trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[Link] Machiavelli in historical context
by Cyan — 2012-07-31T19:41:57.276Z

In modern usage, the name "Machiavelli" is a byword for cynical, selfish scheming. In this post, a Renaissance scholar places Machiavelli the human being into historical context, illuminating that Machiavelli was not cynical so much as desirous of an accurate map of the territory, and not selfish at all but rather relentlessly goal-oriented. (The post starts slowly -- that's historical context for ya.) In writing Il Principe, Machiavelli (quite possibly unintentionally) committed to posterity two major breakthroughs, which we would now call (i) the creation of modern political science and history and (ii) the introduction of utilitarian/consequentialist ethics.

Consequentialism

In 1498, at the age of 29, Machiavelli was made a high official of the Florentine analogue of the State Department/Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His job was to shut up and do the impossible:

Goal: Prevent Florence from being conquered by any of 10+ different incredibly enormous foreign powers.

Resources: 100 bags of gold, 4 sheep, 1 wood, lots of books and a bust of Caesar.

Go!

And thus did Machiavelli come to invent consequentialism.

Modern Political Science

1508. The Italian territories destabilized by the Borgias are ripe for conquest. Everyone in Europe wants to go to war with everyone else and Italy will be the biggest battlefield. Machaivelli’s job now is to figure out who to ally with, and who to bribe. If he can’t predict the sides there’s no way to know where Florence should commit its precious resources. How will it fall out? Will Tudor claims on the French throne drive England to ally with Spain against France? Or will French and Spanish rival claims to Southern Italy lead France to recruit England against the houses of Aragon and Habsburg? Will the Holy Roman Emperor try to seize Milan from the French? Will the Ottomans ally with France to seize and divide the Spanish holdings in the Mediterranean? Will the Swiss finally wake up and notice that they have all the best armies in Europe and could conquer whatever the heck they wanted if they tried? (Seriously, Machiavelli spends a lot of time worrying about this possibility.) All the ambassadors from the great kingdoms and empires meet, and Machiavelli spends frantic months exchanging letters with colleagues

...
What is the Mantra of Polya?
by Mark_Eichenlaub — 2012-07-31T17:49:32.790Z

The other day at dinner, someone showed me this video of a slinky dropping. It shoes that the bottom of the slinky stays perfectly stationary for a while after it's been dropped. (The link goes to the 10-second interesting part).

I spent some time trying to figure out why that happens, but didn't get it. The next day, I spent half an hour writing down the differential equations that describe the slinky's motion and staring at them, with no idea how to proceed. Eventually, I watched the video again with sound, and learned the simple answer, which is that the speed of waves traveling in a slinky is very slow - a few meters per second - and the bottom half sits still until a wave can travel down and inform it that the slinky's been dropped.

The strange thing is that I already knew this, or at least the idea was familiar to me. Also, while at dinner, someone mentioned the "pole-in-the-barn" paradox from special relativity, and mentioned the same speed-of-information-in-materials idea in resolving the paradox, but I still didn't make the connection to the problem I was considering.

I want a simple phrase, similar to "check consequentialism", "take the outside view", or "worth it?" that applies to checking your own thought process while solving problems to stop you from revving your engine in the wrong direction for too long. I realized I've read a book about what to do in such situations. It's George Polya's How to Solve It. (Amazon Wikipedia Google Books) I don't have a copy of the book anymore, and I would like to crowdsource creating a short phrase that captures the general mindset endorsed by it. Some questions I remember the book suggesting are

Have you seen a similar problem before?

What are the unknowns?

What information do you have?

Is it obvious that the unknowns are enough information?

There are more of these listed in the Wikipedia article.

Also, "Mantra of Polya" doesn't roll off the tongue well (at least I think it doesn't, since I'm not sure how to pronounce "Polya"), so a better name for this mnemonic would be good, too.
AGI-12 conference in Oxford in December
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-07-31T10:38:58.987Z

The AGI impacts conference in Oxford in December of this year will happen alongside the AGI-12 conference on Artificial General Intelligence. They also have a call for papers, to which some on this list may be interested in submitting:

AGI-12 Paper Submission Deadline EXTENDED to August 15

Some good news for tardy AGI authors!

As you may recall, the Fifth Conferences on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-12) will be held Dec 8-11 at Oxford University in the UK. The AGI conferences are the only major conference series dedicated to research on the creation of thinking machines with general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond. The full AGI-12 Call for Papers may be found at:

http://agi-conf.org/2012/call-for-papers/

Our proceedings publisher for AGI-12, Springer Lecture Notes in AI (LNAI), has informed us that their deadline for receiving the proceedings manuscript from is later than previously thought. So, we have been able to extend the paper submission deadline once more, till August 15, allowing us to round up a few more excellent papers from tardy authors.

We look forward to seeing you at Oxford in December!
Always check your assertions... (Winning the Lottery)
by brilee — 2012-07-31T10:32:47.686Z

"In 2005, Dr. Zhang was having an ongoing discussion with friends about the Lottery, with Dr. Zhang taking the view that it offered poor odds and was a tax mainly on poor people. To bolster his argument, he began analyzing the Massachusetts Lottery’s various games. But when he got to Cash WinFall, he was shocked to find that during roll-down drawings the odds were in the bettor’s favor."

Full story here - it's rather engrossing.

http://www.mass.gov/ig/publications/reports-and-recommendations/2012/lottery-cash-winfall-letter-july-2012.pdf
Meetup : West LA Meetup
by  — 2012-07-31T05:58:09.567Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup

WHEN:
01 August 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7:00pm - 9:00pm Wednesday, August 1st.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters.

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Discussion Topic: If you have a chance, read an old article and a recent article, any whose title catches your eye. This week conversation will be unstructured, but those will make for good seeds of conversation.

But don't worry if you don't have time to read any articles, or even if you've never read any Less Wrong! Bring a friend! The atmosphere is casual, and good, intelligent conversation with friendly people is guaranteed.

We may also find time for a game, like The Resistance.

I will bring a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup
Meetup : West LA Meetup
by  — 2012-07-31T05:58:01.507Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup

WHEN:
01 August 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7:00pm - 9:00pm Wednesday, August 1st.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters.

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Discussion Topic: If you have a chance, read an old article and a recent article, any whose title catches your eye. This week conversation will be unstructured, but those will make for good seeds of conversation.

But don't worry if you don't have time to read any articles, or even if you've never read any Less Wrong! Bring a friend! The atmosphere is casual, and good, intelligent conversation with friendly people is guaranteed.

We may also find time for a game, like The Resistance.

I will bring a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup
[SEQ RERUN] The Bedrock of Morality: Arbitrary?
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-31T03:45:54.795Z

Today's post, The Bedrock of Morality: Arbitrary? was originally published on 14 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Humans are built in such a way as to do what is right. Other optimization processes may not. So what?

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 Is Fairness Arbitrary?, 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 : Cambridge (MA) Meetup
by chronophasiac — 2012-07-31T01:01:51.262Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge (MA) Meetup

WHEN:
19 August 2012 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
25 Ames St, Cambridge, MA 02139

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups on the first and third Sunday of every month, 2pm at the MIT Landau Building [25 Ames St, Bldg 66], room 148. Room number subject to change based on availability, signs will be posted with the actual room number.

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge (MA) Meetup
Meetup : Cambridge (MA) Meetup
by chronophasiac — 2012-07-31T00:58:31.528Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge (MA) Meetup

WHEN:
05 August 2012 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
25 Ames St, Cambridge, MA 02139

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups on the first and third Sunday of every month, 2pm at the MIT Landau Building [25 Ames St, Bldg 66], room 148. Room number subject to change based on availability, signs will be posted with the actual room number.

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge (MA) Meetup
Meetup : Cambridge (MA) Meetup
by chronophasiac — 2012-07-31T00:58:19.700Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge (MA) Meetup

WHEN:
05 August 2012 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
25 Ames St, Cambridge, MA 02139

Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups on the first and third Sunday of every month, 2pm at the MIT Landau Building [25 Ames St, Bldg 66], room 148. Room number subject to change based on availability, signs will be posted with the actual room number.

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge (MA) Meetup
Meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Thursday 7pm *New Place*
by EvelynM — 2012-07-31T00:24:33.144Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Thursday 7pm *New Place*

WHEN:
02 August 2012 07:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
1129 W. Elizabeth St. Fort Collins 80521

The move to Thursdays is working well. Back to Momo Lomo near campus for more discussions on how to level up in life.

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Thursday 7pm *New Place*
Meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Thursday 7pm *New Place*
by EvelynM — 2012-07-31T00:24:20.668Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Thursday 7pm *New Place*

WHEN:
02 August 2012 07:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
1129 W. Elizabeth St. Fort Collins 80521

The move to Thursdays is working well. Back to Momo Lomo near campus for more discussions on how to level up in life.

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Thursday 7pm *New Place*
Meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Thursday 7pm *New Place*
by EvelynM — 2012-07-31T00:24:09.440Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Thursday 7pm *New Place*

WHEN:
02 August 2012 07:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
1129 W. Elizabeth St. Fort Collins 80521

The move to Thursdays is working well. Back to Momo Lomo near campus for more discussions on how to level up in life.

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Thursday 7pm *New Place*
[Retracted] Simpson's paradox strikes again: there is no great stagnation?
by CarlShulman — 2012-07-30T17:55:04.788Z

ETA: The table linked by Landsburg has been called into serious question by Evan Soltas [H.T. CronoDAS]. I edited the post to leave only the table to provide context for the comment discussion of its status.

Economist Steve Landsburg has a post [H.T. David Henderson] about the supposed stagnation of median wages in the United States in recent decades. In the linked table median wages have risen for:
AI cooperation is already studied in academia as "program equilibrium"
by cousin_it — 2012-07-30T15:22:32.031Z

About a month ago I accidentally found out that the LW idea of quining cooperation is already studied in academia:

1) Moshe Tennenholtz's 2004 paper Program Equilibrium describes the idea of programs cooperating in the Prisoner's Dilemma by inspecting each other's source code.

2) Lance Fortnow's 2009 paper Program Equilibria and Discounted Computation Time describes an analogue of Benja Fallenstein's idea for implementing correlated play, among other things.

3) Peters and Szentes's 2012 paper Definable and Contractible Contracts studies quining cooperation over a wider class of definable (not just computable) functions.

As far as I know, academia still hasn't discovered Loebian cooperation or the subsequent ideas about formal models of UDT, but I might easily be wrong about that. In any case, the episode has given me a mini-crisis of faith, and a new appreciation of academia. That was a big part of the motivation for my previous post.
Meetup : Third Copenhagen Meet-up.
by  — 2012-07-30T14:40:18.062Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Third Copenhagen Meet-up.

WHEN:
05 August 2012 04:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Købmagergade 52, 1150 København

The third Copenhagen meet-up date has been decided in the mailing list.

As the last meet-up the location is Studenterhuset, a cafe.

The topic will be discussion of the basic rationality techniques, knowledge sources, books worth reading, answering of unresolved issues and perchance discussion of vision and future plans for the local bayesian conspiracy/phyg.

I will be on location, from 4 PM with a sign of some kind. Looking forward to meeting you.

less-wrong-copenhagen AT googlegroups DOT com

Discussion article for the meetup : Third Copenhagen Meet-up.
Brain structure - scans reveal an amazingly regular pattern
by D_Alex — 2012-07-30T08:20:12.220Z

http://www.nih.gov/news/health/mar2012/nimh-29.htm has images of human and monkey brain scans which reveal an amazingly grid-like pattern of neuronal connections. What are the implications? Could brain scanning, emulation etc be simpler than would appear from images of tangled up neuronal cells (eg here: http://www.willamette.edu/~gorr/classes/cs449/brain.html)?

(My mother is a retired neuroscientist... I'd ask her for comment, but she is on holidays.)
[SEQ RERUN] Is Fairness Arbitrary?
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-30T05:47:30.297Z

Today's post, Is Fairness Arbitrary? was originally published on 14 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When we say that a fair division of pie among N people is for each person to get 1/N of the pie, we aren't being arbitrary. We're being fair.

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 "Arbitrary", 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.
[Link] Why prison doesn't work and what to do about it
by mesilliac — 2012-07-30T05:30:41.114Z

link: http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2012/07/why-prison-doesnt-work-and-what-to-do.html

I came across this short well-reasoned essay via reddit, but most of the discussion there was by people who (ironically enough) appeared not to have read it. The comment section under the article itself was similar. Some seemed not to have read the first paragraph.

Prison time is a very severe punishment. JS Mill likened it to being consigned to a living tomb.* Any society that employs it should do so with care and restraint. Yet we do not. Partly because we think that prison is a humane punishment, it is drastically over-used in many countries, to the point of cruelty. Aside from failing in humanity, prison does not even perform well at the specific functions of a criminal justice system, namely, deterrence, retribution, security, and rehabilitation. We need to reconsider our over-reliance on prison, and reconsider whether other types of punishment, including capital and corporal punishment, may sometimes be more effective and more humane.

The author's arguments against the imprisonment system, and for alternative methods of punishment, are interesting. They touch upon ideas which are hard to consider rationally. The very idea of punishment is something most people appear to find unpleasant. Indeed so it must be if something is to be considered a punishment.

Flogging is barbaric and ugly. Yet that in itself does not mean it is cruel or inhumane or otherwise unfit as a punishment. Punishments, by definition, are supposed to be very unpleasant.

I found some relevant previous discussion on Less Wrong (Crime and Punishment, The Wrath of Kahneman), and Overcoming Bias (Prison is Cruel), but these seem to be about specifics, and not the system in general.

I am curious both what the scientific consensus is on punishment systems, and what Less Wrong thinks of them. With such an emotionally charged issue, it's hard to find rational discussion about it.
Responsibility and clicking
by KatjaGrace — 2012-07-29T22:15:44.000Z

Sometimes when people hear obvious arguments regarding emotive topics, they just tentatively accept the conclusion instead of defending against it until they find some half satisfactory reason to dismiss it. Eliezer Yudkowsky calls this ‘clicking’, and wants to know what causes it:

My best guess is that clickiness has something to do with failure to compartmentalize – missing, or failing to use, the mental gear that lets human beings believe two contradictory things at the same time. Clicky people would tend to be people who take all of their beliefs at face value.

The Hansonian explanation (not necessarily endorsed by Robin Hanson) would say something about clicky people tending to operate in Near mode. (Why?)

pjeby remarks (with 96 upvotes),

One of the things that I’ve noticed about this is that most people do not expect to understand things. For most people, the universe is a mysterious place filled with random events beyond their ability to comprehend or control. Think “guessing the teacher’s password”, but not just in school or knowledge, but about everything.

Such people have no problem with the idea of magic, because everything is magic to them, even science….

Hypothesis: people expect reality to make sense roughly in proportion to how personally responsible for manipulating it they feel. If you think of yourself as in charge of strategically doing something, you are eager to understand how doing that thing works, and automatically expect understanding to be possible. If you are driving a car, you insist the streets fit intuitive geometry. If you are engaging in office politics, you feel there must be some reason Gina said that thing.

If you feel like some vague ‘they’ is responsible for most things, and is meant to give you stuff that you have a right to, and that you are meant to be a good person in the mean time, you won’t automatically try to understand things or think of them as understandable. Modeling how things work isn’t something you are ‘meant’ to do, unless you are some kind of scientist. If you do dabble in that kind of thing, you enjoy the pretty ideas rather than feel any desperate urge for them to be sound or complete. Other people are meant to look after those things.

A usual observation is that understanding things properly allows you to manipulate them....
Fragmented status doesn’t help
by KatjaGrace — 2012-07-29T22:13:58.000Z

David Friedman wrote, and others have claimed similarly:

It seems obvious that, if one’s concern is status rather than real income, we are in a zero sum game. If my status increases relative to yours, yours has decreased relative to mine. … Like many things that seem obvious, this one is false. …

…what matters to me is my status as I perceive it; what matters to you is your status as you perceive it. Since each of us has his own system of values, it is perfectly possible for my status as I view it to be higher than yours and yours as you view it to be higher than mine…

Status is about what other people think your status is, but Friedman’s argument is that you at least get some choice in whose views to care about. People split off into many different groups, and everyone may see their group as quite important, so see themselves as quite statusful. Maybe I feel good because I win at board games often, but you don’t feel bad if you don’t – you just quit playing board games and hang out with people who care about politics instead, because you have a good mind for that. As Will Wilkinson says:

I think that there are lots of pastors, PTA presidents, police chiefs, local scenesters, small town newspaper editors, and competitive Scrabble champions who are pretty pleased with their high relative standing within the circle they care about. Back where I come from, a single blue ribbon for a strawberry rhubarb pie at the State Fair could carry a small-town lady for years.

This is a popular retort to the fear that seeking status is zero sum, so any status I get comes at the cost of someone else’s status. I think it’s very weak.

There are two separate issues: whether increasing one person’s status decreases someone else’s status just as much (whether status seeking is constant sum) and whether the total benefits from status come to zero, or to some other positive or negative amount (whether status seeking is zero-sum in particular).

That people split into different pools and think theirs is better than others suggests (though does not prove) that the net value of status is more than zero. Disproportionately many people think they are above average, so as long as status translates to happiness in the right kind of way, disproportionately many people are happy.

The interesting question though – ...