trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Please voice your support for stem cell research
by zaph — 2009-05-22T18:45:38.523Z

I apologize, this really isn't an article, as such. I do feel this is an issue that is important for most rationalists. Amongst my blog reading today, I came across this. At a risk to my karma for something potentially off-topic, I thought important to post here, as I hadn't seen it mentioned.

http://network.nature.com/people/etchevers/blog/2009/05/18/quick-us-citizens-go-support-the-draft-nih-guidelines-for-human-stem-cell-research

Cutting to the chase, there is an NIH guideline document being created, and predictably anti-stem cell activists are voicing their dissent. To add pro-stem cell comments, you can post here:

http://nihoerextra.nih.gov/stem_cells/add.htm

The author of the first link posts this suggested comment:

I SUPPORT STEM CELL RESEARCH and wish the NIH to also fund research utilizing established hESC lines derived in accordance with the core principles that govern the derivation of new lines.

The comment period is open until May 26th. Thanks for reading. And if this is entirely off-topic for this list, please let me know and I will remove the article.
Changing accepted public opinion and Skynet
by Roko — 2009-05-22T11:05:08.878Z

Michael Annisimov has put up a website called Terminator Salvation: Preventing Skynet, which will host a series of essays on the topic of human-friendly artificial intelligence. Three rather good essays are already up there, including an old classic by Eliezer. The association with a piece of fiction is probably unhelpful, but the publicity surrounding the new terminator film is probably worth it.

What rational strategies can we employ to maximize the impact of such a site, or of publicity for serious issues in general? Most people who read this site will probably not do anything about it, or will find some reason to not take the content of these essays seriously. I say this because I have personally spoken to a lot of clever people about the creation of human-friendly artificial intelligence, and almost everyone finds some reason to not do anything about the problem, even if that reason is "oh, ok, that's interesting. Anyway, about my new car... ".

What is the reason underlying people's indifference to these issues? My personal suspicion is that most people make decisions in their lives by following what everyone else does, rather than by performing a genuine rational analysis.

Consider the rise in social acceptability of making small personal sacrifices and political decisions based on eco-friendliness and your carbon footprint. Many people I know have become very enthusiastic for recycling used food containers and for unplugging appliances that use trivial amounts of power (for example unused phone chargers and electrical equipment on standby). The real reason that people do these things is that they have become socially accepted factoids. Most people in this world, even in this country, lack the mental faculties and knowledge to understand and act upon an argument involving notions of per capita CO2 emissions; instead they respond, at least in my understanding, to the general climate of acceptable opinion, and to opinion formers such as the BBC news website, which has a whole section for "science and environment". Now, I don't want to single out environmentalism as the only issue where people form their opinions based upon what is socially acceptable to believe, or to claim that reducing our greenhouse gas emissions is not a worthy cause.

Another great example of socially acceptable factoids (though probably a less serious one) is the detox industry - see, f...
Least Signaling Activities?
by RobinHanson — 2009-05-22T02:46:29.949Z

I take it as obvious that signaling is an important function in many human behaviors. That is, the details of many of our behaviors make sense as a package designed to persuade others to think well of us. While we may not be conscious of this design, it seems important nonetheless. In fact, in many areas we seem to be designed to not be conscious of this influence on our behavior.

But if signaling is not equally important to all behaviors, we can sensibly ask the question: for which behaviors does signaling least influence our detailed behavior patterns? That is, for what behaviors need we be the least concerned that our detailed behaviors are designed to achieve signaling functions? For what actions can we most reasonably believe that we do them for the non-signaling reasons we usually give?

You might suggest sleep, but others are often jealous of how much sleep we get, or impressed by how little sleep we can get by on. You might suggest watching TV, but people often go out of their way to mention what TV shows they watch. The best candidate I can think of so far is masturbation, though some folks seem to brag about it as a sign of their inexhaustible libido.

So I thought to ask the many thoughtful commentors at Less Wrong: what are good candidates for our least signaling activities?

Added: My interest in this question is to look for signs of when we can more trust our conscious reasoning about what to do when how. The more signaling matters, the less I can trust such reasoning, as it usually does not acknowledge the signaling influences. If there is a distinctive mental mode we enter when reasoning about how exactly to defecate, nose-pick, sleep, masturbate, and so on, this is plausibly a more honest mental mode. It would be useful to know what our most honest mental modes look like.
Inhibition and the Mind
by Annoyance — 2009-05-21T17:34:07.084Z

Babies have a curious set of reflexes: lightly brush their palms, or the soles of their feet, and they will immediately grasp whatever caused the contact. In the case of feet, it’s more of an attempt than a successful grasping; human feet, while far more flexible and manipulative than most creatures’, are no longer the virtual hands possessed by our tree-dwelling ancestors and relatives.

These and a few other basic responses are commonly called the “primitive, or infantile, reflexes“, and are unusual for a variety of reasons. For one thing, they’re not permanent. As babies age, the reflexes disappear.

But they’re not gone. Unlike many other reflexes, they don’t originate in the peripheral nerves, but the central nervous system. The reflex patterns don’t cease to exist, and they don’t cease to act. They’re eventually inhibited by more sophisticated parts of the brain associated with the frontal cortex. We know that the reflexes don’t cease to exist because there are conditions that cause them to reappear in adults; most of them involve major brain damage, particularly to the frontal areas, and are used to diagnose the severity of injury in cases of head trauma.. People with cerebral palsy frequently possess the responses as well, although they can often learn to control and prevent the reflexes consciously.

These points illustrate a very important basic principle: the mind is made out of ‘layers’ of modules and functions, starting with the most rudimentary, basic, and primitive, and moving to the most complex and subtle. At no point do the lower levels cease to exist or to produce output; we can act in complex ways only because the more basic reactions are held back and prevented from exerting control.

As various factors reduce the efficiency and health of our nervous system, it’s the most complex subsystems that fail first. The more basic, the more hardwired, and the less emulated the system, the less vulnerable it is to widespread damage or malfunctioning. This has long been observed with intoxicants and conditions that impair central nervous system functioning, and is one of the ways neuroscientists understand how the brain creates such complex behaviors as a sense of humor. (Curiously, that's not an aspect of the more modern and recent neurological modules, bu

...
Catchy Fallacy Name Fallacy (and Supporting Disagreement)
by JGWeissman — 2009-05-21T06:01:12.340Z

Related: The Pascal's Wager Fallacy Fallacy, The Fallacy Fallacy

Inspired by:

We need a catchy name for the fallacy of being over-eager to accuse people of fallacies that you have catchy names for.

When you read an argument you don't like, but don't know how to attack on its merits, there is a trick you can turn to. Just say it commits1 some fallacy, preferably one with a clever name. Others will side with you, not wanting to associate themselves with a fallacy. Don't bother to explain how the fallacy applies, just provide a link to an article about it, and let stand the implication that people should be able to figure it out from the link. It's not like anyone would want to expose their ignorance by asking for an actual explanation.

What a horrible state of affairs I have described in the last paragraph. It seems, if we follow that advice, that every fallacy we even know the name of makes us stupider. So, I present a fallacy name that I hope will exactly counterbalance the effects I described. If you are worried that you might defend an argument that has been accused of committing some fallacy, you should be equally worried that you might support an accusation that commits the Catchy Fallacy Name Fallacy. Well, now that you have that problem either way, you might as well try to figure if the argument did indeed commit the fallacy, by examining the actual details of the fallacy and whether they actually describe the argument.

But, what is the essence of this Catchy Fallacy Name Fallacy? The problem is not the accusation of committing a fallacy itself, but that the accusation is vague. The essence is "Don't bother to explain". The way to avoid this problem is to entangle your counterargument, whether it makes a fallacy accusation or not, with the argument you intend to refute. Your counterargument should distinguish good arguments from bad arguments, in that it specifies criteria that systematically apply to a class of bad arguments but not to good arguments. And those criteria should be matched up with details of the allegedly bad argument.

The wrong way:

It seems that you've committed the Confirmation Bias.

The right way:

The Confirmation Bias is when you find only confirming evidence because you only look for confirming evidence. You looked only for confirming evidence by asking people for stories of their success with Technique X.

Notice how the r...
Positive Bias Test (C++ program)
by MBlume — 2009-05-19T21:32:43.353Z

I've written a program which tests positive bias using Wason's procedure from "On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task" (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12: 129-140, 1960). If the user does not discover the correct rule, the program attempts to guess, based on the user's input, what rule the user did find, and explains the existence of the more general rule. The program then directs the user here.

I'd like to use a better set of triplets, and perhaps include more wrong rules. The program should be fairly flexible in this way.

I'd also like to set up a web-based front-end to the program, but I do not currently know any cgi.

I'm not completely happy with the program's textual output. It still feels a bit like the program is scolding the user at the end. Not quite sure how to fix this.

Program source

ETA: Here is a macintosh executable version of the program. I do not have any means to make an exe file, but if anyone does, I can host it.

If you're on Linux, I'm just going to assume you know what to do with a .cpp file =P

Here is a sample run of the program (if you're unfamiliar with positive bias, or the wason test, I'd really encourage you to try it yourself before reading):

Hi there! We're going to play a game based on a classic cognitive science experiment first performed by Peter Wason in 1960 (references at the end)

Here's how it works. I'm thinking of a rule which separates sequences of three numbers into 'awesome' triplets, and not-so-awesome triplets. I'll tell you for free that 2 4 6 is an awesome triplet.

What you need to do is to figure out which rule I'm thinking of. To help you do that, I'm going to let you experiment for a bit. Enter any three numbers, and I'll tell you whether they are awesome or not. You can do this as many times as you like, so please take your time.

When you're sure you know what the rule is, just enter 0 0 0, and I'll test you to see if you've correctly worked out what the rule is.
Enter three numbers separated by spaces: 3 6 9
3, 6, 9 is an AWESOME triplet!
Enter three numbers separated by spaces: 10 20 30
10, 20, 30 is an AWESOME triplet!
Enter three numbers separated by spaces: 8 16 24
8, 16, 24 is an AWESOME triplet!
Enter three numbers separated by spaces: 0 0 0
So, you're pretty sure what the rule is now? Cool. I'm going to give you some sets of numbers, and you can tell me whether they seem awesome to y...
Rationality quotes - May 2009
by Kaj_Sotala — 2009-05-19T19:30:02.498Z

(Since there didn't seem to be one for this month, and I just ran across a nice quote.)

A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.

Please post all quotes separately (so that they can be voted up (or down) separately) unless they are strongly related/ordered.

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB - if we do this, there should be a separate thread for it.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Supernatural Math
by saturn — 2009-05-19T11:31:44.424Z

Related to: How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3

This started as a reply to this thread, but it would have been offtopic and I think the subject is important enough for a top-level post, as there's apparently still significant confusion about it.

How do we know that two and two make four? We have two possible sources of knowledge on the subject. Note that both happen to be entirely physical systems that run on the same merely ordinary entropy that makes car engines go.
First, evolution. Animals whose subitizing apparatus output 2+2=3 were selected out.
Second, personal observation; that is, operation of our sense organs. I can put 2 bananas on a table, then put down 2 more bananas, and count out 4 bananas; my schoolteachers told me 2+2 is 4; I can type 2+2 into a calculator and get 4; etc.
Now, notwithstanding the above, does 2+2 really equal 4, independent of any human thoughts about it? This way lies madness. If there is some kind of pure essence of math that never physically impinges upon the stuff inside our heads (or, worse, exists "outside the physical universe"), there's no sensible way we can know about it. It's a dragon in the garage.
The fact that our faculty for counting bananas can also be used to make predictions about, say, the behavior of quarks is extremely surprising to our savannah-adapted brains. After all, bananas are ordinary things we can hold in our hands and eat, and quarks are tiny and strange and definitely not ordinary at all. So, of course, the obvious thing that comes to mind to explain this is a supernatural force. How else could such dissimilar things be governed by the same laws?
The disappointing truth is that bananas are quarks, and by amazing good fortune, the properties of everyday macroscopic objects are sufficiently related to those of other physical phenomena that a few lucky humans can just barely manage to crudely adapt their banana-counting brain hardware to work in those other domains. No supernatural math required.
Bad reasons for a rationalist to lose
by matt — 2009-05-18T22:57:40.761Z

Reply to: Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories

Inspired by what looks like a very damaging reticence to embrace and share brain hacks that might only work for some of us, but are not backed by Deep Theories. In support of tinkering with brain hacks and self experimentation where deep science and large trials are not available.

Eliezer has suggested that, before he will try a new anti-akraisia brain hack:

[…] the advice I need is from someone who reads up on a whole lot of experimental psychology dealing with willpower, mental conflicts, ego depletion, preference reversals, hyperbolic discounting, the breakdown of the self, picoeconomics, etcetera, and who, in the process of overcoming their own akrasia, manages to understand what they did in truly general terms - thanks to experiments that give them a vocabulary of cognitive phenomena that actually exist, as opposed to phenomena they just made up. And moreover, someone who can explain what they did to someone else, thanks again to the experimental and theoretical vocabulary that lets them point to replicable experiments that ground the ideas in very concrete results, or mathematically clear ideas.

This doesn't look to me like an expected utility calculation, and I think it should. It looks like an attempt to justify why he can't be expected to win yet. It just may be deeply wrongheaded.

I submit that we don't "need" (emphasis in original) this stuff, it'd just be super cool if we could get it. We don't need to know that the next brain hack we try will work, and we don't need to know that it's general enough that it'll work for anyone who tries it; we just need the expected utility of a trial to be higher than that of the other things we could be spending that time on.

So… this isn't other-optimizing, it's a discussion of how to make decisions under uncertainty. What do all of us need to make a rational decision about which brain hacks to try?

We need a goal: Eliezer has suggested "I want to hear how I can overcome akrasia - how I can have more willpower, or get more done with less mental pain". I'd push cost in with something like "to reduce the personal costs of akraisia by more than the investment in trying and implementing brain hacks against it plus the expected profit on other activities I could undertake with that time".

We need some likelihood estimates:

Chance of a random

...
"What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts"
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-05-17T07:24:30.136Z

"But let us never forget, either, as all conventional history of philosophy conspires to make us forget, what the 'great thinkers' really are: proper objects, indeed, of pity, but even more, of horror."

David Stove's "What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts" is a critique of philosophy that I can only call epic.

The astute reader will of course find themselves objecting to Stove's notion that we should be catologuing every possible way to do philosophy wrong. It's not like there's some originally pure mode of thought, being tainted by only a small library of poisons. It's just that there are exponentially more possible crazy thoughts than sane thoughts, c.f. entropy.

But Stove's list of 39 different classic crazinesses applied to the number three is absolute pure epic gold. (Scroll down about halfway through if you want to jump there directly.)

I especially like #8: "There is an integer between two and four, but it is not three, and its true name and nature are not to be revealed."
Wanting to Want
by Alicorn — 2009-05-16T03:08:10.257Z

In response to a request, I am going to do some basic unpacking of second-order desire, or "metawanting". Basically, a second-order desire or metawant is a desire about a first-order desire.

Example 1: Suppose I am very sleepy, but I want to be alert. My desire to be alert is first-order. Suppose also that there is a can of Mountain Dew handy. I know that Mountain Dew contains caffeine and that caffeine will make me alert. However, I also know that I hate Mountain Dew1. I do not want the Mountain Dew, because I know it is gross. But it would be very convenient for me if I liked Mountain Dew: then I could drink it, and I could get the useful effects of the caffeine, and satisfy my desire for alertness. So I have the following instrumental belief: wanting to drink that can of Mountain Dew would let me be alert. Generally, barring other considerations, I want things that would get me other things I want - I want a job because I want money, I want money because I can use it to buy chocolate, I want chocolate because I can use it to produce pleasant taste sensations, and I just plain want pleasant taste sensations. So, because alertness is something I want, and wanting Mountain Dew would let me get it, I want to want the Mountain Dew.

This example demonstrates a case of a second-order desire about a first-order desire that would be instrumentally useful. But it's also possible to have second-order desires about first-order desires that one simply does or doesn't care to have.

Example 2: Suppose Mimi the Heroin Addict, living up to her unfortunate name, is a heroin addict. Obviously, as a heroin addict, she spends a lot of her time wanting heroin. But this desire is upsetting to her. She wants not to want heroin, and may take actions to stop herself from wanting heroin, such as going through rehab.

One thing that is often said is that what first-order desires you "endorse" on the second level are the ones that are your most true self. This seems like an appealing notion in Mimi's case; I would not want to say that at her heart she just wants heroin and that's an intrinsic, important part of her. But it's not always the case that the second-order desire is the one we most want to identify with the person who has it:

Example 3: Suppose Larry the Closet Homosexual, goodness onl...
Share Your Anti-Akrasia Tricks
by Vladimir_Golovin — 2009-05-15T19:06:31.527Z

People have been encouraging me to share my anti-akrasia tricks, but it feels inappropriate to dedicate a top-level post solely to unproven techniques that work for some person and may not work for others, so:

Go ahead and share your anti-akrasia tricks!

Let's make it an open thread where we just share what works and what doesn't, without worrying (yet) about having to explain tricks with deep theories, or designing proper experiments to verify them. However, if you happen to have a theory or a proposed experiment in mind, please share.

Bragging is fine, but please share the failures of your techniques as well – they are just as valuable, if not more.

Note to readers – before you read the comments and try the tricks, keep in mind that the techniques below are not yet proven supported or explained by proper experiments, and are not yet backed by theory. They may work for their authors, but are not guaranteed to work for you, so try them at your own risk. It would be even better to read the following posts before rushing to try the tricks:

Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories

Beware of Other-Optimizing

Akrasia and Shangri-La