trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Social intelligence, education, & the workplace
by PhilGoetz — 2013-05-02T20:51:30.154Z

David McClelland published an influential article (1973) claiming that IQ tests have no value, because they do not correlate with success and it is not clear that they measure anything other than social status. McClelland opened up a new discussion of whether tests predict career success, and whether the purpose of education is social investment or social reformation (why would we even want to single out children with high IQs if those are the children we want not to educate, in order to level the playing field?)
This work is controversial, maybe even more so today than in the 1980s. (Barrett & Depinet 1991) accused McClelland of simply lying, by not mentioning most studies that disagreed with his conclusions and misrepresenting the results of those he did quote.
But in all this time, no one has asked the most-important question: Should we try to make (other people's) children more successful? And should we deliberately promote children because they're likely to be successful?
(If the answer is yes, perhaps we should focus on giving more opportunities to children of the wealthy, since parental wealth is the strongest correlate with career success.)
A close look at (Barrett & Depinet 1991) suggests that, when social class is factored out, IQ correlates well with objective measures of performance, such as employee evaluations, ratings of work samples, and production quantity, but poorly with measures of career success such as job title and salary. Social intelligence is thus the stuff that improves your career but not your performance. That sounds suspiciously like it's skills that help you put one over on your co-workers.
Success is a zero-sum game. It's measured by your position and wealth relative to other people. It makes sense for a prep school or college to advertise that they will make you more successful. It doesn't make sense for a taxpayer-funded school system to do so. Public school is funded by the public in order to benefit the public. The public wants performance, not career success, from you.
It's no paradox that IQ correlates more with performance than with success. Social intelligence does wonders for your career success. People with high social intelligence are able to drive their (often stupid) ideas through committees by using coalition-building and hate-mongering, as well as sarcasm, dismissive humor, emotionally-laden jargon ("death tax...
Meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup
by rocurley — 2013-05-02T17:34:38.818Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup

WHEN:
05 May 2013 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA (courtyard)

We'll be meeting to hang out and play games.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup
Meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 61-63
by therufs — 2013-05-01T20:44:17.183Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 61-63

WHEN:
04 May 2013 12:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
726 Rigsbee Avenue, Durham NC 27701

Meet up at Fullsteam to discuss HPMoR chapters 61-63! (Warning: this is only 3 chapters, but 63 is pretty substantial. Beware the planning fallacy, hyperbolic discounting, etc.) ;)

If you feel like reading ch. 64, this is probably the week to do it -- we probably won't include it in the Official Reading.

Bring food and coffee as you feel moved.

Sign up for the mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/rtlw) and let us know you'll join us!

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 61-63
Group Rationality Diary, May 1-15
by therufs — 2013-05-01T15:37:16.911Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for May 1-15.

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.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!

Next diary: May 16-31

Immediate past diary: April 15-30

Rationality Diaries archive
What do professional philosophers believe, and why?
by Rob Bensinger — 2013-05-01T14:40:47.028Z

LessWrong has twice discussed the PhilPapers Survey of professional philosophers' views on thirty controversies in their fields — in early 2011 and, more intensively, in late 2012. We've also been having some lively debates, prompted by LukeProg, about the general value of contemporary philosophical assumptions and methods. It would be swell to test some of our intuitions about how philosophers go wrong (and right) by looking closely at the aggregate output and conduct of philosophers, but relevant data is hard to come by.

Fortunately, Davids Chalmers and Bourget have done a lot of the work for us. They released a paper summarizing the PhilPapers Survey results two days ago, identifying, by factor analysis, seven major components consolidating correlations between philosophical positions, influences, areas of expertise, etc.

1. Anti-Naturalists: Philosophers of this stripe tend (more strongly than most) to assert libertarian free will (correlation with factor .66), theism (.63), the metaphysical possibility of zombies (.47), and A theories of time (.28), and to reject physicalism (.63), naturalism (.57), personal identity reductionism (.48), and liberal egalitarianism (.32).

Anti-Naturalists tend to work in philosophy of religion (.3) or Greek philosophy (.11). They avoid philosophy of mind (-.17) and cognitive science (-.18) like the plague. They hate Hume (-.14), Lewis (-.13), Quine (-.12), analytic philosophy (-.14), and being from Australasia (-.11). They love Plato (.13), Aristotle (.12), and Leibniz (.1).

2. Objectivists: They tend to accept 'objective' moral values (.72), aesthetic values (.66), abstract objects (.38), laws of nature (.28), and scientific posits (.28). Note 'Objectivism' is being used here to pick out a tendency to treat value as objectively binding and metaphysical posits as objectively real; it isn't connected to Ayn Rand.

A disproportionate number of objectivists work in normative ethics (.12), Greek philosophy (.1), or philosophy of religion (.1). They don't work in philosophy of science (-.13) or biology (-.13), and aren't continentalists (-.12) or Europeans (-.14). Their favorite philosopher is Plato (.1), least favorites Hume (-.2) and Carnap (-.12).

3. Rationalists: They tend to self-identify as 'rationalists' (.57) and 'non-naturalists' (.33), to accept that some knowledge is a priori (.79), a...
May 2013 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2013-05-01T11:09:50.456Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.

If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.
[SEQ RERUN] Collective Apathy and the Internet
by MinibearRex — 2013-05-01T04:33:10.392Z

Today's post, Collective Apathy and the Internet was originally published on 14 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The causes of bystander apathy are even worse on the Internet. There may be an opportunity here for a startup to deliberately try to avert bystander apathy in online group coordination.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Bystander Apathy, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Mortal: A Transponyist Fanfiction
by ModusPonies — 2013-05-01T01:23:36.464Z

I recently published Mortal, a novella-length My Little Pony fanfiction meant to introduce anti-death concepts to an unfamiliar audience. Short description:

Twilight Sparkle's friends have lived long and happy lives. Now their time is coming to an end, but Rainbow Dash, at least, will not go gently. Twilight has the power to save her friend's life. Is it worth violating the natural order?

This is a character-driven melodrama. It's not particularly rationalist, but it's very, very transhumanist. Unlike, say, Friendship is Optimal, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this one to people who don't already know the source. It assumes familiarity with the characters and the world.

I am going to talk about how I put together the story and how people reacted to it. This will contain spoilers.

This line exists so you can break out of the automatic "read everything on the page" mode if you want to avoid the spoilers.

This story was structured as something of a bait-and-switch. I watched the reaction to a previous transhumanist horsefic (yes, there's more than one), and I was struck by how easily readers matched the explicitly anti-death narrative to the "immortality is a curse" trope. Rather than fight against this trend, I decided to work with it. The first act is meant to look like a story about learning to accept the inevitability of death. Starting in chapter 3, I break further and further away from that mold until the protagonists finally rebel against the status quo.

The first chapters got a lot of people invested who I suspect would've been turned off by a less familiar opening. Once I was into the third act, I stopped being subtle and used every trick in the book to make the pro-death characters look like the unreasonable ones. Judging by the comments, there's no shortage of readers who were angry at having their expectations flouted, but quite a few seem thoughtful, and some explicitly changed their mind on the subject.
[LINK] The Unbelievers: Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins Team Up Against Religion
by Shmi — 2013-04-30T18:11:13.901Z

I am looking forward to watching this documentary for entertainment purposes, but I don't expect it to affect people's opinions about religion much.

I have no doubt that both Krauss and Dawkins are very bright and insightful people. However, here is a piece of an interview I found somewhat naive:

Do you foresee a time when the conversation will be over?

LK: I think it’s frustrating. When I was a kid in the ’60s, I was sure that by now there would be no religion. In a way it’s very surprising that there are these momentary resurgences. I think it’s going to be a long road.

RD: If you look at the broad sweep of history, then clearly we’re on the winning side. I think things are moving in the right direction, probably not as fast as I would like to see.

Both of them seem to tacitly assume that religion ought to eventually yield to scientific progress and such. While this may be the overall trend in the West, or at least in the US, it has not necessarily been so elsewhere. I am somewhat surprised that the two rather bright guys seem to have these rose-colored glasses on.

The current and ex-Communist states are the most stark example. In the Soviet Union religion was marginalized for some 70 years, two generations grew up in the environment of state atheism, yet soon after the restrictions were relaxed, the Church has regained almost all of the lost ground. The situation was similar in the rest of the ex-Warsaw bloc (with less time under mandated atheism), and even in China, where the equilibrium was restored after the Cultural Revolution. The standard argument for this happening is "but Communism was basically a religion by another name", what with the various Cults of Personality and the beliefs in the One True Path.

This argument seems convincing on the surface, but consider a similar situation transplanted into a US setting. Suppose that, for whatever reason, after the Civil war religion was abolished all across the country together with slavery. Overtly religious activities are frowned upon and marginalized by the authorities. The community organizations like the Y, the Salvation Army, the Scouts and others do all the same work, only without mentioning God, or maybe replacing it with some secular symbol, like the Motherland/Fatherland/Abe Lincoln/Capitalism/Free Enterprise, whichever. The movie The Invention of ...
Meetup :  Group Decision Making (the good, the bad, and the confusion of welfare economics)
by Davidmanheim — 2013-04-30T16:18:04.955Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Group Decision Making (the good, the bad, and the confusion of welfare economics)

WHEN:
08 May 2013 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
West Los Angeles (At the Westside Tavern Upstair Wine Bar)

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking is free for 3 hours

Or you can take a Public Transit! A Trip Planner can be found here: http://socaltransport.org/tm_pub_start.php <- So you can try to avoid multiple hour trips! (We appreciate your attendance despite length of commute!)

We will hang out for 30 minutes or so, then I'll spend 10-15 minutes presenting:
Group decision making.
AKA
Why voting can be a stupid way to make utility decisions,
AKA
Adding utility between people is stupid, this is an ordinal scale
AKA
Didn't Arrow win a Nobel prize for telling you people to stop?

Then we'll talk about what math and economics can say about making collective decisions in a way that isn't ill defined, and continue a hopefully interesting discussion. (Bonus points if it leads to a publishable idea for me!)

This will be a great break for me from... writing papers and taking tests about the same subject.

No foreknowledge or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible and useful to anyone who values thinking for themselves. That said, it might help to read http://lesswrong.com/lw/ggm/pinpointing_utility/ so we can avoid type errors and radiation poisoning while we talk. (Not real radiation poisoning!)

Discussion article for the meetup : Group Decision Making (the good, the bad, and the confusion of welfare economics)
Meetup : Buffalo LW Sunday Meetup
by StonesOnCanvas — 2013-04-30T13:06:54.723Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo LW Sunday Meetup

WHEN:
05 May 2013 04:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
University at Buffalo - North Campus 31 Capen Hall, Buffalo, NY

Buffalo-area Less Wrong meetups on the first Sunday and Third Thursday of every month, in 31 Capen Hall at the University at Buffalo - North Campus.

Hey Guys,
Today we'll try some practice with Fermi Estimates. Primary Purpose: Sometimes you will have to make decisions without perfect data and having a way to get a decent ballpark approximation can be good enough to help you decide. Secondary Goal: Keep track of how confident we are in our predictions so that we can make our confidence match more closely with our true accuracy.

Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo LW Sunday Meetup
Meetup : Big Gaming Fun 6: A New Beginning!
by Kenoubi — 2013-04-30T13:02:27.212Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Big Gaming Fun 6: A New Beginning!

WHEN:
05 May 2013 01:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
100 East End Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15221

Come match wits against others who value believing the truth and acting effectively to achieve their goals! Now revived after I spent 2.5 months in Switzerland and 4 months being super busy moving into my new house.

You can see my game collection here; please bring anything else you'd like to play.

I have a cat. Please let me know if you're allergic and need me to put her upstairs.

RSVP here or by sending me a private message (but don't not show up because you didn't RSVP, I just want a rough idea of the number of attendees). The door should be unlocked and there should be a sign up when you arrive; if not, call or text (412) 657-1395 when you get here. I intend to hold these every 2-3 weeks, so watch this space!

Also, if transportation is an issue, please post a comment or send me a PM. I'm on the bus line, I might be able to pick a small number of people up, or maybe a fellow attendee can give you a ride.

Discussion article for the meetup : Big Gaming Fun 6: A New Beginning!
[SEQ RERUN] Bystander Apathy
by MinibearRex — 2013-04-30T05:00:52.033Z

Today's post, Bystander Apathy was originally published on 13 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The bystander effect is when groups of people are less likely to take action than an individual. There are a few explanations for why this might be the case.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Akrasia and Shangri-La, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
[Link] Caplan asks for help optimizing his will.
by Jayson_Virissimo — 2013-04-30T02:12:51.663Z

Bryan Caplan of Econlog asks his readers how to improve his will (given a few constraints) in light of the principles of optimal philanthropy. His current draft reads:

I give and bequeath to whatever charity is currently ranked #1 by GiveWell, the sum of $100,000 adjusted for inflation since 2013 using the U.S. Consumer Price Index, or 10% of the total value of my estate excluding our primary residence, whichever is smaller. If GiveWell no longer exists, I give and bequeath the same sum to another charity, selected by my wife and children, dedicated to helping the deserving poor in the Third World in a maximally cost-effective manner. I request that my wife and children consult my friends Robin Hanson, Alexander Tabarrok, Fabio Rojas, James Schneider, Michael Huemer, William Dickens, and Jason Brennan to help them select the most cost-effective charity with this mission. If possible, funding for this bequest should come from my tax-deferred 403(b) retirement accounts.

The full blog post can be found here.

Robin Hanson responds:

I fear "the Third World" might not be a robust reference, and that GiveWell will no longer exist. You might pick some "ex ante % chance that I'd have died by now", such as 25%, and give the money away when you are at an age where you've suffered that % chance. This could ensure at 75% chance that you'll give the money away yourself.
New report: Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2013-04-29T23:14:58.463Z

Summary: Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics (pdf) is 40,000 words taking some initial steps toward tackling the key quantitative issue in the intelligence explosion, "reinvestable returns on cognitive investments": what kind of returns can you get from an investment in cognition, can you reinvest it to make yourself even smarter, and does this process die out or blow up? This can be thought of as the compact and hopefully more coherent successor to the AI Foom Debate of a few years back.

(Sample idea you haven't heard before: The increase in hominid brain size over evolutionary time should be interpreted as evidence about increasing marginal fitness returns on brain size, presumably due to improved brain wiring algorithms; not as direct evidence about an intelligence scaling factor from brain size.)

I hope that the open problems posed therein inspire further work by economists or economically literate modelers, interested specifically in the intelligence explosion qua cognitive intelligence rather than non-cognitive 'technological acceleration'. MIRI has an intended-to-be-small-and-technical mailing list for such discussion. In case it's not clear from context, I (Yudkowsky) am the author of the paper.

Abstract:

I. J. Good's thesis of the 'intelligence explosion' is that a sufficiently advanced machine intelligence could build a smarter version of itself, which could in turn build an even smarter version of itself, and that this process could continue enough to vastly exceed human intelligence. As Sandberg (2010) correctly notes, there are several attempts to lay down return-on-investment formulas intended to represent sharp speedups in economic or technological growth, but very little attempt has been made to deal formally with I. J. Good's intelligence explosion thesis as such.

I identify the key issue as returns on cognitive reinvestment - the ability to invest more computing power, faster computers, or improved cognitive algorithms to yield cognitive labor which produces larger brains, faster brains, or better mind designs. There are many phenomena in the world which have been argued as evidentially relevant to this question, from the observed course of hominid evolution, to Moore's Law, to the competence over time of machine chess-playing systems, and many more. I go into some depth on the so

...