trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny
by daenerys — 2013-04-10T19:54:18.267Z

Standard Intro

The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series.

Several months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post. There is a LOT of material, so I am breaking them down into more manageable-sized themed posts.

Seven women submitted, totaling about 18 pages.

Standard Disclaimer- Women have many different viewpoints, and just because I am acting as an intermediary to allow for anonymous communication does NOT mean that I agree with everything that will be posted in this series. (It would be rather impossible to, since there are some posts arguing opposite sides!)

To the submitters- If you would like to respond anonymously to a comment (for example if there is a comment questioning something in your post, and you want to clarify), you can PM your message and I will post it for you. If this happens a lot, I might create a LW_Women sockpuppet account for the submitters to share.

Please do NOT break anonymity, because it lowers the anonymity of the rest of the submitters.

[Note from daenerys- These two submissions might actually be one submission that had some sort of separation (such as a line of asteriks). If I processed them as separate when they were supposed to be a single entry, this is completely my mistake, and not at all the fault of the submitters. Sorry for the confusion.]

Submitter A

Here's a webpage with more on how misogyny works, including examples in the comments of "mansplaining" minimalizing problems.

Under the article, there's a comment about Stieg Larrson's book, originally named "Men who Hate Women." To see what motivated such a name, I Googled and found this article about his experiences and guilt. Guilt is something that many have felt and tried to assuage in various ways, including asking for forgiveness. I've come to the conclusion that we should never forgive, only demand solutions, so as not to suffer continual sinning and forgiving. With solutions comes absolution, so forgiveness is unnecessary but for allowing the guilty get away with crimes (like the rapists in the article).

The article about Larsson also has a bit about his partner's contributions not being credited to her, which seems to be typical of man-woman partnerships. Besides seeing it in other stories, I'...
"I know what she has to offer already" is almost always false
by diegocaleiro — 2013-04-10T13:59:19.201Z

Interacting with people is very hard for some, for others it comes naturally, and for a third group, usually called extroverts, it is the very way in which they recharge batteries.

Oddly, after spending years on the far end of the curve's tail of how much I try to interact with people, I have noticed a pattern, in almost any group, that seems very unfruitful, and would do well to go extinct. I could try and devise a general version of it, but I'll only mention people who are curiosity driven or very goal oriented.Obviously, I'm deploying an stereotypical approximation, not a double blind large N study.

For those two groups, when two new people get to know each other, frequently the following happens:

1) Tell each other coarse grained info about their background and interests

2) Interact for some amount of time on a shared interest (which could be the interest both share in the fact that currently they disagree about some topic, such as transhumanism)

3) If one finds the other person interesting, try together to refine some specific ideas, or advocate for most strongly held beliefs.This goes on for a bit.

4) Activate or fail to activate the trigger of "friendship" or "good person to interact with" - And though this is beautiful, here the danger begins

If both failed to activate the trigger, the interaction resumes, or people let go of important topics and enter other mental modes. Yet, in most of those cases, they have only interacted about coarse grained descriptions of their interests, and a few things both felt worth advocating, at no point the topic "Hey, what about we tell each other the things we most think we could help each other with, calibrate with the other's opinion and tell each other about that?" comes up naturally to their minds.

What about the other case, in which they decide to keep it going?

5) Both usually feel that they co-activated the trigger. Relieved and relaxed (and under parasympathetic system's influence), they slowly fade away from relevant things, and talk about lower stake topics. High stake topics are worthy in the pursuit of friendship or alliance. Once alliance has been achieved, it becomes a cost (in their minds) basically because now your opinions can put you outside the circle of that person's interest much more likely than deeper inside.

This problem with the stakes of pushing and pulling the "friendship" trigger is multiplica...
[SEQ RERUN] Rationality is Systematized Winning
by MinibearRex — 2013-04-10T04:20:56.258Z

Today's post, Rationality is Systematized Winning was originally published on 03 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The idea behind the statement "Rationalists should win" is not that rationality will make you invincible. It means that if someone who isn't behaving according to your idea of rationality is outcompeting you, predictably and consistently, you should consider that you're not the one being rational.

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 Selecting Rationalist Groups, 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 Interest Probe: Urbana-Champaign, Illinois
by Mestroyer — 2013-04-10T03:52:56.494Z

I'm going to be starting graduate school in Urbana-Champaign this fall, and want to know if there are LessWrongers there (or like me, going to be there) who want to hold some meetups. Google shows me that someone else tried asking the same thing last year and met with some success, but after three meetups, they went extinct.
Taking Charity Seriously: Toby Ord talk on charity effectivess
by jefftk — 2013-04-10T00:59:48.204Z

Video: (youtube)

Transcript:

I'm Toby Ord. I'm here today from Oxford University where I'm a Research Fellow in Philosophy, and also I'm the president of an organization called Giving What We Can.

I should say as well that I haven't always been a philosopher. I used to be a computer scientist beforehand, but I decided I was interested in logic and things like these, which at my university, the Philosophy Department was mainly in charge of. I spent more and more time over there and I was also very interested in a whole lot of ethical questions and ended up being sucked away from Computer Science to the world of Philosophy. But, hopefully, you'll see that I've got an approach to some of these philosophical or ethical questions which is perhaps more quantitative than you are used to seeing from people who looked at these things. So, let's start.

I have always been interested in charity and helping other people and in particular, when I was an undergraduate, I used to get into conversations through the night with my friends. And they would say to me, you know, in some heated political debates, say something, like, "if you think that, why don't you send all your money to help people starving in Africa?", or some other cliche like this. This was meant to be a reduction of my position, that you can't possibly think that because you'd have to spend a lot of your time and effort helping these other people. But I started to treat it more like, "maybe I should be doing this". Maybe I should be thinking about what I'm doing with my income and maybe actually that is a logical conclusion. If you think all people are equal and so that you can help people in poor counties for less, maybe I should be doing something like that. Maybe I should investigate it.

I noticed a couple of philosophers have written on this. Peter Singer has very good papers on this: Famine, Affluence, and Morality, for anyone who wants to look that up. There are some very strong arguments so I took this seriously and started to think about what I could do in my life if I

...
Explicit and tacit rationality
by lukeprog — 2013-04-09T23:33:29.127Z

Like Eliezer, I "do my best thinking into a keyboard." It starts with a burning itch to figure something out. I collect ideas and arguments and evidence and sources. I arrange them, tweak them, criticize them. I explain it all in my own words so I can understand it better. By then it is nearly something that others would want to read, so I clean it up and publish, say, How to Beat Procrastination. I write essays in the original sense of the word: "attempts."

This time, I'm trying to figure out something we might call "tacit rationality" (c.f. tacit knowledge).

I tried and failed to write a good post about tacit rationality, so I wrote a bad post instead — one that is basically a patchwork of somewhat-related musings on explicit and tacit rationality. Therefore I'm posting this article to LW Discussion. I hope the ensuing discussion ends up leading somewhere with more clarity and usefulness.

Three methods for training rationality

Which of these three options do you think will train rationality (i.e. systematized winning, or "winning-rationality") most effectively?

Spend one year reading and re-reading The Sequences, studying the math and cognitive science of rationality, and discussing rationality online and at Less Wrong meetups.

Attend a CFAR workshop, then spend the next year practicing those skills and other rationality habits every week.

Run a startup or small business for one year.

Option 1 seems to be pretty effective at training people to talk intelligently about rationality (let's call that "talking-rationality"), and it seems to inoculate people against some common philosophical mistakes.

We don't yet have any examples of someone doing Option 2 (the first CFAR workshop was May 2012), but I'd expect Option 2 — if actually executed — to result in more winning-rationality than Option 1, and also a modicum of talking-rationality.

What about Option 3? Unlike Option 2 or especially Option 1, I'd expect it to train almost no ability to talk intelligently about rationality. But I would expect it to result in relatively good winning-rationality, due to its tight feedback loops.

Talking-rationality and winning-rationality can come apart

I've come to believe... that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the

...
Litany of Instrumentarski
by Shmi — 2013-04-09T15:07:10.565Z

The Litany of Tarski (formulated by Eliezer, not Tarski) reads

If the box contains a diamond,

I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond;

If the box does not contain a diamond,

I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond;

Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.

This works for a physical realist, but I have been feeling uncomfortable with it for some time now. So I have decided to reformulate it in a more instrumental way, replacing existential statements with testable predictions. I had to find a new name for it, so I call it the Litany of Instrumentarski:

If believing that there is a diamond in the box lets me find the diamond in the box,

I desire to believe that there is a diamond in the box;

If believing that there is a diamond in the box leaves me with an empty box,

I desire to believe that there is no diamond in the box;

Let me not become attached to inaccurate beliefs.

Posting it here in a hope that someone else also finds it more palatable and unassuming than straight-up realism.

EDIT: It seems to me that this modification also guides you to straight-up one-box on Newcomb, where the original one is mired in the EDT vs CDT issues.

EDIT2: Looks like the above version resulting in people confusing desiring accurate beliefs with desiring diamonds. It's about accurate accounting, not about utility of a certain form of crystallized carbon.

Maybe the first line should be modified to something like "If I later find a diamond in the box...", or something. How about the following?

If I will find a diamond in the box,

I desire to believe that I will find a diamond in the box;

If I will find no diamond in the box,

I desire to believe that I will find no diamond in the box;

Let me not become attached to inaccurate beliefs.

For some reason the editor does not let me use the <strike> tag to cross out the previous version, not sure how to work around it.
[SEQ RERUN] Selecting Rationalist Groups
by MinibearRex — 2013-04-09T05:43:49.871Z

Today's post, Selecting Rationalist Groups was originally published on 02 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Trying to breed e.g. egg-laying chickens by individual selection can produce odd side effects on the farm level, since a more dominant hen can produce more egg mass at the expense of other hens. Group selection is nearly impossible in Nature, but easy to impose in the laboratory, and group-selecting hens produced substantial increases in efficiency. Though most of my essays are about individual rationality - and indeed, Traditional Rationality also praises the lone heretic more than evil Authority - the real effectiveness of "rationalists" may end up determined by their performance in groups.

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 Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately, 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.
How to Evaluate Data?
by jetm — 2013-04-09T04:10:30.365Z

What I'm trying to figure out is, how to I determine whether a source I'm looking at is telling the truth? For an example, let's take this page from Metamed: http://www.metamed.com/vital-facts-and-statistics

At first glance, I see some obvious things I ought to consider. It often gives numbers for how many die in hospitals/year, but for my purposes I ought to interpret it in light of how many hospitals are in the US, as well as how many patients are in each hospital. I also notice that as they are trying to promote their site, they probably selected the data that would best serve that purpose.

So where do I go from here? Evaluating each source they reference seems like a waste of time. I do not think it would be wrong to trust that they are not actively lying to me. But how do I move from here to an accurate picture of general doctor competence?
New applied rationality workshops (April, May, and July)
by Julia_Galef — 2013-04-09T02:58:58.442Z

In the early days of the Center for Applied Rationality, Anna Salamon and I had a disagreement about whether we were ready to run our first applied rationality workshops in six weeks. My inside view said "No way"; Her inside view said "Should be fine"; My outside view noted that Anna had more relevant experience than I did, and therefore cowed my inside view into grudgingly shutting up.

It turned out well. Granted, the first couple of workshops were a bit chaotic (hey, sleeping in a dogpile on the living room builds character, amiright May minicampers?). But it's clear in retrospect that we got a lot more value out of diving in than we would have from the extra time spent planning.

The "try stuff fast" habit is responsible for a lot of the techniques in our curriculum; we test out classes on each other and on volunteers, observe "Oh hey, this helps other people too" or "Oh hey, no one else thinks this is useful, turns out I'm just weird," and tweak our curriculum accordingly.

And because we cannot help going recursively meta, we've built a lot of material into our curriculum to make people better at trying things that could make them better at pursuing their goals. Quick, off-the-cuff value of information (VOI) calculations help you decide when it's worth it to spend the time, or money or risk, to try something new. Againstness helps you notice and alleviate the stress responses that can keep you from trying something, once you've noticed that you should. Comfort zone expansion is basically a "try a bunch of new things" drill.

For more details on our curriculum, check out a sample schedule. I also made a simplified map of some of our classes, so you can see how I think of them fitting into the bigger picture of rationality (click to enlarge):

To the extent that I've improved my own rationality skills over the last year, I give a lot of credit to "try stuff fast." Like many Less Wrongers I have historically been more of a "thinking about things" person than a "trying stuff fast" person; given the choice of an afternoon spent debating ignorance priors or one spent figuring out how to improve my public speaking skills, I'd pick the former every time, even though the latter would be more useful to me.

I'm partially reformed now, thanks in part to the influence of Anna, whom you'll frequently overhear saying things like "I think I'll try teaching the class as if I were...
Willing gamblers, spherical cows, and AIs
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-04-08T21:30:24.813Z

Note: posting this in Main rather than Discussion in light of recent discussion that people don't post in Main enough and their reasons for not doing so aren't necessarily good ones. But I suspect I may be reinventing the wheel here, and someone else has in fact gotten farther on this problem than I have. If so, I'd be very happy if someone could point me to existing discussion of the issue in the comments.

tldr; Gambling-based arguments in the philosophy of probability can be seen as depending on a convenient simplification of assuming people are far more willing to gamble than they are in real life. Some justifications for this simplification can be given, but it's unclear to me how far they can go and where the justification starts to become problematic.

In "Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import," Luke and Anna mention the fact that, "Except for weather forecasters (Murphy and Winkler 1984), and successful professional gamblers, nearly all of us give inaccurate probability estimates..." When I read this, it struck me as an odd thing to say in a paper on artificial intelligence. I mean, those of us who are not professional accountants tend to make bookkeeping errors, and those of us who are not math, physics, engineering, or economics majors make mistakes on GRE quant questions that we were supposed to have learned how to do in our first two years of high school. Why focus on this particular human failing?

A related point can be made about Dutch Book Arguments in the philosophy of probability. Dutch Book Arguments claim, in a nutshell, that you should reason in accordance with the axioms of probability because if you don't, a clever bookie will be able to take all your money. But another way to prevent a clever bookie from taking all your money is to not gamble. Which many people don't, or at least do rarely.

Dutch Book Arguments seem to implicitly make what we might call the "willing gambler assumption": everyone always has a precise probability assignment for every proposition, and they're willing to take any bet which has a non-negative expected value given their probability assignments. (Or perhaps: everyone is always willing to take at least one side of any proposed bet.) Needless to say, even people who gamble a lot generally aren't that eager to gamble.

So how does anyone get away with using Dutch Book arguments for anything? A plaus...
LW Study Group Facebook Page
by Ben Pace — 2013-04-08T21:15:40.587Z

Update: There is now an online sign up to groups with workflowy, based on subject and current ability. You do not have to be signed up to Facebook to join a group, but do add an email address so that the group can contact you: https://workflowy.com/shared/cf1fd9ca-885f-c1b9-c2e8-e3a315f70138/

The recent Main article, searching for interest in LWers studying maths together, had many comments showing enthusiasm, but nothing really happened.

On an aside, I think that on LessWrong, we tend not to work together all that well. The wiki isn't kept bright and shiny, and most of the ideas we search for are in loose blog posts that often take a while to find. However, I think having a single place in which to work together on a specific topic, might encourage effect groups. Especially if it's in a place that you get fairly regular reminders from.

So, here's a Less Wrong Study Group Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/131607983690959/

Rixie suggested that we could split into smaller groups, based on age. I was thinking perhaps ability. Maybe even a group leader. However, before sitting and pondering this for eternity (just until we have a perfect structure), perhaps we should 'just try it'.

So, who exactly do I think should join the group?
Well, if you're interested in learning maths, and think that being surrounded by LWers might enhance your learning, this group is intended for you. If you're interested in learning maths, but you think that reading a textbook on your own is daunting, or you've tried and had difficulty previously, then this group is intended for you.

Also, if you're interested in learning other LessWrongy subjects (perhaps some cognitive science, or more economics-y stuffs) then this group could do that. If ten people join who want a basic idea economics, then they can work together. This isn't specificly maths, it's whatever we make it.

Personally, when I read a textbook, there's often a paragraph describing a key idea, and the author's words fly right over my head. I've often thought the best thing for me, would to have someone else who I could talk through that bit with. Maybe he or she would see it easily. Maybe I'd see something they wouldn't get.

I also wouldn't worry about level of prior knowledge. Mainly, because mine is zilch :)

So, what are you waiting for?

(No seriously. Just try it.)

Edit: It is true that anonymi...
Best causal/dependency diagram software for fluid capture?
by Arkanj3l — 2013-04-08T19:20:15.317Z

I've found most graphing software too clunky, or having too much mental friction, for my purpose of creating graphically represented plans, to convert written diagrams into digital form, or to do preference inference based on the structure of my goals (amongst other things).

So far the only tool that I've seen that reduces this friction is GraphViz [1], since I think I can literally just list down connection after connection in markup, with no care for structure or reasonableness, and then prune connections after I see how the entire thing looks. Point and click is for suckers.

However, I also like the approach of Freemind that quickly outputs a visual map that is easily traversable; but it doesn't do much for me when the causality is more involved.

Are there any alternatives that anyone is aware of?

[1] If you are not familiar with GraphViz, see this amusing introduction that maps the social network in R. Kelly's hit hip hopera, "Trapped in the Closet".