trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Communicating via writing vs. in person
by Adam Zerner — 2015-05-22T04:58:06.373Z

There's a lot that I really like about communicating via writing. Communicating in person is sometimes frustrating for me, and communicating via writing addresses a lot of those frustrations:

1) I often want to make a point that depends on the other person knowing X. In person, if I always paused and did the following, it'd add a lot of friction to conversations: "Wait, do you know X? If yes, good, I'll continue. If no, let me think about how to explain it briefly. Or do you want me to explain it in more depth? Or do you want to try to proceed without knowing X and see how it goes?". But if I don't do so, then it risks miscommunication (because the other person may not have the dependency X).

In writing, I could just link to an article. If the other person doesn't have the dependency, they have options. They could try to proceed without knowing X and see how it goes. If it doesn't work out, they could come back and read the link. Or they could read the link right away. And in reading the link, they have their choice of how deeply they want to read. Ie. they could just skim if they want to.

Alternatively, if you don't have something to link to, you could add a footnote. I think that a UI like Medium's side comments is very preferable to putting the footnotes at the bottom of the page. I hope to see this adopted across the internet some time in the next 5 years or so.

2) I think that in general, being precise about what you're saying is actually quite difficult/time consuming*. For example, I don't really mean what I just said. I'm actually not sure how often that it's difficult/time consuming to be precise with what you're saying. And I'm not sure how often it's useful to be precise about what you're saying (or really, more precise...whatever that means...). I guess what I really mean is that it happens often enough where it's a problem. Or maybe just that for me, it happens enough where I find it to be a problem.

Anyway, I find that putting quotes around what I say is a nice way to mitigate this problem.

Ex. It's "in my nature" to be strategic.

The quotes show that the word inside them isn't precisely what I mean, but that it's close enough to what I mean that it should communicate the gist of it. I sense that this communication often happens through empathetic inference.

*I also find that I feel internal and external pressure to be consistent with what I ...
"Risk" means surprise
by PhilGoetz — 2015-05-22T04:47:08.768Z

I lost about $20,000 in 2013 because I didn't notice that a company managing some of my retirement funds had helpfully reallocated them from 100% stocks into bonds and real estate, to "avoid risk". My parents are retired, and everyone advising them tells them to put most of their money in "safe" investments like bonds.

Vanguard has an online retirement advisor that asks you 11 questions, most of which are variations of "Will you panic and sell everything if the market falls?" (I was especially amused by one that added, "Tell us what you did, not what you think you would do.") I filled them out for a hypothetical 65-year-old who is retiring immediately and expects to live another 20 years, (answering the "Are you stupid?" questions with "No, I am not stupid.") It advised this hypothetical person to put his money 50% in bonds and 50% in stocks.

Vanguard also has a neat Monte Carlo retirement simulator that runs 5,000 simulations of an initial investment with a given stocks/bonds allocation using random (non-Markovian) historical data, and tells you in what percentage of these simulations you went broke. I put the same numbers into this retirement simulator and ran it with 100% stocks:

Then I ran the same simulation with the recommended 50% stocks, 50% bonds:

So, 100% stocks is 3 times as likely to last for 20 years as the recommended 50% stocks / 50% bonds. (For the Bayesians out there, it gives an odds ratio multiplier over the recommended allocation of 3.5.) It also has a much, much higher expected value. The only sense in which the 50% stocks / 50% bonds allocation provides less risk is that the worst cases--and we're talking about 5% of results--are a few percentage points less bad.

If you play around enough with the simulator, you can find situations in which the 50% bonds allocation gives a smaller chance of running out of money. They're all situations where you have a lot of money and not much time to spend it. One I found is: $1,000,000, spend $48,000 (2015 dollars) per year for 20 years. 50% stocks / 50% bonds allocation leads to 97% survival. For 100% stocks, it's only 90%.

Yet for most people, 100% stocks is far less risky, by which I mean their chances of running out of money are lower, by which I mean they're not 100%. The median retirement savings for Americans age 55 to 64 is $103,000. The recommended "safe" allocation guarantees q...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Value of Information
by RobinZ — 2015-05-22T02:00:03.200Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Value of Information

WHEN:
24 May 2015 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

We'll be congregating at the courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery from 3:00 - 3:30 until closing, to talk about value of information, or about whatever and use the meetup topic to fill gaps in conversation.

Upcoming meetups:

May 31: MIRI Q&A

Jun. 7: Fun & Games

Jun. 14: Create and Complete

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Value of Information
Leaving LessWrong for a more rational life
by  — 2015-05-21T19:24:32.154Z

You are unlikely to see me posting here again, after today. There is a saying here that politics is the mind-killer. My heretical realization lately is that philosophy, as generally practiced, can also be mind-killing.

As many of you know I am, or was running a twice-monthly Rationality: AI to Zombies reading group. One of the bits I desired to include in each reading group post was a collection of contrasting views. To research such views I've found myself listening during my commute to talks given by other thinkers in the field, e.g. Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg, and Ray Kurzweil, and people I feel are doing “ideologically aligned” work, like Aubrey de Grey, Christine Peterson, and Robert Freitas. Some of these were talks I had seen before, or generally views I had been exposed to in the past. But looking through the lens of learning and applying rationality, I came to a surprising (to me) conclusion: it was philosophical thinkers that demonstrated the largest and most costly mistakes. On the other hand, de Grey and others who are primarily working on the scientific and/or engineering challenges of singularity and transhumanist technologies were far less likely to subject themselves to epistematic mistakes of significant consequences.

Philosophy as the anti-science...

What sort of mistakes? Most often reasoning by analogy. To cite a specific example, one of the core underlying assumption of singularity interpretation of super-intelligence is that just as a chimpanzee would be unable to predict what a human intelligence would do or how we would make decisions (aside: how would we know? Were any chimps consulted?), we would be equally inept in the face of a super-intelligence. This argument is, however, nonsense. The human capacity for abstract reasoning over mathematical models is in principle a fully general intelligent behaviour, as the scientific revolution has shown: there is no aspect of the natural world which has remained beyond the reach of human understanding, once a sufficient amount of evidence is available. The wave-particle duality of quantum physics, or the 11-dimensional space of string theory may defy human intuition, i.e. our built-in intelligence. But we have proven ourselves perfectly capable of understanding the logical implications of models which employ them. We may not be able to build intuition for how a super-intelligence

...
Meetup : Bratislava Meetup
by Viliam — 2015-05-21T19:21:00.320Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava Meetup

WHEN:
25 May 2015 06:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Grösslingová 71, Bratislava

Improvizovaná stretávka u nás doma; telefón 0908/158110. Možno budeme musieť skončiť skôr ako obyčajne, podľa toho, ako to bude zvládať naše dieťa.

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava Meetup
Two Words That Offer Final Ultimate Proof That Medical System Is Evil
by Zvi — 2015-05-21T17:55:25.000Z

Music therapy.

At the hospital, I have just learned, they offer Music Therapy. By music, I mean random folk singers with guitars. By therapy, I mean letting those folk singers sing, and play their guitars. And by offer, I mean do this without consent, around patients who are too weak to object; many of them cannot respond at all.

These are often people who are about to die no matter what we do. It is one thing to deny them death in peace, or with dignity, at a hospice, while running up an ungodly large bill at what is effectively the public’s expense. But live folk music?

Haven’t they suffered enough?
Brainstorming new senses
by lululu — 2015-05-20T19:53:55.069Z

What new senses would you like to have available to you?

Often when new technology first becomes widely available, the initial limits are in the collective imagination, not in the technology itself (case in point: the internet). New sensory channels have a huge potential because the brain can process senses much faster and more intuitively than most conscious thought processes.

There are a lot of recent "proof of concept" inventions that show that it is possible to create new sensory channels for humans with and without surgery. The most well known and simple example is an implanted magnet, which would alert you to magnetic fields (the trade-off being that you could never have an MRI). Cochlear implants are the most widely used human-created sensory channels (they send electrical signals directly to the nervous system, bypassing the ear entirely), but CIs are designed to emulate a sensory channel most people already have brain space allocated to. VEST is another example. Similar to CIs, VEST (versatile extra-sensory transducer) has 24 information channels, and uses audio compression to encode sound. Unlike CIs, they are not implanted in the skull but instead information is relayed through vibrating motors on the torso. After a few hours of training, deaf volunteers are capable of word recognition using the vibrations alone, and to do so without conscious processing. Much like hearing, the users are unable to describe exactly what components make a spoken word intelligible, they just understand the sensory information intuitively. Another recent invention being tested (with success) is BrainPort glasses, which send electrical signals through the tongue (which is one of the most sensitive organs on the body). Blind people can begin processing visual information with this device within 15 minutes, and it is unique in that it is not implanted. The sensory information feels like pop rocks at first before the brain is able to resolve it into sight. Niel Harbisson (who is colorblind) has custom glasses which use sound tones to relay color information. Belts that vibrate when facing north give people an sense of north. Bottlenose can be built at home and gives a very primitive sense of echolocation. As expected, these all work better if people start young as children.

What are the craziest and coolest new senses you would like to see available using this new tech...
What degree of cousins are you and I? Estimates of Consanguinity to promote feelings of kinship and empathy
by chaosmage — 2015-05-20T17:10:37.941Z

Epistemic status: Wild guesswork based on half-understood studies from way outside my field. More food for thought than trustworthy information.

tl/dr: Estimates of familial relatedness between people should help promote empathy, so here's how to make them - and might this be useful for Effective Altruism?

The why

I don't know how it is for you, but for me, knowing I'm related to someone makes a specific emotional difference. Scenario: I'm at a big family-and-friends get-together, I meet a guy, we get along. (For clarity, let's assume no sexual tension.) And then we're told we're third cousins via some weird aunt. From the moment I'm told, I feel different towards him. Firm, forthcoming, obliging. Some kind of basic kinship emotion, I guess, noticeable when it shifts on these rare occasions but basically going on, deep down in System 1, every time that emailing a remote uncle feels different from emailing a similarly remote associate.

Meanwhile, my System 2 has heard that all humans are at least 50th degree cousins and likes to point out everyone I've ever had sex with was a cousin of some degree. That similarly remote associate where I don't have that kinship feeling - he's a relative too, just a more distant one. And when I notice that, I get a bit of that kinship feeling too...

With me so far? Here's my thesis: the two human feelings of kinship and empathy are closely connected, and to make one of them more salient is to increase the salience of the other.

I don't think this has been tested properly. A. J. Jacobs, who is running a huge family reunion event in New York this summer, said "some ambitious psychology professor needs to conduct a study about whether we deliver lower electrical shocks to people if we know we’re related" and I think he's exactly right.

Has anybody here not heard of circles of empathy? They're a concept invented by the very cool 19th century rationalist William Edward Hartpole Lecky in his "History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne". Peter Singer summarizes it as follows:

Lecky wrote of human concern as an expanding circle which begins with the individual, then embraces the family and ‘soon the circle... includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man [sic] with the animal world’.

There's more to read about...
[Link] A Darwinian Response to Sam Harris’s Moral Landscape Challenge
by TheSurvivalMachine — 2015-05-20T13:44:23.172Z

I noticed that there has been some earlier discussion about Sam Harris’s Moral Landscape Challenge here at LW. As a writer on the Swedish politico-philosophical blog The Inverted Fable of Reality, I would like to share a response to the challenge, written by our main contributor, which I believe is interesting to read even if you are not familiar with The Moral Landscape or its content. See this link for the response and a short explanation of the challenge.
The response takes a different approach to most responses to the challenge. It is divided into four parts and starts by asking which ethic is most compatible with science and reality and finally tries to answer this question.
What Would You Do If You Only Had Six Months To Live?
by Sable — 2015-05-20T00:52:05.706Z

Recently, I've been pondering situations in which a person realizes, with (let's say) around 99% confidence, that they are going to die within a set period of time.

The reason for this could be a kind of cancer without any effective treatment, an injury of some kind, or a communicable disease or virus (such as Ebola). More generally, the simple fact that until Harry Potter-Evans-Verres makes the Philosopher's Stone available to us muggles, we're all going to die eventually makes this kind of consideration valuable.

Let's say that you felt ill, and decided to visit the doctor. After the appropriate tests by the appropriate medical professionals, an old man with a kind face tells you that you have brain cancer. It is inoperable (or the operation has less than a 1% success rate) and you are given six months to live. This kindly old doctor adds that he is very sorry, and gives you a prescription for something to deal with the symptoms (at least for a while).

Furthermore, you understand something of probability, and so while you might hope for a miracle, you know better than to count on one. Which means that even if there exists a .0001% chance you'll live for another 50 years, you have to act as though you're only going to live another six months.

What should you do?

The first answer I thought of was, "go skydiving," which is a cheeky shorthand for trying to enjoy your own life as much as you can until you die. Upon reflection, however, that seems like an awfully hedonistic answer, doesn't it? Given this philosophy, you should gorge yourself on donuts, spend your life's savings on expensive cars and prostitutes, and die with a smile on your face.

Something doesn't seem quite right about this approach. For one, it completely ignores things like trying to take care of the people close to you that you're leaving behind, but even if you're a friendless orphan it doesn't make sense to live like that. Dopamine is not happiness, and feeling alive isn't necessarily what life is about. I took a university course centered around Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, and one of the examples we used to distinguish a "happy" life from a "well-spent" life was that of the math professor who spends her days counting blades of grass. While counting those blades of grass might make her happiest, she is still wasting her l...
How my social skills went from horrible to mediocre
by JonahS — 2015-05-19T23:29:48.743Z

Over the past few months, I've become aware that my understanding of social reality had been distorted to an extreme degree. It took 29 years for me to figure out what was going on, but I finally now understand.

The situation is very simple: The amount of time that I put into interacting within typical social contexts was very small, so I didn't get enough feedback to realize that I had a major blindspot as I otherwise would have.

Now that I've identified the blindspot, I can work on it, and my social awareness has been increasing at very rapid clip. I had no idea that I had so much potential for social awareness. I had been in a fixed mindset as rather than a growth mindset, I had thought "social skills will never be my strong point, so I shouldn't spend time trying to improve them, instead I should focus on what I'm best at." I'm astonished by how much my relationships have improved over a span of mere weeks.

I give details below.

How I spent my time growing up

I've been extremely metacognitive and reflective since early childhood, and have spent most of my time optimizing for my intellectual growth. Even as a child, the things that I thought about where very unusual: at age 7, upon reflection, I realized that there's no free will in the sense that people usually think of it: that brain chemistry drives our decisions in a very strong sense.

As I grew up, my interests became more and more remote from those of my peers, and the pool of conversation topics of mutual interest diminished rapidly as I got older. For this reason, I generally found my interactions with others to be very unfulfilling: other people were rarely interested in talking about what I wanted to talk about, and I struggled to find points of mutual interest.

Because I was much more unusual than most of my conversation partners, there was an implicit assumption that the responsibility of finding common ground fell exclusively on me, rather than being shared by me and my conversation partners. Even when I tried really hard to connect with my conversation partners, it often came across to my conversation partners though I wasn't trying, because our interests were so different that even if I bridged 95% of the gap, the remaining 5% was uncomfortably large for them, so that they would feel resentful toward me.

There were almost no people who shared my interests. So my choices seemed to be

So

...
Log-normal Lamentations
by Thrasymachus — 2015-05-19T21:12:52.019Z

[Morose. Also very roughly drafted.]

Normally, things are distributed normally. Human talents may turn out to be one of these things. Some people are lucky enough to find themselves on the right side of these distributions – smarter than average, better at school, more conscientious, whatever. To them go many spoils – probably more so now than at any time before, thanks to the information economy.

There’s a common story told about a hotshot student at school whose ego crashes to earth when they go to university and find themselves among a group all as special as they thought they were. The reality might be worse: many of the groups the smart or studious segregate into (physics professors, Harvard undergraduates, doctors) have threshold (or near threshold)-like effects: only those with straight A’s, only those with IQs > X, etc. need apply. This introduces a positive skew to the population: most (and the median) are below the average, brought up by a long tail of the (even more) exceptional. Instead of comforting ourselves at looking at the entire population to which we compare favorably, most of us will look around our peer group and find ourselves in the middle, and having to look a long way up to the best. 1

Yet part of growing up is recognizing there will inevitably be people better than you are – the more able may be able to buy their egos time, but no more. But that needn’t be so bad: in several fields (such as medicine) it can be genuinely hard to judge ‘betterness’, and so harder to find exemplars to illuminate your relative mediocrity. Often there are a variety of dimensions to being ‘better’ at something: although I don’t need to try too hard to find doctors who are better at some aspect of medicine than I (more knowledgeable, kinder, more skilled in communication etc.) it is mercifully rare to find doctors who are better than me in all respects. And often the tails are thin: if you’re around 1 standard deviation above the mean, people many times further from the average than you are will still be extraordinarily rare, even if you had a good stick to compare them to yourself.

Look at our thick-tailed works, ye average, and despair! 2

One nice thing about the EA community is that they tend to be an exceptionally able bunch: I remember being in an ‘intern house’ t...