trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Eye Reading Ability
by Vaniver — 2011-04-25T17:15:40.235Z

I seem to recall this site having a high population with some sort of Autism Spectrum Disorder, and so you might be interested in an online test of eye-reading ability, which seems to be linked to ASD.

But once you take it, just read your score and open the test up in a new tab- don't see which eyes you got wrong. Then retake the test, but imitate the photo each time, and then guess.

Does your score increase? Compare the lists of eyes you got wrong (the benefit of doing this in two tabs). Anything interesting?

The test is here.

From The Last Psychiatrist.
What is Metaethics?
by lukeprog — 2011-04-25T16:53:23.625Z

When I say I think I can solve (some of) metaethics, what exactly is it that I think I can solve?

First, we must distinguish the study of ethics or morality from the anthropology of moral belief and practice. The first one asks: "What is right?" The second one asks: "What do people think is right?" Of course, one can inform the other, but it's important not to confuse the two. One can correctly say that different cultures have different 'morals' in that they have different moral beliefs and practices, but this may not answer the question of whether or not they are behaving in morally right ways.

My focus is metaethics, so I'll discuss the anthropology of moral belief and practice only when it is relevant for making points about metaethics.

So what is metaethics? Many people break the field of ethics into three sub-fields: applied ethics, normative ethics, and metaethics.

Applied ethics: Is abortion morally right? How should we treat animals? What political and economic systems are most moral? What are the moral responsibilities of businesses? How should doctors respond to complex and uncertain situations? When is lying acceptable? What kinds of sex are right or wrong? Is euthanasia acceptable?

Normative ethics: What moral principles should we use in order to decide how to treat animals, when lying is acceptable, and so on? Is morality decided by what produces the greatest good for the greatest number? Is it decided by a list of unbreakable rules? Is it decided by a list of character virtues? Is it decided by a hypothetical social contract drafted under ideal circumstances?

Metaethics: What does moral language mean? Do moral facts exist? If so, what are they like, and are they reducible to natural facts? How can we know whether moral judgments are true or false? Is there a connection between making a moral judgment and being motivated to abide by it? Are moral judgments objective or subjective, relative or absolute? Does it make sense to talk about moral progress?

Others prefer to combine applied ethics and normative ethics so that the breakdown becomes: normative ethics vs. metaethics, or 'first order' moral questions (normative ethics) vs. 'second order' questions (metaethics).

Mainstream views in metaethics

To illustrate how people can give different answers to the questions of metaethics, let me summarize...
Attempts to work around Goedel's theorem by using randomness
by cousin_it — 2011-04-25T14:18:53.186Z

You can't make PA complete by adding new axioms with a deterministic algorithm. But what if you used a randomized algorithm? Richard Lipton wrote a post about this idea: generate a random bitstring S, then add to PA the axiom that the K-complexity of S is high enough. That is probabilistically very likely to be true, but is always unprovable in PA for long enough S. Clearly this gives you a stronger theory, but how much stronger? In particular, is there any hope at all that you can approach completeness in some suitable probabilistic sense?

Nah, don't get your hopes up. In the comments to Lipton's post, Alexander Shen (amusingly, one of my former schoolteachers) and Harvey Friedman show that most true statements remain unreachable by this procedure. Leonid Levin proved a weaker but more general result, roughly saying that randomized algorithms cannot complete PA with positive probability.

So the idea doesn't seem to work. But it was a very nice try.
Convincing Arguments Aren’t Necessarily Correct – They’re Merely Convincing
by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) — 2011-04-25T12:43:07.217Z

I've been studying a lot of finance lately, and it strikes me that it's a field that requires a very high degree of rationality and ability to cut through the noise to get to correct arguments.

What's nice about investing especially, though, is that it has a very similar utility curve for all players. People have slightly different goals in terms of finance and investing, but generally speaking, people are measuring utility in terms of financial return. There's some differences between time preferences and risk tolerance, but generally speaking, we can sort the winning strategies from the losing ones over time. There's a fairly clear and objective standard for what worked and what didn't, which could make it a very helpful field for the aspiring rationalist to study and learn from.

I originally wrote this post, "Convincing Arguments Aren’t Necessarily Correct – They’re Merely Convincing" for my blog, so the tone is more colloquial than you'd normally see on LessWrong, and the audience is slightly different. A friend of mine suggested I post it up here too as it might be interesting to the LW crowd, so here we go -

"Convincing Arguments Aren’t Necessarily Correct – They’re Merely Convincing"

Things have been going well lately, and I now have a surplus of cash for the first time in a while. Err, rather, I have both a surplus of cash and some high consistency predictable future income. That’s nice! I envy all you salaried people when I think about predictable future income. Having a decent chunk of cash, but no predictable future income means you don’t really have a surplus of cash.

Anyways, I was thinking of what to invest a small bit of money in, and reading some papers and analyses and such. I’m reading a mix of finance, investment, politics, diplomacy, and history lately, which makes for a nice mix. It also has me interested in the topic.

Today, I read a really fantastically convincing argument, enough so that I was immediately ready to go buy a small amount of what the author was advocating.

Then I stopped myself! Wait, the author isn’t necessarily correct – he’s merely convincing.

I went back through the piece I was reading, which was quite a long piece. I started counting the number of premises the author had, and it went something like this:

Premise A
Premise B
Premise C
Premise D
Premise E
Pre...
New Haven / Southern Connecticut Meetup, Wednesday Apr. 27th 6 PM
by alyssavance — 2011-04-25T04:00:07.525Z

To all Less Wrongians in the New Haven / Southern Connecticut area: Come join us for dinner at Yorkside Pizza and Restaurant (288 York Street, New Haven CT) on Wednesday, April 27th at 6:00 PM. There is currently no established LW meetup in New Haven, but we are starting one, and me and some of my friends will definitely be there. Contact thomas@humanityplus.org for info. It will be awesome!
San Francisco Meetup 4/28
by Mass_Driver — 2011-04-24T23:48:49.736Z

Thursday, April 28th at 7:00 PMGreen Papaya825 Mission Street (4th and Mission)San Francisco, CA 94103

Welcome back to the next installment of the newest Bay Area Less Wrong meetup: San Francisco! The second meeting of the San Francisco group will be this coming Thursday, April 28th, from 7:00-9:00 at Green Papaya near 4th and Mission. The theme of the meeting will be "What would you like to be awesome at?" Everyone will get a chance to talk about something they think they could get awesome at pretty quickly with the right kind of help, and also about something that they'd like to be awesome at but have no idea how to get started on.

Hopefully this will help us get to know each other a little bit while also starting to plan out the broad strokes of what kinds of things we'll do together at future meet-ups. Once we know what at least some people want to be awesome at, we can brainstorm ways of making that happen together.

If you have any questions at all about the Meetup, feel free to call me, [redacted], at [redacted], or to e-mail me at [redacted]. You can also PM me on the Less Wrong blog at Mass_Driver. If you'd like to help organize this or future meetings, you should definitely get in touch -- help is welcome and probably needed!

If you've never been to a LessWrong meetup before, this is a good chance to go to your first one! Chances are other people feel awkward too, and we'll all be a little uneasy about the whole thing together. Less Wrong meetups are so new that nobody really knows the right way to run them yet, let alone the right way to participate in them. So, come! Help us figure it out. It doesn't matter if you've read the whole blog, if you're unemployed (I am), or if you've graduated high school -- if you show up and try to be less wrong, we'll be glad you came.

If you want to stay informed about upcoming events in the Bay Area, join the Bay Area LessWrong Google Group! There are other chapters in Tortuga and Berkeley, and together we aim to throw so many events that the global Less Wrong blog won't have room to post them all.

See you soon!
[SEQ RERUN] "I don't know."
by MinibearRex — 2011-04-24T21:40:07.061Z

Today's post, "I don't know." was originally published on 21 December 2006. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

An edited instant messaging conversation regarding the use of the phrase "I don't know". "I don't know" is a useful phrase if you want to avoid getting in trouble or convey the fact that you don't have access to privileged information.

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 The Modesty Argument, 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.
Join the Special Relocation Task Force!
by jsalvatier — 2011-04-24T21:26:32.520Z

(Andrew is a pseudonym because he is a little worried about showing up in an internet search; please respect that and do not use his real name when posting below).

Andrew is an established and valuable member (link to highest voted post) of the LessWrong community. Sadly, he is without a tribe; he lives in a relatively small city where he has not found a tribe to belong to despite considerable effort. Being part of a tribe would improve Andrew's life considerably. Andrew is not attached to the area and quite willing to leave, doesn't know how to taskify getting himself a tribe.

Big decisions like moving are often easier and better executed when made with outside input. Therefore, I am putting together a Special Relocation Task Force to aid his efforts.

Besides helping Andrew, I am also interested in answering the question 'will rationalists be good at this?'. They should be; rationalists should win. If they are not, something is wrong and I want to know about it. This experiment seems like a good way of answering that question.

Here are some basic facts about Andrew:

He currently works in aerospace

He has a mechanical engineering degree

He currently lives in Texas

He would prefer a job that more fully uses his intellectual skills and pushes him to his limits

The Special Relocation Task Force will consist of 5 or fewer people (including Andrew and myself), and will attempt to help him figure out how to find a tribe that fits him well and figure out how to get him there. Andrew does not expect this help to be handed to him on a silver platter, he expects to be the most involved member of the task force and to do most any hard work involved.

The Special Relocation Task Force will need to answer questions such as the following:

Should Andrew move?

If so where?

How does one go about finding a good job near a satisfactory tribe?

What kind of job should he get?

Here is my initial plan for the task force:

Select 5 or fewer people (including Andrew and I) for the task force.

Choose how to coordinate task force. Forum+skype, email-list+video chat, etc. ?

Initial meeting

Discuss the details of Andrews issue

Discuss the contours of the issue (hold off on proposing solutions)

Propose broad directions

Select overall direction(s)

Break up mission into tasks

Assign tasks to people

Work on as

...
Are Girl Scout Cookies Deliciously Evil? A Case Study in Evaluating Charities by Yourself
by gwern — 2011-04-24T21:19:26.081Z

I recently finished up an essay examining the Girl Scouts, their cookies, and their finances with reference to whether they are inefficient or corrupt.

What is the relevance to LW? (The essay is aimed at a general audience & assumes no knowledge of LW material, though it links heavily to LW in justifying why one should make predictions - such as about Girl Scout finances - before looking at data.)

Well, on occasion, people ask questions about SIAI that they could have answered by themselves, such as by looking through SIAI financial filings. This kind of annoys me. This essay serves as a demonstration how one could investigate a charity on one's own, without simply trusting GiveWell's recommendations (good though they surely are).

Reading SIAI's filings may be a future essay; until then, it is left as an exercise for the reader... (EDIT: One such reading is BrandonReinhart's extremely thorough SIAI Fundraising Article; highly recommended.)
Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience
by lukeprog — 2011-04-24T20:24:51.205Z

Hume was skeptical of induction and causality. Descartes began his philosophy by doubting everything. Both thought we may be in great error about the external world. But neither could bring themselves to seriously doubt the contents of their own subjective conscious experience.

Philosophers and non-philosophers alike often say: "I may not know whether that is really a yellow banana before me, but surely I know the character of my visual experience of a yellow banana! I may not know whether I really just dropped a barbell on my toe, but surely I know the subjective character of my pain experience, right?"

In this article I hope to persuade you that yes, you can be wrong about the subjective quality of your own conscious experience. In fact, such errors are common.

Human echolocation

Thomas Nagel famously said that we cannot imagine the subjective experience of bat sonar:

Bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine.1

Hold up a book in front of your face at arm's length, close your eyes, and say something loudly. Can you hear the emptiness of the space in front of you? Close your eyes again, hold the book directly in front of your face, and say the book's name again. Can you now hear that the book is closer?

I'll bet you can, and thus you may be more bat-like than Nagel seems to think is possible, and more bat-like than you have previously thought. When I discovered this, I realized that not only had I been wrong about my perceptual capabilities, I had also been ignorant of the daily content of my subjective auditory experience.

Blind people can be especially good at using echolocation to navigate the world. Just like bats and dolphins and whales (but less accurately), humans can make sounds and then hear how nearby objects reflect and modify those sounds. People with normal vision can also be trained to echolocate to some degree with training, for example detecting the location of walls while blindfolded.2 After some practice, blindfolded people can use sound to distinguish objects of different shapes and textures (at a rate significantly better than chance).3

You can try this yourself. Get a friend to blindfold you and then move their hand to one of fou...
Edinburgh LW Meetup Saturday April 30th
by sark — 2011-04-24T20:09:35.864Z

The second Edinburgh LW meetup.

The first one was 2 weeks ago. It was fun. Do join us!

Date/time: Saturday 30th of April at 2:00pm.

Place: A pub called the Auld Hoose. I would be holding a sign with "Less Wrong" written on it.

Rough agenda: We will discuss akrasia. We will state our projects and discuss how we intend to keep track of their progress and how we can stay on track. We will also discuss anything else! Feel free to suggest additional topics so that we can coordinate on some preparation to ensure a smoother more enjoyable discussion.

Please RSVP here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=183616241685780

See you there!

EDIT: I would like to thank the attendees of the first meetup for their very enjoyable company. You made the meetup a success. Now let's do it again!
Get data points on your current utility function via hypotheticals
by Dorikka — 2011-04-24T18:44:35.928Z

I've recently found that my utility function valued personal status and fame a whole lot more than I thought it did -- I previously had thought that it mostly relied on the consequences of my actions for other sentiences, but it turned out I was wrong. Obviously, this is a valuable insight -- I definitely want to know what my current utility function is; from there, I can decide whether I should change my actions or my utility function if the two aren't coordinated.

I did this by imagining how I would feel if I found out certain things. For example, how would I feel if everyone else was also trying to save the world? The emotional response I had was sort of a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I was a really mediocre being. This obviously wasn't a result of calculating that the marginal utility of my actions would be a whole lot lower in this hypothetical world (and so I should go do something else); instead, it was the fact that me trying to save the world didn't make me special any more -- I wouldn't stand out, in this sort of world.

(Epilogue: I decided that I hadn't done a good enough job programming my brain and am attempting to modify my utility function to rely on the world actually getting saved.)

Discussion: What other hypotheticals are useful?
What To Do: Environmentalism vs Friendly AI (John Baez)
by XiXiDu — 2011-04-24T18:03:07.743Z

In a comment on my last interview with Yudkowsky, Eric Jordan wrote:

John, it would be great if you could follow up at some point with your thoughts and responses to what Eliezer said here. He’s got a pretty firm view that environmentalism would be a waste of your talents, and it’s obvious where he’d like to see you turn your thoughts instead. I’m especially curious to hear what you think of his argument that there are already millions of bright people working for the environment, so your personal contribution wouldn’t be as important as it would be in a less crowded field.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

[...]

This a big question. It’s a bit self-indulgent to discuss it publicly… or maybe not. It is, after all, a question we all face. I’ll talk about me, because I’m not up to tackling this question in its universal abstract form. But it could be you asking this, too.

[...]

I’ll admit I’d be happy to sit back and let everyone else deal with these problems. But the more I study them, the more that seems untenable… especially since so many people are doing just that: sitting back and letting everyone else deal with them.

[...]

I think so far the Azimuth Project is proceeding in a sufficiently unconventional way that while it may fall flat on its face, it’s at least trying something new.

[...]

The most visible here is the network theory project, which is a step towards the kind of math I think we need to understand a wide variety of complex systems.

[...]

I don’t feel satisfied, though. I’m happy enough—that’s never a problem these days—but once you start trying to do things to help the world, instead of just have fun, it’s very tricky to determine the best way to proceed.

Link: johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/what-to-do/

His answer, as far as I can tell, seems to be that his Azimuth Project does trump the possibility of working directly on friendly AI or to support it indirectly by making and contributing money.

It seems that he and other people who understand all the arguments in favor of friendly AI and yet decide to ignore it, or disregard it as unfeasible, are rationalizing.

I myself took a different route, I was rather trying to prove to myself that the whole idea of AI going FOOM is somehow flawed rather than trying to come up with j...
Paris Meetup, Saturday April 30th, 2PM
by Emile — 2011-04-24T10:21:38.240Z

When: Saturday, April 30th, 2PM.

Where: Au Pt'it Chat, a little Café near Châtelet, which is here. I'll be there with a LessWrong sign.

Yvain, cousin_it and Morendil should be there ... and you are welcome too!

This is a repost, the meetup was originally planned the 16th, but that post wasn't promoted and the date changed in the meantime.

Lurkers and newbies are very welcome!
Mini-camp on Rationality, Awesomeness, and Existential Risk (May 28 through June 4, 2011)
by AnnaSalamon — 2011-04-24T08:10:13.048Z

Meet fellow LW-ers, hone your rationality, and get on a path toward reducing existential risk and becoming more awesome.

Who: You and a class full of other aspiring rationalists and world-changers, from around the world.

What: A week-long mini-camp, filled with hands-on activities for applying rationality to your life, your goals, and existential risk reduction. (See details in the FAQ.)

When and where: Saturday May 28 through Saturday June 4, 2011 in Berkeley, California.

Why: Because you’re a social primate, and the best way to jump into a new way of thinking, make friends, and accomplish your goals is often to spend time with other primates who are doing just that.

Other reasons:

Sing karaoke, develop body language skills, and generally try things, building courage.

See the San Francisco Bay area.

Get an inside look at the Singularity Institute.

Instructors:

Anna Salamon Luke"prog" Muehlhauser Divia Melwani

Cost: Room[1], board, and tuition are paid for by the Singularity Institute (see below). Getting here is up to you. (A limited number of scholarships are also available to cover the costs of flights; so if you’d love to come but can’t afford it, apply anyhow.)

A week isn’t long enough to learn rationality or how to prevent existential risks. It isn’t long enough to acquire a cool career or master the skills that will help you succeed. But it is long enough to get on a path toward doing these things.

So if you’ve been wanting the above, now is your moment. Come meet us! See what we can help you do.

Apply now.

Frequently Asked Questions:

1. I’m older. Should I still apply?

Yes! We’d really love a more diverse crowd around here, with a wider set of experiences and skills.

2. I’d like to come, but I’m not sure you’ll accept me. Should I still apply?

Absolutely! You can fill out our form in as little 10 minutes. What’s the harm?[2]

3. I’d like to come, but I can’t afford the flights. Should I still apply?

Yes. A limited number of flights scholarships will probably be available.

4. Can I come for just part of the time?

Yes. If work or other obligations prevent you from coming for the full week, we are open to partial visits. You’ll m...