trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
On desiring subjective states (post 3 of 3)
by torekp — 2015-05-05T02:16:01.543Z

Carol puts her left hand in a bucket of hot water, and lets it acclimate for a few minutes. Meanwhile her right hand is acclimating to a bucket of ice water. Then she plunges both hands into a bucket of lukewarm water. The lukewarm water feels very different to her two hands. To the left hand, it feels very chilly. To the right hand, it feels very hot. When asked to tell the temperature of the lukewarm water without looking at the thermocouple readout, she doesn't know. Asked to guess, she's off by a considerable margin.

Next Carol flips the thermocouple readout to face her (as shown), and practices. Using different lukewarm water temperatures of 10-35 C, she gets a feel for how hot-adapted and cold-adapted hands respond to the various middling temperatures. Now she makes a guess - starting with a random hand, then moving the other one and revising the guess if necessary - each time before looking at the thermocouple. What will happen? I haven't done the experiment, but human performance on similar perceptual learning tasks suggests that she will get quite good at it.
We bring Carol a bucket of 20 C water (without telling) and let her adapt her hands first as usual. "What do you think the temperature is?" we ask. She moves her cold hand first. "Feels like about 20," she says. Hot hand follows. "Yup, feels like 20."
"Wait," we ask. "You said feels-like-20 for both hands. Does this mean the bucket no longer feels different to your two different hands, like it did when you started?"
"No!" she replies. "Are you crazy? It still feels very different subjectively; I've just learned to see past that to identify the actual temperature."
In addition to reports on the external world, we perceive some internal states that typically (but not invariably) can serve as signals about our environment. Let's tentatively call these states Subjectively Identified Aspects of Perception (SIAPs). Even though these states aren't strictly necessary to know what's going on in the environment - Carol's example shows that the sensation felt by one hand isn't necessary to know that the water is 20 C, because the other hand knows this via a different sensation - they still matter to us. As Eliezer notes:

If I claim to value art for its own sake, then would I val

...
Two meetups in Denver/Boulder Colorado
by fowlertm — 2015-05-05T00:58:02.964Z

There will be a rationalist meetup in Denver tomorrow at 7:00 pm at Darcy's Pub, 4955 S Ulster St. #103 Denver, CO 80237

This Saturday I'll be giving a presentation on the control problem for superintelligent agents. It'll be from 2-4 at the Boulder Hacker Space, 1965 33rd Street, UNIT B, Boulder, CO.
Meetup : Brussels - The Art of Not Being Right
by Roxolan — 2015-05-05T00:30:42.331Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels - The Art of Not Being Right

WHEN:
09 May 2015 01:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles

See detailed description on http://www.meetup.com/LWBrussels/events/221990500/

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels - The Art of Not Being Right
Group rationality diary, May 5th - 23rd
by philh — 2015-05-04T23:59:39.601Z

This is the public group rationality diary for May 5 - 23, 2015. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Archive of previous rationality diaries

Note to future posters: no one is in charge of posting these threads. If it's time for a new thread, and you want a new thread, just create it. It should run for about two weeks, finish on a saturday, and have the 'group_rationality_diary' tag.
Theological Epistemology
by Bound_up — 2015-05-04T22:06:49.171Z

Does anyone know of an apparently defensible response to the following question?
How does a theist distinguish by any imaginable experience between an omnipotent and loving Being, and an omnipotent Being that just wants you to believe it is loving?
Or, if you prefer:

Out of all potential omnipotent beings that want you to believe that they are loving, what observation can distinguish those which actually are loving?

Also, are any of you aware of another who has posed this question?

EDIT: I'm confused at the apparent disapproval of many. Is it because the question refers to religion?
Meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Rationalist Taboo
by rocurley — 2015-05-04T05:38:00.446Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Rationalist Taboo

WHEN:
04 May 2015 06:15:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
1061 Market St #4, San Francisco, CA 94103

We'll be meeting to practice rationalist taboo!

If you need help getting in, you can call (301)-458-0764

As usual, feel free to show up late.

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco Meetup: Rationalist Taboo
Is Scott Alexander bad at math?
by JonahS — 2015-05-04T05:11:47.044Z

This post is a third installment to the sequence that I started with The Truth About Mathematical Ability and Innate Mathematical Ability. I begin to discuss the role of aesthetics in math.

There was strong interest in the first two posts in my sequence, and I apologize for the long delay. The reason for it is that I've accumulated hundreds of pages of relevant material in draft form, and have struggled with how to organize such a large body of material. I still don't know what's best, but since people have been asking, I decided to continue posting on the subject, even if I don't have my thoughts as organized as I'd like. I'd greatly welcome and appreciate any comments, but I won't have time to respond to them individually, because I already have my hands full with putting my hundreds of pages of writing in public form.

Where I come from

My father is a remarkable creature, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to have grown up around him. Amongst other things, we share a love of music. There's a fair amount of overlap in our musical tastes. But there's an important difference between us.

When a piece of music is complex, like a piano sonata or a symphony, I often need to listen to it repeatedly before I figure out what I like about it. When I share the piece with him that he's never heard before, he'll often highlight the parts that I like most in real time, on first listening, without my having said anything.

In the past, people would have attributed this to magic, or other supernatural constructs like telepathy. We now know that these explanations don't suffice.

You might hypothesize that the difference comes from him having greater abstract pattern recognition ability than my own. In fact, this is the case, but it doesn't suffice to account for the phenomenon. Some people with greater pattern recognition ability than me don't appreciate music at all. More significantly, my father doesn't figure out what I like by thinking about it – his reactions are instead emotionally rooted, for example, he broke into tears upon hearing the repetition of the original theme in the final movement of Beethoven's piano sonata Op. 109.

For whatever reason, my father's initial emotional responses are surprisingly often closely aligned with my eventual emotional responses than my ...
Is Determinism A Special Case Of Randomness?
by  — 2015-05-04T01:56:15.255Z

I was trying to reconcile the fact that in a deterministic universe there could be life with free will, but I am going full circle now and am starting to think that everything is really random, if not I don't see how there could be free will in a deterministic universe.

If mathematicians measure randomness with probability, then there must be some things that have a 100% occurrence probability (in the current universe above atomic levels I presume), which now I see as special cases of randomness rather than opposites to randomness, and these lead us to think that there is determinism.

I think we may have this cognitive bias (deterministic views of reality) because it is extremely helpful to use these 100% probability occurrence things to model the universe rationally, learn, and to predict the future, but it is not the whole story or at least a complete description of reality.

What do you think?

EDIT 1: Thank you all for the comments below. I recognize I am naive in this topic.

Although I am not convinced yet, I think my possible argumentative error is:

P1: I observe free will in the behavior of living things.

P2: Deterministic physical mechanical processes don't permit free will.

C: Therefore physics must include random processes.

I think I only see a solution of free will in randomness, but maybe there are other solutions ( I will read the Free Will Sequence here on LW!)

EDIT 2: After reading some articles of the Free Will Sequence I realize the problem of investing energy around free will questions if free will is just a mistake in our thinking process.

It is something like why ask about time travel if time doesn't exist? or, why explore the mechanics of randomness vs determinism if randomness doesn't exist and thus the dichotomy "randomness vs determinism" doesn't exist in the first place?
Meetup : LW Cologne meetup
by EGI — 2015-05-04T00:12:02.468Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Cologne meetup

WHEN:
09 May 2015 05:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Marienweg 43, 50858 Köln

Time for our monthly meetup again. Time and place same as last month (May 9th 2015 Marienweg 43, 50858 Köln). Please notify me (marcel_mueller(at)mail(dot)de) if you attend and if you will bring food / games / discussion content.

Is anyone interested in attending PhilCologne?

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Cologne meetup
Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015
by Gondolinian — 2015-05-04T00:06:14.089Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Calling all Nigerian rationalists and effective altruists
by oge — 2015-05-03T22:31:49.356Z

I'm in Lagos, Nigeria till the end of May and I'd like to hold a LessWrong/EA meetup while I'm here. If you'll ever be in the country in the future (or in the subcontinent), please get in touch so we can coordinate a meetup. I'd also appreciate being put in contact with any Nigerians who may not regularly read this list.

My e-mail address is oge@nnadi.org. I hope to hear from you.
The language of desire (post 2 of 3)
by torekp — 2015-05-03T21:57:33.050Z

To the extent that desires explain behavior, it is primarily by meshing with beliefs to favor particular actions. For example, if I desire to lose 5 lbs, and I believe that exercising a half hour per day will cause me to lose 5 lbs, then this belief-desire pair makes it more likely that I will exercise. Beliefs have semantic content. In order to explain an action as part of a belief-desire pair, a desire must also have semantic content: one that in some sense "matches" a relevant part of the belief. In the example, the matching semantic content is "to lose 5 lbs".
Of course, desires can also explain some behaviors without functioning as part of a belief-desire pair. I might want something so badly, I start trembling. No beliefs are required to explain the trembling. Also, notably, desires usually (but not always) feel like something. We gesture in the vague direction of these feelings by talking about "a burning desire", or "thirst" (for something that is not a drink), etc. In these ways, "desire" is a richer concept than what I am really after, here. That's OK, though; I'm not trying to define desire. Alternatively, we can talk about "values", "goals", or "utility functions" - anything that interacts with beliefs, via semantics, to favor particular actions. I will mostly stick to the word "desire", but nothing hangs on it.
So how does this "semantics" stuff work?
Let me start by pointing to the Sequences. EY explains it pretty well, with some help by pragmatist in the comments. Like EY, I subscribe to the broad class of causal theories of mental content. For our purposes here, we need not choose among them.
The reference of the concepts involved in desires (or goals) is determined by their causal history. To take a simple example, suppose Allie has a secret admirer. It's Bob, but she doesn't know this. Bob leaves her thoughtful gifts and love letters, which Allie appreciates so much that she falls in love with "my secret admirer". She tells all her friends, "I can't wait to meet my secret admirer and have a torrid affair!" Allie's desire refers to Bob, because Bob is the causal source of all the gifts and love letters, which in turn caused Allie's relevant thoughts and desires.
We could have told the story differently, in a way that made the re...
Gasoline Gal looks under the hood (post 1 of 3)
by torekp — 2015-05-03T20:15:49.744Z

"Hi," said Galaxy, "Are you Fuller Chen? I'm here to see your 2018 Chevy SS. Is it still for sale?"
"Sure," Fuller replied, "let me open the garage door for you." [Garage door opens.] "What's your name?"
"I'm Galaxy, but everyone calls me Gal." Galaxy walked around the car. "Looks great. Not a scratch or a blemish."
"Would you like to take it for a test drive?" Fuller asked, opening the passenger door for himself and reaching the key out to her.
"Yes, thanks," said Galaxy. She adjusted her seat and mirrors, then started the car and eased it out of the garage and onto the residential street. "Wow, this car is really quiet. Is it a hybrid? I didn't think they made a hybrid."
"Nope, not a hybrid," Fuller answered. His smile made her think there was a joke in there somewhere.
She took it onto the main road and put the pedal to the metal. The response was rapid and forceful - and eerily quiet. "This car is too quiet," Galaxy objected. "What's going on here?" She slammed on the brakes and pulled into an empty parking lot.
"It's a fuel cell!" Fuller announced. "Pop the hood, and take a look! Retrofitted it myself. It's a labor of love, but I need to cash in all my major assets for my business start-up. That's why I'm letting it go at the price of an ordinary SS. And as you have seen, the performance is equal to or better than any conventional engine."
Galaxy looked under the hood. It sure did look like a fuel cell. "We have a problem," Galaxy warned, "I admit, I am impressed with the performance, but ... I'm looking for a car with an internal combustion engine. I need to hear the roar of the engine, feel the vibrations, and know that I'm being propelled by something that's literally exploding."
"Oh, if it's a roar you want, the car already has a speaker to generate noise for pedestrian safety," said Fuller. "I could modify it to make the same audible sounds as a traditional internal combustion engine."
"No, listen: my nickname is Gasoline Gal. I grew up working in my father's auto repair shop. I was the engine specialist. Internal combustion is what I know and love. It's what I want. Not a simulacrum, but an actual internal combustion engine."
"But I can make this car behave the same as perceived fr...
Why capitalism?
by Algon — 2015-05-03T18:16:02.562Z

Note: I'm terrible at making up titles, and I think that the one I gave may give the wrong impression. If anyone has a suggestion on what I should change it to, it would be much appreciated.

As I've been reading articles on less wrong, it seems to me that there are hints of an underlying belief which states that not only is capitalism a good economic paradigm, it shall remain so. Now, I don't mean to say anything like 'Capitalism is Evil!' I think that capitalism can, and has, done a lot of good for humanity.

However, I don't think that capitalism will be the best economic paradigm going into the future. I used to view capitalism as an inherent part of the society we currently live in, with no real economic competition.

I recently changed my views as a result of a book someone recommended to me 'The zero marginal cost society' by Jeremy Rifkin. In it, the author states that we are in the midst of a third industrial revolution as a result of a new energy/production and communications matrix i.e. renewable energies, 3-D printing and the internet.

The author claims that these three things will eventually bring their respective sectors marginal costs to zero. This is significant because of a 'contradiction at the heart of capitalism' (I'm not sure how to phrase this, so excuse me if I butcher it): competition is at the heart of capitalism, with companies constantly undercutting each other as a result of new technologies. These technological improvement allow a company to produce goods/services at a more attractive price whilst retaining a reasonable profit margin. As a result, we get better and better at producing things, and it lets us produce goods at ever decreasing costs. But what happens when the costs of producing something hit rock bottom? That is, they can go no lower.

3D printing presents a situation like this for a huge amount of industries, as all you really need to do is get some designs, plug in some feedstock and have a power source ready. The internet allows people to share their designs for almost zero cost, and renewable energies are on the rise, presenting the avenue of virtually free power. All that's left is the feedstock, and the cost of this is due to the difficulty of producing it. Once we have better robotics, you won't need anyone to mine/cultivate anything, and the whole thing becomes basically free.

And when you can get your goods, ene...
Communities: A single moderator is often superior to the wisdom of crowds
by casebash — 2015-05-03T09:21:12.575Z

Less Wrong is a community where I believe that most of the people would accept that "knowledge is power". In our modern age, the internet provides some of the best tools for distributing this information. Many tools, such as Reddit, StackExchange or Less Wrong itself, use voting as a method to determine the highest quality content.

One situation this works well for is when an area is niche (ie. http://www.reddit.com/r/criticaltheory, http://www.reddit.com/r/neuroscience). Because these areas are so niche, the vast majority of people who decide to participate in these forums will have at least a minimum amount of knowledge, meaning that the content can remain high quality even where there are large numbers of participants.

Another situation is when a forum is highly moderated. Examples include Less Wrong, which bans politics, Skeptics Stackexchange, which requires references and Ask Historians where sources aren't mandatory, but you're expected to be able to back up your claims on demand.

What is interesting is when an area is neither niche, nor easy to be objective about. Take for example https://www.reddit.com/r/socialskills, https://www.reddit.com/r/dating or personal development (https://www.reddit.com/r/decidingtobebetter). In these areas, large numbers of people come along and post various articles and questions that interest them. Unfortunately, there are often huge amounts of overlap between the articles that are posted. Between articles telling you to "be yourself", "have confidence in yourself" and to "step out of your comfort zone" it is very hard to find articles telling you things you haven't seen before. It is very hard to find new content buried among all of the noise.

This is a shame because social skills, dating and personal development are all important areas. Sites like Reddit theoretically allow you to access the best content available on the web, but this benefit doesn't accrue if all the articles are saying the same thing. What is particularly ironic is that it wouldn't be too hard for a single person to do a much better job of filtering this content. All they would have to do, is filter out the articles that are duplicates of articles that are already existing. Sure they wouldn't be perfect and a significant percentage of useful articles would be filtered out due to their biases, but this would still be superior to the status...
You're allowed to fight for something
by So8res — 2015-05-03T03:00:00.000Z
Link: https://mindingourway.com/youre-allowed-to-fight-for-something/

The first sort of guilt I want to address is the listless guilt, that vague feeling one gets after playing video games for twelve hours straight, a guilty feeling that you should be doing something else. Many people in my local friend group don't suffer from the listless guilt, because many people in my sphere are effective altruists who feel a very acute and specific sense of guilt when they think they've spent their time poorly. Specific guilt tends to be as bad or worse than the listless guilt, but before I address specific guilt, I need to confront the listless guilt.

It seems to me that the listless guilt usually stems from not doing anything in particular. I'm not sure how to remove that feeling of guilt in people who aren't doing anything in particular. But if they shift the guilt to being guilty about not doing one thing in particular, then I have some tools that might help.

Warning: in this post, I'm going to encourage people with listless guilt to find something to care about, and to shift their guilt away from a vague sense of not doing anything towards a specific sense of not doing one thing in particular. If you already have strong specific guilts, consider skipping this post.

The message of the allegory of the stamp collector is this: you can care about things in the world. There is no difference in kind between steering reality towards futures where there are more happy-chemicals in your head, and steering reality towards futures where there are lots of happy humans outside your head. Your decision process is implemented by the lump of meat between your ears, but it builds a map of the entire universe, and you can act (according to the map) towards whatever end you please.

You only ever see the map, but you walk the territory.

Many people will say that humans only ever do what they want. They wheel out phrases such as "revealed preference" and say that no matter what people do, they do it because they wanted to. But here's the thing:

If you use the word "want" to mean "whatever humans actually do," then I need new words to differentiate activities-I-do-for-personal-enjoyment (stargazing, studying physics, tinkering, cavorting) from activities-I-do-for-the-sake-of-others-I-care-about (attempting to reduce existential risk, donating to charities, community service). These are very different clusters of behavior that feel very different, and I need wor...