trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
How Greedy Bastards Have Saved More Lives Than Mother Theresa Ever Did
by waitingforgodel — 2010-12-03T06:20:38.961Z

And how you can use the same techniques to save a stranger's life for under $600

It's a strange world we live in.

When I first heard of Optimal Philanthropy, it was in a news article about Bill Gates's plan for retirement. He'd decided to donate tens of billions of dollars to charity, but had decided that no existing charity was worth donating to.

Gates felt they weren't run properly.

You see, at the time most people thought that "efficient charities" were those that had little or no overhead. Everyone wanted as much money to go to the front lines as possible, with little or none for administration.

Gates didn't care about any of that.

No, what Gates wanted was measurable results... and if more administration would get better results, he was all for it.

In business, it all comes down to return on investment. How much money did you use (to rent buildings, buy supplies, hire employees), and how much money did you earn in return.

Gates felt that something similar was needed for charity.

If the charity saved lives, Gates reasoned, then it should be judged by how much money it used to save that life. If a charity could save twice as many lives on the same budget by using more administrators, they by all means they should do that.

As you may have heard, Bill Gates was appalled that he couldn't find a charity he could measure.

Here he was, trying to selflessly give away over ten billion dollars to any charity that could prove it would have the highest impact.... and finding a bunch of nonsense answers about how that's not the way charity works... or how little overhead there was.

And as you may have also heard, Mr. Gates turned that frustration into a revolution in the world of charity -- and inspired others to follow him. His foundation -- the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation -- is now the biggest in the world, and makes a difference everyday in the areas of world education, malaria, and sustainable energy.

But Enough About All That! This Isn't About Bill Gates, This Is About You

Although the billionaires of the world have gotten their heads screwed on right about charity (and saving hundreds of millions more lives as a result), us non-billionaires didn't seem to get the memo.

And that means, if you are the sort of person who donates, you're not doing nearly the amount of good you could.

Here are 3 simple steps you can use right away that will at least double the ...
Rationality Quotes: December 2010
by Tiiba — 2010-12-03T03:23:07.900Z

Every month on the month, Less Wrong has a thread where we post Deep Wisdom from the Masters. I saw that nobody did this yet for December for some reason, so I figured I could do it myself.

* Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

* "Do not quote yourself." --Tiiba

* Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB. That's like shooting fish in a barrel. :)

* No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Definitions, characterizations, and hard-to-ground variables
by Sniffnoy — 2010-12-03T03:18:07.947Z

[I am hoping this post is not too repetitive, does not spend too much time rehashing basics... also: What should this be tagged with?]

Systems are not always made to be understandable - especially if they were not designed in the first place, like the human brain. Thus, they can often contain variables that are hard to ground in an outside meaning (e.g. "status", "gender"...). In this case, it may often be more appropriate to simply characterize how the variable behaves, rather than worry about attempting to see what it "represents" and "define" it thus. Ultimately, the variable is grounded in the effects it has on the outside world via the rest of the system. Meanwhile it may not represent anything more than "a flag I needed to make this hack work".

I will refer to this as characterizing the object in question rather than defining it. Rather than say what something "is", we simply specify how it behaves. Strictly speaking, characterization is of course a form of definition[0] - indeed, strictly speaking, nearly all definitions are of this form - but I expect you will forgive me if for now I allow a fuzzy notion of "characterization vs. definition" scale.

Let us consider a simple example where this is appropriate; consider the notion of "flying" in Magic: the Gathering. In this game, a player may have his creatures attack another player, who can then block them with creatures of his own. Some of these creatures have printed on them the text "flying", which is defined by the game rules to expand to a larger block of explanatory text. What does "flying" mean? It means "this creature can't be blocked except by creatures with flying"[1]. So the creature can only be blocked by creatures that can only be blocked by creatures that can only be blocked by... well, you see the problem. This is not the real definition at all; if you took a card with "flying" and instead actually replaced it with the text "this creature can't be blocked except by creatures with flying", you'd get a weaker card. (Such cards actually exist, too.)

The real definition isn't what it nominally expands out to; really, it's just a flag. Meanwhile it's characterized by an external rule that says that creatures with the flag can only be blocked by other creatures with the flag. It may represent the ability to fly but that's just ...
$100 for the best article on efficient charity -- Submit your articles
by Roko — 2010-12-02T20:57:31.410Z

Several people have written articles on efficient charity -- throwawayaccount_1 has an excellent article hidden away in a comment, as does waitingforgodel. Multifoliaterose promises to write an article "at some point soon" ..., and louie has actually submitted an article to the main LW page.

What I'd like is for throwawayaccount_1, waitingforgodel and multifoliaterose to submit to the main LW articles page. People will read the articles, and hopefully vote more for better articles. Srticles not submitted to the main LW articles page are not eligible for the prize.

Note that it is hard for me to judge which article(s) will actually have the best effect in terms of causing people to make better decisions, so at least some empiricism is desirable. Yes, it isn't perfect, but if anyone has a better suggestion, I am all ears.
Social Presuppositions
by lucidfox — 2010-12-02T13:25:39.742Z

During discussion in my previous post, when we touched the subject of human statistical majorities, I had a side-thought. If taking the Less Wrong audience as an example, the statistics say that any given participant is strongly likely to be white, male, atheist, and well, just going by general human statistics, probably heterosexual.

But in my actual interaction, I've taken as a rule not to make any assumptions about the other person. Does it mean, I thought, that I reset my prior probabilities, and consciously choose to discard information? Not relying on implicit assumptions seems the socially right thing to do, I thought; but is it rational?

When I discussed it on IRC, this quote by sh struck me as insightful:

I.e. making the guess incorrectly probably causes far more friction than deliberately not making a correct guess you could make.

I came up with the following payoff matrix:

Bob

Has trait X (p = 0.95)
Doesn't have trait X (p = 0.05)

Alice
Acts as if Bob has trait X
+1
-100

Acts without assumptions about Bob
0
0

In this case, the second option is strictly preferable. In other words, I don't discard the information, but the repercussions to our social interaction in case of an incorrect guess outweigh the benefit from guessing correctly. And it also matters whether either Alice or Bob is an Asker or a Guesser.

One consequence I can think of is that with a sufficiently low p, or if Bob wouldn't be particularly offended by Alice's incorrect guess, taking the guess would be preferable. Now I wonder if we do that a lot in daily life with issues we don't consider controversial ("hmm, are you from my country/state too?"), and if all the "you're overreacting/too sensitive" complaints come from Alice incorrectly assessing a too low-by-absolute-value negative payoff in (0, 1).
Cheat codes
by sketerpot — 2010-12-01T21:19:39.547Z

Most things worth doing take serious, sustained effort. If you want to become an expert violinist, you're going to have to spend a lot of time practicing. If you want to write a good book, there really is no quick-and-dirty way to do it. But sustained effort is hard, and can be difficult to get rolling. Maybe there are some easier gains to be had with simple, local optimizations. Contrary to oft-repeated cached wisdom, not everything worth doing is hard. Some little things you can do are like cheat codes for the real world.

Take habits, for example: your habits are not fixed. My diet got dramatically better once I figured out how to change my own habits, and actually applied that knowledge. The general trick was to figure out a new, stable state to change my habits to, then use willpower for a week or two until I settle into that stable state. In the case of diet, a stable state was one where junk food was replaced with fruit, tea, or having a slightly more substantial meal beforehand so I wouldn't feel hungry for snacks. That's an equilibrium I can live with, long-term, without needing to worry about "falling off the wagon." Once I figured out the pattern -- work out a stable state, and force myself into it over 1-2 weeks -- I was able to improve several habits, permanently. It was amazing. Why didn't anybody tell me about this?

In education, there are similar easy wins. If you're trying to commit a lot of things to memory, there's solid evidence that spaced repetition works. If you're trying to learn from a difficult textbook, reading in multiple overlapping passes is often more time-efficient than reading through linearly. And I've personally witnessed several people academically un-cripple themselves by learning to reflexively look everything up on Wikipedia. None of this stuff is particularly hard. The problem is just that a lot of people don't know about it.

What other easy things have a high marginal return-on-effort? Feel free to include speculative ones, if they're testable.
Smart people who are usually wrong
by PhilGoetz — 2010-12-01T20:45:30.123Z

There are several posters on Less Wrong whom I

think are unusually smart, and would probably test within the top 2% in the US on standardized tests, and

think are usually wrong when they post or comment here.

So I think they are exceptionally smart people whose judgement is consistently worse than if they flipped a coin.

How probable is this?

Some theories:

This is a statistical anomaly. With enough posters, some will by chance always disagree with me. To test this hypothesis, I can write down my list of smart people who are usually wrong, then make a new list based on the next six months of LessWrong, and see how well the lists agree. I have already done this. They agree above chance.

I remember times when people disagree with me better than times when they agree with me. To test this, I should make a list of smart people, and count the number of times I votes their comments up and down. (It would be really nice if the website could report this to me.)

This is a bias learned from an initial statistical anomaly. The first time I made my list, I became prejudiced against everything those people wrote. This could be tested using the anti-kibitzer.

I have poor judgement on who is smart, and they are actually stupid people. I'm not interested in testing this hypothesis.

What I am actually detecting is smart people who have strong opinions on, and are likely to comment on, areas where I am either wrong, or have a minority opinon.

These people comment only on difficult, controversial issues which are selected as issues where people perform worse than random.

Many of these comments are in response to comments or posts I made, which I made only because I thought they were interesting because I already disagreed with smart people about the answers.

Intelligence does not correlate highly with judgement. Opinions are primarily formed to be compatible with pre-existing opinions, and therefore historical accident is more significant than intelligence in forming opinons. The distribution of historical accidents is probably such that some number of smart people will have opinions based on an entire worldview that is largely wrong.
Philadelphia Meetup: Dec 5 or 6
by PhilGoetz — 2010-12-01T20:24:53.952Z

I'll be in Philadelphia on Dec. 6-7 for the Systems Biology of Human Aging conference. If there are LWers in Philadelphia who'd like to meet, we can meet at my hotel, and either stay there or go out. This would be either Sunday Dec. 5 at 6pm-11pm, or Monday Dec. 6 at 9pm-midnight. If interested, please respond here, with date preference, and also email my username at gmail.

Notice the different hours. I really don't have much time on Monday night.
A  possible example of failure to apply lessons from Less Wrong
by JoshuaZ — 2010-12-01T19:33:04.193Z

One issue that has been discussed here before is whether Less Wrong is causing readers and participants to behave more rationally or is primarily a time-sink. I recently encountered an example that seemed worth pointing out to the community that suggested mixed results. The entry for Less Wrong on RationalkWiki says " In the outside world, the ugly manifests itself as LessWrong acolytes, minds freshly blown, metastasising to other sites, bringing the Good News for Modern Rationalists, without clearing their local jargon cache." RationalWiki has a variety of issues that I'm not going to discuss in detail here (such as a healthy of dose of motivated cognition pervading the entire project and having serious mind-killing problems) but this sentence should be a cause for concern. What they are essentially talking about is LWians not realizing (or not internalizing) that there's a serious problem of inferential distance between people who are familiar with many of the ideas here and people who are not. Since inferential distance is an issue that has been discussed here a lot, this suggests that some people who have read a lot here are not applying the lessons even when they are consciously talking about material related to those lessons. Of course, there's no easy way to tell how representative a sample this is, how common it is, and given RW's inclination to list every possible thing they don't like about something, no matter how small, this may not be a serious issue at all. But it did seem to be serious enough to point out here.
Is ambition rational?
by sliverlake — 2010-12-01T18:54:54.639Z

I don't understand the people around me who are working so very hard to succeed. It strikes me as irrational. Why do you do it?

A long time ago I reasoned that it is more efficient to strive for a 90% rather than 100% on a test because both yield the same "A". This morphed into a way of life. I barely got past grad school to earn my PhD, and now I'm a "Dr." just like anyone else. I worked in corporate research where promotions are largely determined by time served. So I aimed to do a good job, but I didn't put in extra effort. Recently, I do just enough consulting to get by and spend the rest of my time as a lazy hipster. :-)

The emotional half of my brain would like to be more successful, but the "logical" part of my brain explains (condescendingly) that the poor odds don't justify the extra effort. Which is right?

Here's a practical example: My friend is a senior manager at an investment bank. If she works extremely hard for a few more years, she has a small chance (1 in 50?) at being promoted to managing director (2x income). On the other hand, she could scale back her responsibilities and coast for a few years on her already outrageous salary. She has not decided what to do.

I'm new. If this has already been discussed please post links. Searching didn't yield anything relevant. Thanks.
Ask and Guess
by  — 2010-12-01T17:54:10.469Z

There's a concept (inspired by a Metafilter blog post) of ask culture vs. guess culture. In "ask culture," it's socially acceptable to ask for a favor -- staying over at a friend's house, requesting a raise or a letter of recommendation -- and equally acceptable to refuse a favor. Asking is literally just inquiring if the request will be granted, and it's never wrong to ask, provided you know you might be refused. In "guess culture," however, you're expected to guess if your request is appropriate, and you are rude if you accidentally make a request that's judged excessive or inappropriate. You can develop a reputation as greedy or thoughtless if you make inappropriate requests.

When an asker and a guesser collide, the results are awful. I've seen it in marriages, for example.

Husband: "Could you iron my shirt? I have a meeting today."

Wife: "Can't you see I'm packing lunches and I'm not even dressed yet? You're so insensitive!"

Husband: "But I just asked. You could have just said no if you were too busy -- you don't have to yell at me!"

Wife: "But you should pay enough attention to me to know when you shouldn't ask!"

It's not clear how how the asking vs. guessing divide works. Some individual people are more comfortable asking than guessing, and vice versa. It's also possible that some families, and some cultures, are more "ask-based" than "guess-based." (Apparently East Asia is more "guess-based" than the US.) It also varies from situation to situation: "Will you marry me?" is a question you should only ask if you know the answer is yes, but "Would you like to get coffee with me?" is the kind of question you should ask freely and not worry too much about rejection.

There's a lot of scope for rationality in deciding when to ask and when to guess. I'm a guesser, myself. But that means I often pass up the opportunity to get what I want, because I'm afraid of being judged as "greedy" if I make an inappropriate request. If you're a systematic "asker" or a systematic "guesser," then you're systematically biased, liable to guess when you should ask and vice versa.

In my experience, there are a few situations in which you should experiment with asking even if you're a guesser: in a situation where failure/rejection is so common as to not be shameful (i.e. dati...
How to Save the World
by Louie — 2010-12-01T17:17:48.713Z

Most of us want to make the world a better place. But what should we do if we want to generate the most positive impact possible? It’s definitely not an easy problem. Lots of smart, talented people with the best of intentions have tried to end war, eliminate poverty, cure disease, stop hunger, prevent animal suffering, and save the environment. As you may have noticed, we’re still working on all of those. So the track record of people trying to permanently solve the world's biggest problems isn’t that spectacular. This isn’t just a “look to your left, look to your right, one of you won’t be here next year”-kind of thing, this is more like “behold the trail of dead and dying who line the path before you, and despair”. So how can you make your attempt to save the world turn out significantly better than the generations of others who've tried this already?
It turns out there actually are a number of things we can do to substantially increase our odds of doing the most good. Here's a brief summary of some on the most crucial considerations that one needs to take into account when soberly approaching the task of doing the most good possible (aka "saving the world").
1. Patch your moral intuition (with math!) - Human moral intuition is really useful. But it tends to fail us at precisely the wrong times -- like when a problem gets too big [“millions of people dying? *yawn*”] or when it involves uncertainty [“you can only save 60% of them? call me when you can save everyone!”]. Unfortunately, these happen to be the defining characteristics of the world’s most difficult problems. Think about it. If your standard moral intuition were enough to confront the world’s biggest challenges, they wouldn’t be the world’s biggest challenges anymore... they’d be “those problems we solved already cause they were natural for us to understand”. If you’re trying to do things that have never been done before, use all the tools available to you. That means setting aside your emotional numbness by using math to feel what your moral intuition can’t. You can also do better by acquainting yourself with some of the more common human biases. It turns out your brain isn't always right. Yes, even your brain. So knowing the ways in which it systematically gets thing...
Gender Identity and Rationality
by lucidfox — 2010-12-01T16:32:25.785Z

Not sure if I would be better off posting this on the main page instead, but since it's almost entirely about my personal experiences, here it goes.

Two years ago, I underwent a radical change in my worldview. A series of events caused me to completely re-evaluate my beliefs in everything related to gender, sexuality, tolerance, and diversity -- which in turn caused a cascade that made me rethink my stance on many other topics.

Coincidentally, the same events caused me to also rethink the way I thought of myself. This was, as it turned out, not very good. It still makes it difficult for me to untangle various consequences, correlated but potentially not directly bound by a cause-effect relation.

To be more blunt: being biologically male, I confessed to someone online about things that things that "men weren't supposed to do": my dissatisfaction with my body, my wish to have a female body, persistent fantasies of a sex change, desires to shave my body, grow long hair and wear women's clothes, and so on and so forth. She listened, and then asked, "Maybe you're transsexual?"

Back then, it would never even occur to me to think of that -- and my first gut response, which I'm not proud of, was denying association with "those freaks". As I understand now, I was relying on a cached thought, and it limited the scope of my reasoning. She used simple intuitive reasoning to arrive at the hypothesis based on what I revealed to her; I didn't know the hypothesis was even there, as I knew nothing about gender identity.

In the events that unfolded, I integrated myself into some LGBT communities and learned about all kinds of people, including those who didn't fit into notions of the gender binary at all. I've learned to view gender as a multidimensional space with two big clusters, rather than as a boolean flag. It felt incredibly heartwarming to be able to mentally call myself by a female name, to go by it on the Internet, to talk to like-minded people who had similar experiences and feelings, and to be referred by the pronoun "she" -- which at first bugged me, because I somehow felt I had "no moral right" or had to "earn that privilege", but quickly I got at ease with it, and soon it just felt ordinary, and like the only acceptable thing to do, the only way of presentation that felt right.

(I'm compressing and simplifying here for the sake of readability -- I'm skipping over the...