trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Are meaningful careers a cover story?
by KatjaGrace — 2010-06-15T14:06:23.000Z

It is more respectable to have a non-altruistic hobby than to have a non-altruistic job. If I say to a public servant that their career doesn’t make the world a better place, I’m being offensive. If I say to a chess player that their hobby doesn’t make the world a better place, they will likely agree. It’s no accusation.

People also like to have jobs that make the world a better place, whereas they don’t usually care about whether their hobbies do. A few people volunteer or create things for the enjoyment of others of course, but it’s not much of a negative if a hobby doesn’t achieve altruistic goals. People rarely worry ‘I must get out of this hockey; it’s so draining to think all my efforts aren’t helping anyone, and when I die there will be nothing to show for it’.

At first this may seem unsurprising. Jobs are where you exchange socially beneficial work for money, while hobbies are where you enjoy yourself. But why must they be grouped that way? By definition jobs are where you get money, and pleasing others will tend to get you money, but if you are already making money without seemingly making the world a better place, why try so hard to add your dose of altruism there? It should often be easier to change to a more altruistic hobby than a more altruistic job, since you don’t need to find someone to pay you for it. And if you take up an altruistic hobby, you don’t displace anyone.

Here’s a hypothesis for why altruism matters more in jobs than hobbies. Humans are sensitive about receiving money, and about others receiving it. We intuitively feel that material wealth should be divided fairly amongst the tribe and are suspicious of people who accumulate it without sharing. We allow inequality if it’s deserved in return for other socially beneficial actions, but we monitor this closely. We can’t believe the rich really deserve it, nor the welfare dependent, and this suspicion of cheating colors all our dealings with them. When we are given money then, we must feel and look like we deserved it or we risk deep shame. So the very fact that employment gives you money means you need a clear, tellable justification about altruism.

On the other hand we don’t crave justice in enjoyment of leisure time. The fact that someone is having a really interesting conversation wi...
What Does Make a Difference? It’s Really Simple
by diegocaleiro — 2010-06-15T02:33:06.249Z

This is really simple:
Suppose you want to check if some action of yours makes a difference.
How to do it?
The wrong thing to do:
Think of the consequences of your action and evaluate them to see if they fit your purposes. If they do, go on and do it.

The reason for this being wrong: If someone else does something with the same consequences, and if your doing or not your action makes no difference to the fact that THAT person will do it, then you are not necessary for those consequences, they would happen anyway.
This is also true if something, not a person, would do an action with the same consequences.

The right thing to do: Consider what would happen if you DIDN’T do your action. Subtract that from what would happen if you DID do your action.
This is the difference it would make if you did it.

There is a reason it is called a ‘difference’, it is the difference between you doing it and you not doing it.

Example: Suppose you think you will make a difference by carefully considering your vote, and voting.

Wrong: Well, I’m partially causally responsible for the election of X so my action would make a difference.

Right: If I do vote or if I don’t vote, the same candidates will be elected. Therefore my vote makes no difference.
(In more than 16000 elections in the USA it was NEVER the case that one vote would have made a difference)

The AWFUL argument people usually say: But what if everyone did it?

The reason it does not work: Everyone will NOT do it. Yes. That simple.

The reason it is awful: Compare “I don’t think I should go to the movies today, what if everione did it?”

So, when you are willing to make a difference, not feel good, not do what everyone does, not clean your consciousness. When you want to REALLY, REALLY make a difference, you should consider the difference between doing and not doing it.

It is that simple.

(Note to the Less Wrong entry: I know most people here know that politics is a mind killer, but delving deeper into the simple argument, notice it works for any case of overdetermination, such as posting a comment or entry that someone else would. If you realize now how important it is to figure out what is important, don't forget more than one person have already done it, use them.)
Book Club Update and Chapter 1
by Morendil — 2010-06-15T00:30:52.358Z

This post summarizes response to the Less Wrong Book Club and Study Group proposal, floats a tentative virtual meetup schedule, and offers some mechanisms for keeping up to date with the group's work. We end with summaries of Chapter 1.

Statistics

The proposal for a LW book club and study group, initially focusing on E.T. Jaynes' Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (a.k.a. PT:TLOS), drew an impressive response with 57 declarations of intent to participate. (I may have missed some or misinterpreted as intending to participate some who were merely interested. This spreadsheet contains participant data and can be edited by anyone (under revision control). Please feel free to add, remove or change your information.) The group has people from no less than 11 different countries, in time zones ranging from GMT-7 to GMT+10.

Live discussion schedule and venues

Many participants have expressed an interest in having informal or chatty discussions over a less permanent medium than LW itself, which should probably be reserved for more careful observations. The schedule below is offered as a basis for further negotiation. You can edit the spreadsheet linked above with your preferred times, and by the next iteration if a different clustering emerges I will report on that.

Tuesdays at UTC 18:00 (that is 1pm Bay Area, 8pm in Europe, etc. - see linked schedule for more)

Wednesdays at UTC 11:00 (seems preferred by Australian participants)

Sundays at UTC 18:00 (some have requested a weekend meeting)

The unofficial Less Wrong IRC channel is the preferred venue. An experimental Google Wave has also been started which may be a useful adjunct, in particular as we come to need mathematical notations in our discussions.

I recommend reading the suggested material before attending live discussion sessions.

Objectives, math prerequisites

The intent of the group is to engage in "earnest study of the great literature in our area of interest" (to paraphrase from the Knowledge Hydrant pattern language, a useful resource for study groups).

Earnest study aims at understanding a work deeply. Probably (particularly so in the case of PT:TLOS) the most useful way to do so is sequentially, in the order the author presented their ideas. Therefore, we aim for a pace that allows participants to extract as much insight as possible from each piece of the work, before moving on to the next, which ...
How to always have interesting conversations
by Kaj_Sotala — 2010-06-14T00:35:15.424Z

One of the things that makes Michael Vassar an interesting person to be around is that he has an opinion about everything. If you locked him up in an empty room with grey walls, it would probably take the man about thirty seconds before he'd start analyzing the historical influence of the Enlightenment on the tradition of locking people up in empty rooms with grey walls.
Likewise, in the recent LW meetup, I noticed that I was naturally drawn to the people who most easily ended up talking about interesting things. I spent a while just listening to HughRistik's theories on the differences between men and women, for instance. There were a few occasions when I engaged in some small talk with new people, but not all of them took very long, as I failed to lead the conversation into territory where one of us would have plenty of opinions.
I have two major deficiencies in trying to mimic this behavior. One, I'm by nature more of a listener than speaker. I usually prefer to let other people talk so that I can just soak up the information being offered. Second, my native way of thought is closer to text than speech. At best, I can generate thoughts as fast as I can type. But in speech, I often have difficulty formulating my thoughts into coherent sentences fast enough and frequently hesitate.
Both of these problems are solvable by having a sufficiently well built-up storage of cached thoughts that I don't need to generate everything in real time. On the occasions when a conversations happens to drift into a topic I'm sufficiently familiar with, I'm often able to overcome the limitations and contribute meaningfully to the discussion. This implies two things. First, that I need to generate cached thoughts in more subjects than I currently have. Seconds, that I need an ability to more reliably steer conversation into subjects that I actually do have cached thoughts about.
Below is a preliminary "conversational map" I generated as an exercise. The top three subjects - the weather, the other person's background (job and education), people's hobbies - are classical small talk subjects. Below them are a bunch of subjects that I feel like I can spend at least a while talking about, and possible paths leading from one subject to another. My goal in generating the map is to create a huge web of interesting subjects, so that I can us...
You might be population too
by KatjaGrace — 2010-06-13T01:39:47.000Z

I recently attended a dinner forum on what size the population should be. All of the speakers held the same position: small. The only upsides of population mentioned were to horrid profit seeking people like property developers. Yet the downsides to population are horrendous – all our resource use problems multiplied! As one speaker quoted “The population can’t increase forever, and as a no brainer it should stop sooner rather than later”. As there are no respectable positives in the equation, no need for complicated maths. Smaller is better.

I suggested to my table what I saw as an obvious omission in this model: I at least am enjoying the population being big enough to have me in it, so I would at least consider putting a big positive value on human lives. My table seemed to think this an outlandish philosophical position. I suggested that if resource use is the problem, we fix externalities there, but they thought this just as roundabout a way of getting ‘sustainability’, whereas cutting the population seems straightforward and there’s nothing to lose by it. I suggested to the organizer that the positive of human existence deserved a mention (in a multiple hour forum), and he explained that if we didn’t exist we wouldn’t notice, as though that settles it.

But the plot thickened further. Why do you suppose we should keep the population low? “We should leave the world in as good or a better condition as we got it in” one speaker explained. So out of concern for future generations apparently. Future people don’t benefit from being alive, but it’s imperative that we ensure they have cheap water bills long before they have any such preferences.

One simple solution then: since all these costs of our population go to the next generation and they don’t actually benefit from being alive – lets not have another generation! Then not only will there be no resource use in future, but the costs of our rapacious lifestyles will have nobody to go to. Coincidentally Peter Singer wrote an article to this effect last week, asking ‘Would it be wrong for us all to agree not to have children, so that we would be the last generation on Earth?’

At the forum mention was made, and amused looks were exchanged, over the voluntary human extinction movement. Apparently it’s crazy to...
H+ Summit Meetup Harvard 6/12
by thomblake — 2010-06-10T17:25:32.430Z

Just realized I hadn't seen a post about this, and couldn't find mention of it by searching...

The H+ Summit is happening this Saturday and Sunday at Harvard. I assume there are quite a few Humanity+ fellow-travelers here who might be going (though it's kindof late notice if this is the first time you've heard of it).

I'm interested in a Lw meet-up or anything of the sort on Saturday evening (June 12). Who's in?

EDIT (6/12): Meeting at h+ afterparty instead. It will be 6 to 8 at Sprout. http://diybio.org/hplusbeer/

I'll be the one named Thom Blake.

EDIT (6/11): Location: Grendel's Den Time: About 6ish. We might move if it's not suitable - apparently it may be overrun by sports fans.
Heuristics for a good life
by KatjaGrace — 2010-06-10T15:40:40.000Z

I wondered what careers or the like help other people the most. Tyler reposted my question, adding:

Let’s assume pure marginalist act utilitarianism, namely that you choose a career and get moral credit only for the net change caused by your selection. Furthermore, I’ll rule out “become a billionaire and give away all your money” or “cure cancer” by postulating that said person ends up at the 90th percentile of achievement in the specified field but no higher.

And answered:

What first comes to mind is “honest General Practitioner who has read Robin Hanson on medicine.” If other countries are fair game, let’s send that GP to Africa. No matter what the locale, you help some people live and good outcomes do not require remarkable expertise. There is a shortage of GPs in many locales, so you make specialists more productive as well. Public health and sanitation may save more lives than medicine, but the addition of a single public health worker may well have a smaller marginal impact, given the greater importance of upfront costs in that field.

I’m not convinced that the Hansonian educated GP would be much better than a materialism educated spiritual healer. Tyler’s commenters have a lot of suggestions for where big positives might be too – but all jobs have positives and many of them seem important, so how to compare? Unfortunately calculating the net costs and benefits of all the things one could do with oneself is notoriously impossible. So how about some heuristics for what types of jobs tend to be more socially beneficial?

Here some ideas, please extend and criticize:

Low displacement: if someone had to be hired, you only add the difference between your ability and the second best candidate (plus the second best candidate’s efforts to another job at random). The same goes for what you produce. Even if creating beautiful music doesn’t knock another musician out of business, people listen to your new song instead of older songs, which are not seemingly any worse.

Big gains to a marginal person being better: careers that fail the above can still rate highly if this is so. This is a hard route because if candidate quality matters more there will generally be stronger selection so you will be more average for who they let in. Your best bet here might be in something importan

...
UDT agents as deontologists
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2010-06-10T05:01:06.970Z

One way (the usual way?) to think of an agent running Updateless Decision Theory is to imagine that the agent always cares about all possible worlds according to how probable those worlds seemed to the agent's builders when they wrote the agent's source code[see added footnote 1 below]. In particular, the agent never develops any additional concern for whatever turns out to be the actual world[2]. This is what puts the "U" in "UDT".

I suggest an alternative conception of a UDT agent, without changing the UDT formalism. According to this view, the agent cares about only the actual world. In fact, at any time, the agent cares about only one small facet of the actual world — namely, whether the agent's act at that time maximizes a certain fixed act-evaluating function. In effect, a UDT agent is the ultimate deontologist: It doesn't care at all about the actual consequences that result from its action. One implication of this conception is that a UDT agent cannot be truly counterfactually mugged.

[ETA: For completeness, I give a description of UDT here (pdf).]

Vladimir Nesov's Counterfactual Mugging presents us with the following scenario:

Imagine that one day, Omega comes to you and says that it has just tossed a fair coin, and given that the coin came up tails, it decided to ask you to give it $100. Whatever you do in this situation, nothing else will happen differently in reality as a result. Naturally you don't want to give up your $100. But see, the Omega tells you that if the coin came up heads instead of tails, it'd give you $10000, but only if you'd agree to give it $100 if the coin came up tails.

Omega can predict your decision in case it asked you to give it $100, even if that hasn't actually happened, it can compute the counterfactual truth. The Omega is also known to be absolutely honest and trustworthy, no word-twisting, so the facts are really as it says, it really tossed a coin and really would've given you $10000.

An agent following UDT will give the $100. Imagine that we were building an agent, and that we will receive whatever utility follows from the agent's actions. Then it's easy to see why we should build our agent to give Omega the money in this scenario. After all, at th...
Your intuitions are not magic
by Kaj_Sotala — 2010-06-10T00:11:30.121Z

People who know a little bit of statistics - enough to use statistical techniques, not enough to understand why or how they work - often end up horribly misusing them. Statistical tests are complicated mathematical techniques, and to work, they tend to make numerous assumptions. The problem is that if those assumptions are not valid, most statistical tests do not cleanly fail and produce obviously false results. Neither do they require you to carry out impossible mathematical operations, like dividing by zero. Instead, they simply produce results that do not tell you what you think they tell you. As a formal system, pure math exists only inside our heads. We can try to apply it to the real world, but if we are misapplying it, nothing in the system itself will tell us that we're making a mistake.

Examples of misapplied statistics have been discussed here before. Cyan discussed a "test" that could only produce one outcome. PhilGoetz critiqued a statistical method which implicitly assumed that taking a healthy dose of vitamins had a comparable effect as taking a toxic dose.
Even a very simple statistical technique, like taking the correlation between two variables, might be misleading if you forget about the assumptions it's making. When someone says "correlation", they are most commonly talking about Pearson's correlation coefficient, which seeks to gauge whether there's a linear relationship between two variables. In other words, if X increases, does Y also tend to increase. (Or decrease.) However, like with vitamin dosages and their effects on health, two variables might have a non-linear relationship. Increasing X might increase Y up to a certain point, after which increasing X would decrease Y. Simply calculating Pearson's correlation on two such variables might cause someone to get a low correlation, and therefore conclude that there's no relationship or there's only a weak relationship between the two. (See also Anscombe's quartet.)
The lesson here, then, is that not understanding how your analytical tools work will get you incorrect results when you try to analyze something. A person who doesn't stop to consider the assumptions of the techniques she's using is, in effect, thinking that her techniques are magical. No matter how she might use them, they will always produce the right results. Of course, assuming that makes about as much sense as assuming that...
Bay Area Meetup Saturday 6/12
by Nick_Tarleton — 2010-06-09T18:18:17.750Z

There will be a meetup at 7PM this Saturday at the SIAI house (3755 Benton St, Santa Clara). (More info on the official page.)

The usual set of people will be present, as well as new SIAI Visiting Fellows.

(Sorry for the short notice.)
Less Wrong Book Club and Study Group
by Morendil — 2010-06-09T17:00:29.214Z

Do you want to become stronger in the way of Bayes? This post is intended for people whose understanding of Bayesian probability theory is currently somewhat tentative (between levels 0 and 1 to use a previous post's terms), and who are interested in developing deeper knowledge through deliberate practice.

Our intention is to form an online self-study group composed of peers, working with the assistance of a facilitator - but not necessarily of a teacher or of an expert in the topic. Some students may be somewhat more advanced along the path, and able to offer assistance to others.

Our first text will be E.T. Jaynes' Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, which can be found in PDF form (in a slightly less polished version than the book edition) here or here.

We will work through the text in sections, at a pace allowing thorough understanding: expect one new section every week, maybe every other week. A brief summary of the currently discussed section will be published as an update to this post, and simultaneously a comment will open the discussion with a few questions, or the statement of an exercise. Please use ROT13 whenever appropriate in your replies.

A first comment below collects intentions to participate. Please reply to this comment only if you are genuinely interested in gaining a better understanding of Bayesian probability and willing to commit to spend a few hours per week reading through the section assigned or doing the exercises.

As a warm-up, participants are encouraged to start in on the book:

Preface

Most of the Preface can be safely skipped. It names the giants on whose shoulders Jaynes stood ("History", "Foundations"), deals briefly with the frequentist vs Bayesian controversy ("Comparisons"), discusses his "Style of Presentation" (and incidentally his distrust of infinite sets), and contains the usual acknowledgements.
One section, "What is 'safe'?", stands out as making several strong points about the use of probability theory. Sample: "new data that we insist on analyzing in terms of old ideas (that is, models which are not questioned) cannot lead us out of the old ideas". (The emphasis is Jaynes'. This has an almost Kuhnian flavor.)

Discussion on the Preface starts with this comment.