I've recently been made aware of some pretty good reasons for SIAI to not publish in mainstream journals, so here they are:

Articles published to websites (e.g. Yudkowsky's work, Bostrom's pre-prints) seem to have gotten more attention, and had more positive impact, than their in-journal counterparts.

Articles in mainstream journals take a relatively large amount of time, money, and expertise to produce.

Articles in mainstream journals must jump through lots of hoops - journals' aversion to novelty, reviewer bias, etc.

It is easier to simply collaborate with (and greatly influence) established mainstream academics who have already jumped through mainstream academia's many hoops (as Carl Shulman has been doing, for example).

I still think there are strong reasons to publish articles in standard academic form (for readability purposes), but I've recently updated hugely toward SIAI not publishing in mainstream journals.
Separate morality from free will
by PhilGoetz — 2011-04-10T02:35:22.802Z

[I made significant edits when moving this to the main page - so if you read it in Discussion, it's different now. It's clearer about the distinction between two different meanings of "free", and why linking one meaning of "free" with morality implies a focus on an otherworldly soul.]

It was funny to me that many people thought Crime and Punishment was advocating outcome-based justice. If you read the post carefully, nothing in it advocates outcome-based justice. I only wanted to show how people think, so I could write this post.

Talking about morality causes much confusion, because most philosophers - and most people - do not have a distinct concept of morality. At best, they have just one word that composes two different concepts. At worst, their "morality" doesn't contain any new primitive concepts at all; it's just a macro: a shorthand for a combination of other ideas.

I think - and have, for as long as I can remember - that morality is about doing the right thing. But this is not what most people think morality is about!

Free will and morality

Kant argued that the existence of morality implies the existence of free will. Roughly: If you don't have free will, you can't be moral, because you can't be responsible for your actions.1

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says: "Most philosophers suppose that the concept of free will is very closely connected to the concept of moral responsibility. Acting with free will, on such views, is just to satisfy the metaphysical requirement on being responsible for one's action." ("Free will" in this context refers to a mysterious philosophical phenomenological concept related to consciousness - not to whether someone pointed a gun at the agent's head.)

I was thrown for a loop when I first came across people saying that morality has something to do with free will. If morality is about doing the right thing, then free will has nothing to do with it. Yet we find Kant, and others, going on about how choices can be moral only if they are free.

The pervasive attitudes I described in Crime and Punishment threw me for the exact same loop. Committing a crime is, generally, regarded as immoral. (I am not claiming that it is immoral. I'm talking descriptively about general beliefs.) Yet people...
Self-modification, morality, and drugs
by fubarobfusco — 2011-04-10T00:02:53.215Z

No, not psychoactive drugs: allergy drugs.

This is my attempt to come to grips with the idea of self-modification. I'm interested to know of any flaws folks might spot in this analogy or reasoning.

Gandhi wouldn't take a pill that would make him want to kill people. That is to say, a person whose conscious conclusions agree with their moral impulses wouldn't self-modify in such a way that they no longer care about morally significant things. But, what about morally insignificant things? Specifically, is willingness to self-modify about X a good guide to whether X is morally significant?

A person with untreated pollen allergies cares about pollen; they have to. In order to have a coherent thought without sneezing in the middle of it, they have to avoid inhaling pollen. They may even perceive pollen as a personal enemy, something that attacks them and makes them feel miserable. But they would gladly take a drug that makes them not care about pollen, by turning off or weakening their immune system's response to it. That's what allergy drugs are for.

But a sane person would not shut off their entire immune system, including responses to pathogens that are actually attacking their body. Even if giving themselves an immune deficiency would stop their allergies, a sane allergy sufferer wouldn't do it; they know that the immune system is there for a reason, to defend against actual attacks, even if their particular immune system is erroneously sensitive to pollen as well as to pathogens.

My job involves maintaining computer systems. Like other folks in this sort of job, my team use an automated monitoring system that will send us an alert (by pager or SMS), waking us up at night if necessary, if something goes wrong with the systems. We want to receive significant alerts, and not receive false positives. We regularly modify the monitoring system to prevent false positives, because we don't like being woken up at night for no good reason. But we wouldn't want to turn off the monitoring system entirely; we actually want to receive true alerts, and we will take action to refine our monitoring system to deliver more accurate, more timely true alerts — because we would like to improve our systems to make them fail less often. We want to win, and false positives or negatives detract from winning.

Similarly, there are times when we conclude that our moral impulse...
The Neuroscience of Desire
by lukeprog — 2011-04-09T19:08:12.446Z

Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn’t it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don’t want to go to Montana.

- Don DeLillo, White Noise

Winning at life means achieving your goals — that is, satisfying your desires. As such, it will help to understand how our desires work. (I was tempted to title this article The Hidden Complexity of Wishes: Science Edition!)

Previously, I introduced readers to the neuroscience of emotion (affective neuroscience), and explained that the reward system in the brain has three major components: liking, wanting, and learning. That post discussed 'liking' or pleasure. Today we discuss 'wanting' or desire.

The birth of neuroeconomics

Much work has been done on the affective neuroscience of desire,1 but I am less interested with desire as an emotion than I am with desire as a cause of decisions under uncertainty. This latter aspect of desire is mostly studied by neuroeconomics,2 not affective neuroscience.

From about 1880-1960, neoclassical economics proposed simple, axiomatic models of human choice-making focused on the idea that agents make rational decisions aimed at maximizing expected utility. In the 1950s and 60s, however, economists discovered some paradoxes of human behavior that violated the axioms of these models.3 In the 70s and 80s, psychology launched an even broader attack on these models. For example, while economists assumed that choices among objects should not depend on how they are described ('descriptive invariance'), psychologists discovered powerful framing effects.4

In response, the field of behavioral economics began to offer models of human choice-making that fit the experimental data better than simple models of neoclassical economics did.5 Behavioral economists often proposed models that could be thought of as information-processing algorithms, so neuroscientists began looking for evidence of these algorithms in the human br...
Gamification and rationality training
by Psy-Kosh — 2011-04-09T17:59:00.780Z

Watch this Extra Credits and take note especially of the end, where they're offering consultation to educators and doctors re making educational stuff and other useful stuff more like games. (Incidentally, the people that make Extra Credits all work in or have been around in the game industry)

I figured I'll email them and going to point them to LW, see if they're willing to give any insights re rationality training. Especially in light of the fact that the subject of games for teaching rationality has come here up before.

Hey, maybe we'll learn something about how to learn something about how to be Less Wrong.
Trusting Yourself (Formally)
by paulfchristiano — 2011-04-09T14:59:45.094Z

Suppose I am a self-modifying AI reasoning about my own behavior (or about the behavior of another AI I am designing).

To a human, it seems like it is very important that we trust our own deductions. That is, humans seem to believe "things I believe are probably true." Thus a human would not self-modify to stop acting on their beliefs. How do we formalize this sort of trust?

For simplicity say I exist in a fixed environment without uncertainty whose description I know (including my own existence in it). The only sort of statements I care about are mathematical statements: any property of our environment can be expressed as a purely mathematical statement. In order to act intelligently in this environment, I have a mathematical deduction engine which proves mathematical statements; my decisions are informed by the output of my deduction engine.

I am considering replacing my deduction engine with a psuedo-random statement evaluator in order to save energy (after all, I need energy for many purposes). Why shouldn't I do it? You might hope that the deduction engine would be able to tell me that my deduction engine is useful; that my deduction engine isn't just a psuedo-random statement evaluator. But an important property of mathematical deduction is the second incompleteness theorem: no reasonable proof system X can prove that X doesn't prove false statements. In fact the situation is more dire: if X ever proves a statement of the form "X wouldn't prove Y if Y weren't true" then X must also prove Y itself.

My question is: what sort of confidence in its own reasoning can a consistent thinker actually have? I know that an agent sure of its own correctness will start believing everything. But what about an agent who is 99% confident of its own correctness? What does Lob's theorem look like when applied to probabilistic beliefs?

For example, suppose the algorithm X believes itself to be well-calibrated in the following sense. For any statement A and any probability p and any time T, consider the statements S1 = "At time T, X believes A with probability p," and S2 = "At time T, X believes A with probability p, and A is really true." We say that X believes itself to be well-calibrated about A at time T if, for all p, the probability X assigns to S2 is exactly p times the probability X assigns to S1.

Lob's theorem says that this sort of belief in well-calibration is i...