trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Theory of Knowledge (rationality outreach)
by KPier — 2011-08-09T21:36:07.057Z

Public schools (and arguably private schools as well; I wouldn't know) teach students what to think, not how to think.

On LessWrong, this insight is so trivial not to bear repeating. Unfortunately, I think many people have adopted it as an immutable fact about the world that will be corrected post-Singularity, rather than a totally unacceptable state of affairs which we should be doing something about now. The consensus seems to be that a class teaching the basic principles of thinking would be a huge step towards raising the sanity waterline, but that it will never happen. Well, my school has one. It's called Theory of Knowledge, and it's offered at 2,307 schools worldwide as part of the IB Diploma Program.

The IB Diploma, for those of you who haven't heard of it, is a internationally recognized high school program. It requires students to pass tests in 6 subject areas, jump through a number of other hoops, and take an additional class called Theory of Knowledge.

For the record, I'm not convinced the IB Diploma Program is a good thing. It doesn't really solve any of the problems with public schools, it shares the frustrating focus on standardized testing and password-guessing instead of real learning, etc. But I think Theory of Knowledge is a huge opportunity to spread the ideas of rationality.

What kinds of people sign up for the IB Diploma? It is considered more rigorous than A-levels in Britain, and dramatically more rigorous than standard classes in the United States (I would consider it approximately equal to taking 5 or 6 AP classes a year). Most kids engaged in this program are intelligent, motivated and interested in the world around them. They seem, (through my informal survey method of talking to lots of them) to have a higher click factor than average.

The problem is that currently, Theory of Knowledge is a waste of time. There isn't much in the way of standards for a curriculum, and in the entire last semester we covered less content than I learn from any given top-level LessWrong post. We debated the nature of truth for 4 months; most people do not come up with interesting answers to this on their own initiative, so the conversation went in circles around "There's no such thing as truth!" "Now, that's just stupid." the whole time. When I mention LessWrong to my friends, I generally explain it as "What ToK would be like, if ToK was actually good."

At ...
The New York Times: The Mathematics of Changing Your Mind
by Incorrect — 2011-08-09T20:27:36.032Z

Bayes’s theorem, named after the 18th-century Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes, addresses this selfsame essential task: How should we modify our beliefs in the light of additional information? Do we cling to old assumptions long after they’ve become untenable, or abandon them too readily at the first whisper of doubt? Bayesian reasoning promises to bring our views gradually into line with reality and so has become an invaluable tool for scientists of all sorts and, indeed, for anyone who wants, putting it grandiloquently, to sync up with the universe. If you are not thinking like a Bayesian, perhaps you should be.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/books/review/the-theory-that-would-not-die-by-sharon-bertsch-mcgrayne-book-review.html

Reddit /r/math discussion
Meetup : San Diego social meet-up
by Mercurial — 2011-08-09T19:39:28.615Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Diego social meet-up

WHEN:
14 August 2011 01:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
6380 Del Cerro Blvd. San Diego, CA 92120

As per this request, we're having a meetup on Sunday, August 14th at the K&B Wine Cellars (same as last time).

This is probably going to be primarily social rather than covering specific topics. (We're still hammering out details for the topics-based one for the last Sunday of the month.)

The locale we're using wasn't particularly picky about when we should leave last time, so I suspect we have pretty much the whole afternoon.

If you have any particular desire to use the projector, either let me know here or be sure to bring a VGA cable. (Last time theirs was missing.) And, of course, if you want to use a Mac with the projector be sure to have any adaptors you need with you.

Also, as Miciaih_Chang so kindly reminded me in the comments below, the sound system for the projector doesn't work (or possibly isn't hooked up to a speaker system in the first place). So if you want to give a presentation that depends on sound and your laptop's speakers are, well, laptop speakers, you might want to bring some speakers of your own. (If you need this but have trouble getting a hold of speakers, let me know. I might be able to borrow some from my program.)

And as last time, I politely request that no smokers attend. This was a total non-issue last time, for which my wife and I are grateful! But just to be careful, I'll repeat the request each time I put these together.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Diego social meet-up
Leveling IRL - level 1
by cousin_it — 2011-08-09T17:12:09.681Z

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -- Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

This post is a followup to Leveling IRL. Thanks to SarahC, taryneast, Benquo, AdeleneDawner and MixedNuts, we have an outline of level 1. At this point I feel it's more productive to post it as-is than discuss it further:

Strength: reach the "untrained" level on each exercise in the ExRx tables.

Endurance: run 1 mile (1.6 km) without stopping.

Social: initiate a conversation with someone you know and arrange a meeting with them later. Do that 4 times with different people within 1 month.

Self control: work for 2 hours without interruptions. Do that on 8 separate days within 1 month.

Memory: memorize and recite a passage of your choosing, at least 250 words long, without making any mistakes.

Programming: solve Project Euler problem #1 by writing and running a program in any language you choose.

Cooking: make pancakes. Here's a good recipe.

Finance: make a simple buy vs rent calculation, using prices appropriate for your area and your current standard of living.

Creativity: write 500 words of fiction in one sitting.

The list has some glaring omissions, like math or chess, because I don't yet know of a crisp enough way to test those skills. Ideas are welcome! Also it seems very likely that some items on the list are wildly miscalibrated, some of them will turn out to be too hard for a beginner, and others will be too easy for anyone with a pulse. I'll be happy to hear about such miscalibrated requirements from the people who achieved them or at least tried :-)

And here's what I think the rules should look like:

The requirements for a level are frozen. No discussing them while you're trying to achieve them.

A level is indivisible, you don't get moral whuffie points for doing half of the tasks.

The only exception is that some people may opt to try for Level 1 No Physical, so they don't have to meet the Strength and Endurance requirements. (In university we had a saying that "sports is the only test you cannot cram i

...
Judging the intent of others favorably
by lessdazed — 2011-08-09T17:10:10.888Z

I would like LW to be an environment in which we can learn by having honest and productive conversations. Fortunately, it substantially is such a place, but we can do better.

I would like to make a post about judging others favorably in the near future. To this end I think a useful mechanism would be to encourage people to post as comments scenarios in which they made erroneous assumptions about others' intent, and hide the conclusion in which they learned of their error from view until the reader has performed the exercise of considering what the innocuous actual explanation might be.

The purpose would be to make a repository of stories in which people could read the scenario, fail to think of how the situation could be resolved, and then see how in the previously hidden comment. Each bias involved in misjudgment - thinking one's enemies innately evil, believing one's own argument from ignorance about what the best possible explanation could be, and so forth - would be identified.

I don't know that hiding the conclusions of stories would be technically easy. One hack would be to have people post the conclusion within the comment in which they laid out the story. people could then downvote the child comment and upvote the parent. However, not everyone has the hiding threshold set at -3, and the first people to see the comment would see the conclusion, not everyone has unlimited dowvotes, etc.

Alternatively, the conclusion to each story could be in rot13.

As a protocols, analogously to how people are discouraged from quoting themselves, I would think to limit posts about when others misjudged the author's intent to a maximum, perhaps one for every two submissions in which an author posts he or she misjudged the intent of others.

As another protocol posts in which others on LW misjudged one's intent would be off-limits.

Comments are encouraged, whether on my proposed protocols, how to format, etc.
Meetup : Ottawa LessWrong Weekly Meetup
by XFrequentist — 2011-08-09T15:38:32.385Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa LessWrong Weekly Meetup

WHEN: 10 August 2011 07:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: Heart and Crown, 347 Preston Street, Ottawa ON

To switch things up, we'll try a new night and venue.

We'll be at the Heart & Crown Pub on Preston Street, probably in the back room.

Discussion post: Learned Blankness - (Other suggestions welcome)

Activity: Repetition

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa LessWrong Weekly Meetup
Topic Search Poll Results and Short Reports
by Nic_Smith — 2011-08-09T06:28:38.031Z

At the end of June, I asked Less Wrong to vote for "What topic[s] would be best for an investigation and brief post?" in order to direct a search for topics to examine here. My thanks to everyone that participated (especially since the comments hint that the poll format was not well-liked). The most-wanted topics follow, and the complete list can be found on Google Docs -- maps and graphs related to the poll are also available on All Our Ideas. A score for a topic in the results below is an "estimated [percent] chance that it will win against a randomly chosen idea."

Systems theory -- 71.6

Leadership -- 70.7

Linguistics (general) -- 70.7

Finance -- 67.0

Bayesian approach to business -- 60.7

Lisp (Programming language) -- 59.7

Anthropology (general) -- 59.4

Sociology (general) -- 59.2

Political Science (general) -- 58.5

Historiography (the methods of history) -- 58.3

Logistics -- 56.8

Sociology of Political Organizations -- 56.0

Military Theory -- 52.1

Diplomacy -- 51.1

Systems theory, in first place, is a topic that I found while rummaging through online sources, including Wikipedia, for items to add to the poll; it's described there as the "study of systems in general, with the goal of elucidating principles that can be applied to all types of systems in all fields of research. [....] In this context the word systems is used to refer specifically to self-regulating systems, i.e. that are self-correcting through feedback." Leadership seems to fall into both the social and "being effective" categories of interest, but has only lightly been touched on in previous discussion here despite a lot of ink spilled on the topic elsewhere -- the top Google results for "leadership" on this site are currently Calcsam's post on community roles and a book review for the Arbinger Institute's Leadership and Self Deception. "To Lead, You Must Stand Up" also comes to mind.

How to Use It

The spreadsheet includes columns for "Currently Investigated By" and "Writeup URLs" -- feel free to add your name or writeup links. If you already know a thing or two about one of the above topics, share your knowledge in a comment below or in a discussion post as appropriate, similar to the earlier "What can you teach us?" If you want to survey what currently exists on a topic, grab a few books, investigate, and then let us know what you found. When a related post instead of just a comment i...
[SEQ RERUN] Failing to Learn from History
by Unnamed — 2011-08-09T04:42:37.325Z

Today's post, Failing to Learn from History was originally published on August 30, 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

There are no inherently mysterious phenomena, but every phenomenon seems mysterious, right up until the moment that science explains it. It seems to us now that biology, chemistry, and astronomy are naturally the realm of science, but if we had lived through their discoveries, and watched them reduced from mysterious to mundane, we would be more reluctant to believe the next phenomenon is inherently mysterious.

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 My Wild and Reckless Youth, 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.
Individual Deniability, Statistical Honesty
by Alicorn — 2011-08-09T04:17:19.388Z

If you have a lot of people to question about something, and they have a motivation to lie, consider this clever use of a six-sided die.

If the farmer tossed the die and got a one, they had to respond "yes" to the surveyor's question. If they got a six, they had to say "no." The rest of the time, they were asked to answer honestly. The die was hidden from the person who was conducting the survey, so they never knew what number the farmer was responding to.

Suddenly, the number of "yes" responses to the leopard question started coming up by more than just one-sixth.
Real-life observations of the blue eyes puzzle phenomenon?
by HonoreDB — 2011-08-08T17:10:32.957Z

The Blue Eyes Puzzle (solution) depicts a paradox: people engage in coordinated action despite having no new information, when "I know you know he knows" reaches a critical mass. Apparently the formal system invented to address this is called Common Knowledge.

Duncan Black complains:

I wonder if any serious investor could actually explain what new information "the market" has which could explain why DJIA should be worth 11% less than it was 2 weeks ago.

The typical, compelling, explanation for this sort of thing is herd behavior. In the absence of new information, the market is modeled as a random walk, and when the amplitude of its swing happens to get high enough, people see a trend, anticipate it continuing, and thereby create the trend and cause a massive swing.

I wonder if you could instead model stock market swings, or other seemingly unmotivated coordinated activity, as common knowledge reaching critical mass. Say new information was injected into the market two weeks ago, and it took that long to reach a blue eyes catastrophe.

I have no evidence for this other than random pattern matching.
Spaced repetition review (my entry)
by gwern — 2011-08-08T15:48:30.514Z

As people have likely forgotten, jsalvatier had generously set up a contest to look through the literature on the spacing effect. Duke submitted his entry a while ago, and I turned mine in on the 1 August deadline. It's part of my overall essay on spaced repetition: gwern.net/Spaced repetition#literature-review

There's a lot of research, and I only cover what I estimate to be 0-5% of the extant literature, so if you're interested only in the punchline: gwern.net/Spaced repetition#review-summary

(This is only a pointer to the review because the formatting would drive me nuts on LW. I'm not sure the edit box even supports footnotes at all; nor do I intend to find out.)
[Website usability] Scroll to new comments (v0.3)
by dbaupp — 2011-08-08T14:08:30.127Z

I wrote a short userscript1 that allows for jumping to the next (or previous) new comment in a page (those marked with green). I have tested it on Firefox nightly with the Greasemonkey addon and Chromium. Unfortunately, I think that user scripts only work in Chromium/Google Chrome and Firefox (with Greasemonkey).

Download here (Clicking the link should offer a install prompt, and that is all the work that needs to be done.)

It inserts a small box in the lower right-hand corner that indicates the number of new messages and has a "next" and a "previous" link like so:

Clicking either link should scroll the browser to the top of the appropriate comment (wrapping around at the top and bottom).

The "!" link shows a window for error logging. If a bug occurs, clicking the "Generate log" button inside this window will create a box with some information about the running of the script2, copying and pasting that information here will make debugging easier.

I have only tested on the two browsers listed above, and only on Linux, so feedback about any bugs/improvements would be useful.

(Technical note: It is released under the MIT License, and this link is to exactly the same file as above but renamed so that the source can be viewed more easily. The file extension needs to be changed to "user.js" to be able to run as a user script properly)

Changelog

v0.1 - First version

v0.2 - Logging & indication of number of new messages

v0.3 - Correctly update when hidden comments are loaded (and license change). NOTE: Upgrading to v0.3 on Chrome is likely to cause a "Downgrading extension error" (I'd made a mistake with the version numbers previously), the fix is to uninstall and then reinstall the new version. (uninstall via Tools > Extensions)

1 A segment of javascript that runs in the web browser as the page is loaded. It can modify the page, e.g. inserting a bit of html as this script does.

2 Specifically: the url, counts of different sets of comments, some info about the new comments, and also a list of the clicks on "prev" and "next".
Best Textbook List Expansion
by magfrump — 2011-08-08T11:17:33.462Z

A while back, Lukeprog set up an article to list the best textbooks in every subject. It currently contains a fairly large list of books in a variety of subjects.

I just got an e-mail from Amazon advertising "Up to 90% off textbooks" and I thought "This seems like a good opportunity to check out a bunch of cheap, good textbooks in subjects I want to learn about!"

When I went over to Luke's post, I discovered recommendations for philosophy, psychology, all sorts of math, but almost none in basic science.

I assume that someone here must have read one or a few basic textbooks on physics, biology, and chemistry. If so, what were they? How were they? Would I be better off just trying to take a basic lecture course in the subject, or going through Khan Academy?
Part 1 On What is a Self Discussion
by diegocaleiro — 2011-08-08T09:55:28.151Z

In Nonperson Predicates Eliezer said:

"Build an AI? Sure! Make it Friendly? Now that you point it out, sure! But trying to come up with a "nonperson predicate"? That's just way above the difficulty level they signed up to handle.

But a longtime Overcoming Bias reader will be aware that a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory. That impossible confusing questions correspond to places where your own thoughts are tangled, not to places where the environment itself contains magic. That even difficult problems do not require an aura of destiny to solve. And that the first step to solving one is not running away from the problem like a frightened rabbit, but instead sticking long enough to learn something.

So I am not running away from this problem myself."

Me neither. When entering the non-existent gates of bayesian Heaven, I don't want to have to admit that I have located a sufficiently small problem in problem-space that seems solvable and that unsolved constitutes an existential risk, that was not being tackled by anyone I met in the Singularity Institute, and I just ran away from it.

So, would you mind helping me? In the course of writing my CEV text, I noticed that discussing what are people/selves was a necessary previous step. I've written the first part of that text, and would like to know what is excessive/unclear/improvable/vague.

On What Is a Self

Selves and Persons
In the eight movement of your weekly chess game you do what feels same as always: Reflect for a few seconds on the many layers of structure underlying the current game-state, specially regarding changes from your opponent’s last move. It seems reasonable to eat his pawn with your bishop. After moving you look at him and see the sequence of expressions: Doubt “Why did he do that?”, distrust “He must be seeing something I don’t”, inquiry “Let me double check this”, Schadenfreud “No, he actually failed” and finally joy “Piece of cake, I’ll win”. He takes your bishop with a horse that from your perspective could only be coming from neverland. Still stunned, you resign. It is the second time in a row you lose the game due to a simple mistake. The excuse bursts naturally out of your mouth: “I’m not myself today”
Th...
Anki Library
by atucker — 2011-08-08T05:00:22.904Z

I have a few anki decks that I like, and am making more based on books I'm reading (currently doing one on Good Calories, Bad Calories). They don't replace reading the book, could probably supplement a summary, but definitely helps recall on specific details (at least for me).
Other people have some anki decks that I'm interested in sharing.
Would people be interested in setting up a shared anki library? Or at least a list of decks so that people can find them in anki's search?