trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meta: A 5 karma requirement to post in discussion
by Jack — 2011-01-20T06:22:13.396Z

Admins have been doing a decent, timely job taking down the spam that comes up in the Discussion section. But it is an eyesore for any period of time and there seems to be more and more of it. And there is an easy solution: a small karma requirement for discussion section posts. I think 5 would about right. A reasonable, literate person can get 5 karma pretty easily. "Hi, I'm new" usually does it. That plus a half-way insightful comment about something almost definitely will. This would screen out the spammers. As for the occasional genuine user that posts in discussion before commenting at all, I don't know how many there have been but my sense is that delaying them from posting until they can get five upvotes is almost certainly a good thing.

Thoughts? Or is changing this actually a difficult task that requires rewriting the site's code and that's why it hasn't been done already?
I Want to Learn About Education
by fiddlemath — 2011-01-20T03:46:47.006Z

I want to learn what's well-understood about education. I expect to launch myself into some endeavors in teaching the first few levels of epistemic and instrumental rationality - ie., critical thinking and problem solving. I'm a little suspicious, though, of the scattered educational texts that I've so far read. In particular, education seems like a field where it's easy to have motivated thoughts, and hard to gather good data.

With my background (Math and CS) I'm a little at sea in educational literature. Does anyone know of good, reductionist-grade or evidential-grade, introductory texts in education?
Networks, Crowds, and Markets textbook
by  — 2011-01-20T02:04:58.129Z

I thought some people might like to see a free textbook on networks. This is not a graph theory course; it covers an enormous breadth of topics including game theory, and it's written in plain English with almost no mathematical technicality. There are a lot of examples related to the social sciences, frequently citing and summarizing specific studies, and this is the real value of the book, I think -- it's almost an overview of the field of "math applied to the social sciences." Some of the examples are fascinating -- for example, I now have the first convincing explanation I've yet seen for why WWI began.

Should be a fairly quick read; I'm up to Ch. 7 in a few hours this evening.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets, by Easley and Kleinberg
Steve Jobs' medical leave, riches and longevity
by sfb — 2011-01-20T01:06:32.742Z

Heinlein imagined the Howard Foundation as a group founded by a millionaire dying of "old age" in mid-life; founded to encourage long lived people to have children together using financial incentives with the goal of breeding extra long-lived humans.

Our world has many billionaires, typically older rather than younger people ( Forbes list - few under 50 ); middle aged Bill Gates has donated his fortune to normal kinds of charity, elder Warren Buffett has as well, youthful Mark Zuckerberg has pledged his too, all healthy. Steve Jobs is worth over a billion dollars and has been criticised for his lack of public philanthropy, he's also CEO of a company with $60 billion in reserve, and suffering serious health problems.

In short, we live in a world where there are rich people, and where you hear the idea of "rich old white men spending a lot on medical treatments to benefit rich old white men" but at the same time, Aubrey De Gray style serious discussion of longevity is rare and much medical spending goes on alleviating and curing the problems of old age rather than avoiding them.

Sergey Brin has donated $50 million towards Parkinson's research based on DNA tests showing he has a 50% chance of getting it, yet at the moment he has a much higher probability of getting old-age and a net worth of $10-15 billion.

Is our world one where something analagous to the Howard Foundation will appear? Let's pull some numbers from thin air and say that means someone dying and leaving pretty much all of their estate of more than $200 million to fund longevity research/treatment in some way. If so, it might be something done in private that we would not hear of, so what would be indicators that it might be about to happen, or might have happened already? And if an ill middle aged technology billionaire with change-the-world drive doesn't do it, then who?

(I consider significant increases in lifespan (100 healthy years, 150 total years, or more) nearly inevitable at some nonspecific time in the future, given a world where humans continue to develop technology improvements, remain primarily biological, and avert or avoid existential risks and government restrictions on it. I also consider that dying and leaving money to The Gates Foundation is a good cause arguably much better than longevity research, wheras dying and leaving hundreds of millions to heirs / dogs homes / art...
Theists are wrong; is theism?
by Will_Newsome — 2011-01-20T00:18:34.164Z

Many folk here on LW take the simulation argument (in its more general forms) seriously. Many others take Singularitarianism1 seriously. Still others take Tegmark cosmology (and related big universe hypotheses) seriously. But then I see them proceed to self-describe as atheist (instead of omnitheist, theist, deist, having a predictive distribution over states of religious belief, et cetera), and many tend to be overtly dismissive of theism. Is this signalling cultural affiliation, an attempt to communicate a point estimate, or what?

I am especially confused that the theism/atheism debate is considered a closed question on Less Wrong. Eliezer's reformulations of the Problem of Evil in terms of Fun Theory provided a fresh look at theodicy, but I do not find those arguments conclusive. A look at Luke Muehlhauser's blog surprised me; the arguments against theism are just not nearly as convincing as I'd been brought up to believe2, nor nearly convincing enough to cause what I saw as massive overconfidence on the part of most atheists, aspiring rationalists or no.

It may be that theism is in the class of hypotheses that we have yet to develop a strong enough practice of rationality to handle, even if the hypothesis has non-negligible probability given our best understanding of the evidence. We are becoming adept at wielding Occam's razor, but it may be that we are still too foolhardy to wield Solomonoff's lightsaber Tegmark's Black Blade of Disaster without chopping off our own arm. The literature on cognitive biases gives us every reason to believe we are poorly equipped to reason about infinite cosmology, decision theory, the motives of superintelligences, or our place in the universe.

Due to these considerations, it is unclear if we should go ahead doing the equivalent of philosoraptorizing amidst these poorly asked questions so far outside the realm of science. This is not the sort of domain where one should tread if one is feeling insecure in one's sanity, and it is possible that no one should tread here. Human philosophers are probably not as good at philosophy as hypothetical Friendly AI philosophers (though we've seen in the cases of decision theory and utility functions that not everything can be left for the AI to solve). I don't want to stress your epistemology too much, since it's not like your immortal soul3 matters very much. Does it?

Adde...
Should we have secular churches?
by Desrtopa — 2011-01-19T22:02:58.267Z

In the comments of a recent thread, another poster pointed out that religious individuals tend to report higher levels of happiness than nonreligious individuals. I suggested that the social network of churches, rather than the direct effects of theistic belief, might be responsible for this difference, and after doing a bit of searching around to see if the available studies support such an explanation, found a study that indicates that this is indeed the case.

Religious churches may be far from optimal in the services they provide to communities, but they have a great positive impact on the lives of many individuals. And not just as friendly social gatherings and occasional providers of community service; I've known priests who were superb community organizers and motivational speakers, who played an important role for their congregations to which I know of no existing secular analogue.

It seems probable that a secular organization could effectively play the same role in a community, but would anyone be likely to take it seriously? Since people who're already religious may be inclined to reject the value of a secular authority filling the role of a church, and atheistic individuals may not be inclined to attend, either due to reversing the stupidity of religion, or due to asocial and anticooperative values, it's uncertain whether a secular organization that adequately filled the role of a church would get off the ground in the first place in the present social climate.

So, what are your feelings on the prospect of secular church analogues? Do you think that they're appropriate or practical? Do you expect them ever to become common in real life?
Starcraft AI Competition
by JoshuaZ — 2011-01-19T21:45:59.444Z

Ars Technica has an article about A Starcraft AI competition.. While this is clearly narrow AI there are some details which may interest people at LW. The article is about the best performing AI, the "Berkeley Overmind." (The AI in question only played as Zerg, one of the three possible sides in Starcraft. In fact, it seems that the AIs in general were all specialized for a single one of the three sides. While human players are often much better at one specific side, they are not nearly this specialized).

Highlights from the article:

StarCraft was released in 1998, an eternity ago by video game standards. Over those years Blizzard Entertainment, the game’s creator, has continually updated it so that it’s one of the most finely tuned and balanced Real Time Strategy (RTS) games ever made. It has three playable races: the human-like Terrans, with familiar tanks and starships, the alien Zerg, with large swarms of organic creatures, and the Protoss, technologically advanced aliens reliant on powerful but expensive units. Each race has different units and gameplay philosophies, yet no one race or combination of units has an unbeatable advantage. Player skill, ingenuity, and the ability to react intelligently to enemy actions determine victory.

This refinement and complexity makes StarCraft an ideal environment for conducting AI research. In an RTS game, events unfold in real-time and players’ orders are carried out immediately. Resources have to be gathered so fighting units can be produced and commanded into battle. The map is shrouded in fog-of-war, so enemy units and buildings are only visible when they’re near friendly buildings or units. A StarCraft player has to acquire and allocate resources to create units, coordinate those units in combat, discover, reason about and react to enemy actions, and do all this in real-time. These are all hard problems for a computer to solve.

Note, that using the interface that humans need to use was not one of the restrictions. This was an advantage that the Berkeley group used to full effect, as did other AIs in the comptetion.

We had to limit ourselves. David Burkett, another of Dan’s PhD students and the other team lead, says, “It turns out building control nodes for units is hard, so there’s a huge cost associated with building more than one [type of] u

...
Erroneous Visualizations
by BecomingMyself — 2011-01-19T01:44:13.376Z

Buried somewhere among Eliezer's writings is something essentially the same as the following phrase:

"Intentional causes are made of neurons. Evolutionary causes are made of ancestors."

I remember this quite well because of my strange reaction to it. I understood what it meant pretty well, but upon seeing it, some demented part of my brain immediately constructed a mental image of what it thought an "evolutionary cause" looked like. The result was something like a mountain of fused-together bodies (the ancestors) with gears and levers and things (the causation) scattered throughout. "This," said that part of my brain, "is what an evolutionary cause looks like, and like a good reductionist I know it is physically implicit in the structure of my brain." Luckily it didn't take me long to realize what I was doing and reject that model, though I am just now realizing that the one I replaced it with still had some physical substance called "causality" flowing from ancient humans to my brain.

This is actually a common error for me. I remember I used to think of computer programs as these glorious steampunk assemblies of wheels and gears and things (apparently gears are a common visual metaphor in my brain for things it labels as complex) floating just outside the universe with all the other platonic concepts, somehow exerting their patterns upon the computers that ran them. It took me forever to figure out that these strange thingies were physical systems in the computers themselves, and a bit longer to realize that they didn't look anything like what I thought they did. (I still haven't bothered to find out what they really are, despite having a non-negligible desire to know.) And even before that -- long before I started reading Less Wrong, or even adopted empiricism (which may or may not have come earlier), I decided that because the human brain performs computation, and (it seemed to me) all computations were embodiments of some platonic ideal, souls must exist. Which could have been semi-okay, if I had realized that calling it a "soul" shouldn't allow you to assume it has properties that you ascribe to "souls" but not to "platonic ideals of computation".

Are errors like this common? I talked to a friend about it and she doesn't make this mistake, but one person is hardly a good sample. If anyone else is like this, I'd like to know how often it cause...
Meditations on first philosophy
by Craig_Heldreth — 2011-01-19T00:27:33.631Z

I put this post up on my blog this morning (link) and some here might like to see it or discuss it.

Meditations on first philosophy is the title of the first book ever written in contemporary western Philosophy, according to the university course I took. It was written by Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century, who began with the premise that he wanted to find true factual indubitable knowledge and that the way to find this was to begin by doubting everything, and retaining only what could be defended by rigorous logic. So by these meditations he reasoned to such respected elements as "I think, therefore I am." This short book continues to be relied on hundreds of years later and modern (especially French) philosophers such as Sartre, Foucault and Derrida all explicitly acknowledge the importance of Descartes' achievement.
I am occupied with a similar project. This was not entirely a conscious choice or any sort of Cartesian magnum opus. In the past five years I have slowly realized that almost nothing I think or do is too trivial to closely examine, and I am now of the attitude that I am willing to examine anything and everything, taking absolutely nothing for granted.
The first major recent instance changed my note taking practice. This happened in 2005 and was entirely accidental. I found myself in a seminar that did not absorb my entire attention, and to entertain myself I experimented with notation methods. It is no understatement to say that I learned how to take notes all over again as if for the first time in my life, which is a little odd considering I was over forty years old at the time. By the end of the seminar, I still was not engaged in it very attentively, but everybody else in the seminar felt they had to have a copy of my notes. One of my fellow attendees referred to them as the Golden notes. I later learned that a similar system was employed by Michel Foucault, which he referred to as hypomnemata.
The second big event concerned my vocabulary. In 2006 I thought I had almost as much vocabulary as I was ever going to need, that this was a basic skill like tying one's shoes or riding a bicycle that you learn once and don't worry about it after. In retrospect, that was obviously a silly attitude, but it was not until I took a vocabulary test which I thought I had aced and found out I had not aced it that I rea...
Some Morals from the Study of Human Irrationality [Link]
by XiXiDu — 2011-01-18T15:56:21.053Z

Luke Muehlhauser posted a selection of the “morals” from Stuart Sutherland’s Irrationality.

Link: commonsenseatheism.com/?p=13556

I was wondering if the same could be done for the Sequences and if it would be a good idea or rather hold people off from reading them at full length.

Is it even possible to summarize each post in one sentence? An example would be Belief in the Implied Invisible which could be summarized by a quote from the post Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable:

If P(Y|X) ≈ 1, then P(X∧Y) ≈ P(X). Which is to say, believing extra details doesn't cost you extra probability when they are logical implications of general beliefs you already have.

One could then compile a quote paper and cite the accompanying posts. As Luke wrote, "If you want to know his reasons for giving all this advice, read the book."
January 2011 Southern California Meetup
by JenniferRM — 2011-01-18T04:50:20.454Z

There will be a meetup for Southern California this Sunday, January 23, 2011 at 4PM and running for three to five hours. The meetup is happening at Marco's Trattoria. The address is:

8200 Santa Monica Blvd
West Hollywood, CA 90046

If all the people (including guests and high end group estimates) show up we'll be at the limit of the space with 24 attendees. Previous meetups had room for walk-ins and future meetups should as well, but this one is full. If you didn't RSVP in time for this one but want to get an email reminder when the February meetup is scheduled send me a PM with contact info.

For those interested in carpooling, see comments for: San Diego, Lake Forest.

The format for past meetups has varied based on the number of attendees and their interests. At various points we have either tried or considered: paranoid debating, small group "dinner party conversations", structured rationality exercises, large discussions with people sharing personal experiences with sleep and "nutraceutical" interventions for intelligence augmentation, and specialized subprojects to develop tools for quantitatively estimating the value of things like cryonics or existential risk interventions.
People at these meetups are generally up for being subjects of fun experiments in group or individual rationality. Also, past experience indicates that interesting top level articles are inspired by conversations that happen at meetups. Expect something awesome to happen... or bring something neat to make something awesome happen!
Statistical Prediction Rules Out-Perform Expert Human Judgments
by lukeprog — 2011-01-18T03:19:33.866Z

A parole board considers the release of a prisoner: Will he be violent again? A hiring officer considers a job candidate: Will she be a valuable asset to the company? A young couple considers marriage: Will they have a happy marriage?

The cached wisdom for making such high-stakes predictions is to have experts gather as much evidence as possible, weigh this evidence, and make a judgment. But 60 years of research has shown that in hundreds of cases, a simple formula called a statistical prediction rule (SPR) makes better predictions than leading experts do. Or, more exactly:

When based on the same evidence, the predictions of SPRs are at least as reliable as, and are typically more reliable than, the predictions of human experts for problems of social prediction.1

For example, one SPR developed in 1995 predicts the price of mature Bordeaux red wines at auction better than expert wine tasters do. Reaction from the wine-tasting industry to such wine-predicting SPRs has been "somewhere between violent and hysterical."

How does the SPR work? This particular SPR is called a proper linear model, which has the form:

P = w1(c1) + w2(c2) + w3(c3) + ...wn(cn)

The model calculates the summed result P, which aims to predict a target property such as wine price, on the basis of a series of cues. Above, cn is the value of the nth cue, and wn is the weight assigned to the nth cue.2

In the wine-predicting SPR, c1 reflects the age of the vintage, and other cues reflect relevant climatic features where the grapes were grown. The weights for the cues were assigned on the basis of a comparison of these cues to a large set of data on past market prices for mature Bordeaux wines.3

There are other ways to construct SPRs, but rather than survey these details, I will instead survey the incredible success of SPRs.

Howard and Dawes (1976) found they can reliably predict marital happiness with one of the simplest SPRs ever conceived, using only two cues: P = [rate of lovemaking] - [rate of fighting]. The reliability of this SPR was confirmed by Edwards & Edwards (1977) and by Thornton (1979).

Unstructured interviews reliably degrade the decisions of gatekeepers (e.g. hiring and admissions officers, parole boards, etc.). Gatekeepers (and SPRs) make better decisions on the basis of dossiers alone than on the basis of dossiers and unstructured interviews. (Bloom and Brundag

...
Eliezer to speak in Oxford, 8pm Jan 25th
by Alex Flint — 2011-01-17T23:58:21.854Z

Next Tuesday Eliezer will be giving a talk in conjunction with the Oxford Transhumanists entitled "Smarter-Than-Human Artificial Intelligence: Predictably the Most Important Thing in the History of Ever". The talk is open for everybody and it would be great to meet any of you that are in the area and can come down. The talk will be followed by drinks at the Turf Tavern, and hopefully we will be able to drag Eliezer with us for further discussion.

When: 8pm, Tuesday January 25th
Where: Saskatchewan Room, Exeter College, Turl Street, OX1 3DP (there will be ushers to guide you to the room from the college entrance)
RSVP: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=182377671794308

Eliezer doesn't often speak in this part of the world so don't miss it!
Link: "Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Change"
by cousin_it — 2011-01-17T17:46:48.453Z

Linky. HN discussion. My summary with the negatives flipped:

If you want to change your behavior effectively,

think of a small step,

that doesn't require willpower every time,

uses the environment for encouragement,

involves a new behavior, not stopping an old one,

is relatively easy to do,

is prompted by an external trigger,

(which shouldn't be just learning some new information),

is a concrete behavior rather than an abstract goal,

and resolve to adopt it for some fixed period of time, not forever.

Then the behavior change will be easy.