trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
2014 Survey Results
by Scott Alexander — 2015-01-05T19:36:59.292Z

Thanks to everyone who took the 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey. Extra thanks to Ozy, who did a lot of the number crunching work.

This year's results are below. Some of them may make more sense in the context of the original survey questions, which can be seen here. Please do not try to take the survey as it is over and your results will not be counted.

I. Population

There were 1503 respondents over 27 days. The last survey got 1636 people over 40 days. The last four full days of the survey saw nineteen, six, and four responses, for an average of about ten. If we assume the next thirteen days had also gotten an average of ten responses - which is generous, since responses tend to trail off with time - then we would have gotten about as many people as the last survey. There is no good evidence here of a decline in population, although it is perhaps compatible with a very small decline.

II. Demographics

Sex
Female: 179, 11.9%
Male: 1311, 87.2%
Gender
F (cisgender): 150, 10.0%
F (transgender MtF): 24, 1.6%
M (cisgender): 1245, 82.8%
M (transgender FtM): 5, 0.3%
Other: 64, 4.3%
Sexual Orientation
Asexual: 59, 3.9%
Bisexual: 216, 14.4%
Heterosexual: 1133, 75.4%
Homosexual: 47, 3.1%
Other: 35, 2.3%
[This question was poorly worded and should have acknowledged that people can both be asexual and have a specific orientation; as a result it probably vastly undercounted our asexual readers]
Relationship Style
Prefer monogamous: 778, 51.8%
Prefer polyamorous: 227, 15.1%
Uncertain/no preference: 464, 30.9%
Other: 23, 1.5%
Number of Partners
0: 738, 49.1%
1: 674, 44.8%
2: 51, 3.4%
3: 17, 1.1%
4: 7, 0.5%
5: 1, 0.1%
Lots and lots: 3, 0.2%
Relationship Goals
Currently not looking for new partners: 648, 43.1%
Open to new partners: 467, 31.1%
Seeking more partners: 370, 24.6%
[22.2% of people who don’t have a partner aren’t looking for one.]
Relationship Status
Married: 274, 18.2%
Relationship: 424, 28.2%
Single: 788, 52.4%
[6.9% of single people have at least one partner; 1.8% have more than one.]
Living With
Alone: 345, 23.0%
With parents and/or guardians: 303, 20.2%
With partner and/or children: 411, 27.3%
With roommates: 428, 28.5%
Children
0: 1317, 81.6%
1: 66, 4.4%
2: 78, 5.2%
3: 17, 1.1%
4: 6, 0.4%
5: 3, 0.2%
6: 1, 0.1%
Lots and lots: 1, 0.1%
Want More Children?
Yes: 549, 36.1%
Uncertain: 426, 28.3%
No: 516, 34.3%
[418 of the people who don’t have children don’t want any, suggesting that the LW community...
How much does consumption affect production?
by Timothy Telleen-Lawton — 2015-01-05T15:51:20.824Z

A ewe for a ewe

In a discussion with Benquo over his recent suffering-per-calorie estimates I learned that there have been a few different proponents of incorporating short term elasticities into such estimates. But do empirical short term elasticities really improve our estimates of consumption's long term effect on production? For example, if I decide to reduce my lifetime consumption of chicken by one, should I expect the long term production of chicken to drop by ~1, ~0, or something in between?

I believe we should have a relatively strong prior that long term production has a roughly 1:1 relationship with consumption, including for small individual decisions. Below are a couple arguments I find compelling, and a major exception that is not a short term elasticity.

Black box economies in general

If I go to a large alien civilization of uncertain economic structure and surprise them by buying(?) one widget, how should I expect that to affect their long term production of widgets? Seems like I should expect it to increase by one, because now they have one less than they used to. If it was originally decided that that widget should be produced; why wouldn't they decide to replace it when lost?

Neoclassical capitalism in the long term

In a simplified market, I expect there to be a lowest price at which chickens can be reliably produced at scale ("the Cost"). If producers expect the market price to be less than the Cost in the future, they will shut down production to avoid losses. If they expect it to be more than the Cost in the future, they might expand operations to make more profit. In the long term (when we can ignore temporary shocks to the system and producers have time to make adjustments), I expect the equilibrium price of chicken to approach the Cost of chicken (because other prices lead to conditions that push the price back toward the Cost). In other words, my prior is that the "price elasticity of supply" in the arbitrarily long term becomes arbitrarily high (imagine a virtually horizontal supply curve).

How many chickens will be produced at that long term price? However many are worth the Cost to consumers. If 50% of chicken consumers permanently become vegetarians, I expect that eventually the chicken industry will end up producing about 50% fewer chickens at a price similar to today's.

Similarly if consu

...
Open thread Jan. 5-11, 2015
by polymathwannabe — 2015-01-05T12:48:41.845Z

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.
Negative polyamory outcomes?
by atorm — 2015-01-05T12:25:17.934Z

Related article: Polyhacking

Note: This article was posted earlier for less than a day but accidentally deleted.

Although polyamory isn't one of the "official" topics of LW interest (human cognition, AI, probability, etc...), this is the only community I'm part of where I expect a sufficiently high number of members to have experience with it to give useful feedback.

If you go looking for advice or articles about polyamory on the internet, you mostly get stuff written by polyamorists that are happy with their decisions. Is this selection bias? Where are the people whose relationships (or social lives, out anything) got damaged or ruined by experimenting with Consensual Non-Monogamy?

I'm posting this hoping for feedback, negative AND positive, on experiences with polyamory. I considered putting this in an Open Thread, but it occurred to me that many other LW readers might be interested in whether polyamory has drawbacks they need to be aware of. If you have experience with CNM (including first-hand witnessing, which has the added bonus of not requiring you to out yourself while still participating in the dialogue), please comment with your overall impression and as much detail as you would like to include (I am also putting my experiences there rather than in this post). If you've seen multiple poly relationships, multiple comments would make tallying slightly easier. I will try to upvote people who feed me data, a la LW surveys. If there are sufficient comments, I will periodically go through them and post a rough ratio of good to bad experiences at the bottom of this article.

PSA: The Username account is available for use by any who wish to remain anonymous. The password is left as an exercise for the reader. Hat tip... Username.
Meetup : Dallas, TX
by DubiousTwizzler — 2015-01-05T04:54:37.400Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Dallas, TX

WHEN:
10 January 2015 01:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
3725 Belt Line Road, Addison, TX 75001

This is the new Dallas meetup. We will be meeting up at Dunn Bros Coffee on Saturday, Jan 10th at 1 PM. We will have a sign that says "Less Wrong" on it.

(We're open to changing the location after the first meetup)

My roommate and I just moved to Dallas and decided it was time for a meetup. There was a previous Dallas LW meetup which disappeared for reasons unknown to us. Neither of us attended that meetup, but we invite any previous members and any newcomers to have coffee with us and hang out.

Discussion article for the meetup : Dallas, TX
Negative Polyamory outcomes?
by atorm — 2015-01-05T00:33:07.319Z

Related article: Polyhacking

Although polyamory isn't one of the "official" topics of LW interest (human cognition, AI, probability, etc...), this is the only community I'm part of where I expect a sufficiently high number of members to have experience with it to give useful feedback.

If you go looking for advice or articles about polyamory on the internet, you mostly get stuff written by polyamorists that are happy with their decisions. Is this selection bias? Where are the people whose relationships (or social lives, out anything) got damaged or ruined by experimenting with Consensual Non-Monogamy?

I'm posting this hoping for feedback, negative AND positive, on experiences with polyamory. I considered putting this in an Open Thread, but it occurred to me that many other LW readers might be interested in whether polyamory has drawbacks they need to be aware of. If you have experience with CNM (including first-hand witnessing, which has the added bonus of not requiring you to out yourself if you don't want to), please comment with your overall impression and as much detail as you would like to include (I am also putting my experiences there rather than in this post). If you've seen multiple poly relationships, multiple comments would make tallying slightly easier. (ETA: I will also try to upvote people who feed me data, a la LW surveys) If there are sufficient comments, I will periodically go through them and post a rough ratio of good to bad experiences at the bottom of this article.
Compartmentalizing: Effective Altruism and Abortion
by Dias — 2015-01-04T23:48:53.591Z

Cross-posted on my blog and the effective altruism forum with some minor tweaks; apologies if some of the formatting hasn't copied across. The article was written with an EA audience in mind but it is essentially one about rationality and consequentialism.

Summary: People frequently compartmentalize their beliefs, and avoid addressing the implications between them. Ordinarily, this is perhaps innocuous, but when the both ideas are highly morally important, their interaction is in turn important – many standard arguments on both sides of moral issues like the permissibility of abortion are significantly undermined or otherwise effected by EA considerations, especially moral uncertainty.

A long time ago, Will wrote an article about how a key part of rationality was taking ideas seriously: fully exploring ideas, seeing all their consequences, and then acting upon them. This is something most of us do not do! I for one certainly have trouble. He later partially redacted it, and Anna has an excellent article on the subject, but at the very least decompartmentalizing is a very standard part of effective altruism.

Similarly, I think people selectively apply Effective Altruist (EA) principles. People are very willing to apply them in some cases, but when those principles would cut at a core part of the person’s identity – like requiring them to dress appropriately so they seem less weird – people are much less willing to take those EA ideas to their logical conclusion.

Consider your personal views. I’ve certainly changed some of my opinions as a result of thinking about EA ideas. For example, my opinion of bednet distribution is now much higher than it once was. And I’ve learned a lot about how to think about some technical issues, like regression to the mean. Yet I realized that I had rarely done a full 180 – and I think this is true of many people:

Many think EA ideas argue for more foreign aid – but did anyone come to this conclusion who had previously been passionately anti-aid?

Many think EA ideas argue for vegetarianism – but did anyone come to this conclusion who had previously been passionately carnivorous?

Many think EA ideas argue against domestic causes – but did anyone come to this conclusion who had previously been a passionate nationalist?

Yet this is quite worrying. Given the power a

...
Bragging Thread January 2015
by Gondolinian — 2015-01-04T18:54:32.819Z

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.

Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.

So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?

(Previous Bragging Thread)
Why do you really believe what you believe regarding controversial subjects?
by iarwain1 — 2015-01-04T14:32:19.829Z

For every controversial subject I've heard of, there are always numerous very smart experts on either side. So I'm curious how it is that rational non-experts come to believe one side or the other.

So, what are your meta-arguments for going with one side or the other for any given controversial subject on which you have an opinion?

Have you researched both sides so thoroughly that you consider yourself equal to or better than the opposing experts? If so, to what do you attribute the mistakes of your counterparts? Have you carefully considered the possibility that you are the one who's mistaken?

Do you think that one side is more biased the other? Why?

Do you think that one side is more expert than the other? Why?

Do you rely on the majority of experts? (I haven't worked out for myself if going with a majority makes sense, so if you have arguments for / against this meta-argument then please elaborate.)

Do you think that there are powerful arguments that simply haven't been addressed by the other side? To what do you attribute the fact that these arguments haven't been addressed?

Do you have other heuristics or meta-arguments for going with one side or the other?

Do you just remain more or less an agnostic on every controversial subject?

Or do you perhaps admit that ultimately your beliefs are at least partially founded on non-rational reasons?

Do you think that this whole discussion is misguided? If so, why?

I know I don't have to list controversial subjects, but here are some to perhaps stimulate some thinking: Politics, religion (theism OR atheism), dangers from AI / x-risks, Bayesianism vs. alternatives, ethics & metaethics, pretty much everything in philosophy (at least that's what it often seems like!), social justice issues, policy proposals of all types. (If you have a particular controversy for which you'd like people to list their meta-arguments, just mention it in the comments.)

ETA: For myself, I generally try not to have an opinion on almost any controversial issue. So for example, on the recent LW survey I deliberately left most of the controversial issue questions blank. On the few issues that I do have some opinion, it's generally because I attribute a higher likelihood of bias to one side or the other, and/or I judge one side or the other to be greater experts, and/or there's a very large majority on one side, and/or

...
Problems and Solutions in Infinite Ethics
by Xodarap — 2015-01-04T14:06:06.292Z

(Crossposted from the EA forum.)

Summary: The universe may very well be infinite, and hence contain an infinite amount of happiness and sadness. This causes several problems for altruists; for example: we can plausibly only affect a finite subset of the universe, and an infinite quantity of happiness is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of a finite amount of happiness. This would imply that all forms of altruism are equally ineffective.

Like everything in life, the canonical reference in philosophy about this problem was written by Nick Bostrom. However, I found that an area of economics known as "sustainable development" has actually made much further progress on this subject than the philosophy world. In this post I go over some of what I consider to be the most interesting results.

NB: This assumes a lot of mathematical literacy and familiarity with the subject matter, and hence isn't targeted to a general audience. Most people will probably prefer to read my other posts:

Ridiculous math things which ethics shouldn't depend on but does, which includes such interesting tidbits as: why standard calculus teaches children to be immoral and why the Banach-Tarski paradox implies we should means test Medicare and

Kill the young people, whose name speaks for itself

1. Summary of the most interesting results

There’s no ethical system which incorporates all the things we might want.

Even if we have pretty minimal requirements, satisfactory ethical systems might exist but we can’t prove their existence, much less actually construct them

Discounted utilitarianism, whereby we value people less just because they are further away in time, is actually a pretty reasonable thing despite philosophers considering it ridiculous.

(I consider this to be the first reasonable argument for locavorism I've ever heard)

2. Definitions

In general, we consider a population to consist of an infinite utility vector (u0,u1,…) where ui is the aggregate utility of the generation alive at time i. Utility is a bounded real number (the fact that economists assume utility to be bounded confused me for a long time!). Our goal is to find a preference ordering over the set of all utility vectors which is in some sense “reasonable”. While philosophers have understood for a long time that ...
Meetup : [NYC] New Years Resolutions
by Raemon — 2015-01-04T07:27:48.010Z

Discussion article for the meetup : [NYC] New Years Resolutions

WHEN:
06 January 2015 07:00:37PM (-0500)

WHERE:
353 East 17th Street APT 21B New York NY 10003

Each year, the New York Rationality group meets to discuss our goals from the previous year, see how we have fared, and help each other plan resolutions that are actionable and likely to succeed. Whether you're an old timer or have just arrived in NYC, you're welcome to join in our yearly tradition. Begins at 7pm.

Discussion article for the meetup : [NYC] New Years Resolutions
Tentative Thoughts on the Cost Effectiveness of the SENS Foundation
by Fluttershy — 2015-01-04T02:58:53.627Z

Edit from fucking 2019: this is all obviously wrong, EA is a scam, do all your own analysis of everything if you want to have an impact

It should be emphasized that back-of-the-envelope calculations, such as the one given in this post, ought to be adjusted to account for the fact that interventions can look much more cost-effective than they are, especially when the interventions were only shallowly investigated.

Previously, Givewell has looked into the cost-effectiveness of life sciences funding, as well as publishing a simple estimate of the impact of the average dollar spent on cancer research, which suggested that, in the past, each $2790 spent on cancer-relevant biomedical research in the US added one year of life lived (YLL) to the life of a US resident. Givewell has also interviewed Aubrey de Grey of the SENS foundation. Owencb has previously estimated the cost-effectiveness of funding SENS/ anti-aging research as being around $50 per QALY. Aubrey de Grey has previously been averse to giving explicit cost-effectiveness estimates regarding how many QALYs would be gained per unit of funding supplied to SENS, though he has been clear that SENS's funding needs are "$100 million per year for each of the next ten years".

This part of the post will consist of me using lots of best guesses to produce something vaguely resembling a cost-effectiveness estimate for SENS. You should not take this cost-effectiveness estimate literally.

If SENS needs one billion dollars to ensure that rejuvenation technologies that give individuals 30 extra years of healthy life are available to the public in 30 years, we might (completely arbitrarily) assume that someone else will come along and fund SENS in ten years if we don't contribute to funding SENS today. This means that if we fund SENS today instead waiting for it to be hypothetically funded in ten years from now, about ten times the number of people who die each year would live 30 years of healthy life that they wouldn't have lived otherwise. Given that there are about 57 million deaths per year worldwide, this translates to about 17 billion YLLs lost by waiting ten years to fund SENS; since SENS ostensibly requires only 1 billion of philanthropic funding, this implies that $0.059 of funding for SENS produces a YLL.

Of course, regenerative medicine won't be free to the people receiving it, and I ...
Graphical Assumption Modeling
by ozziegooen — 2015-01-03T20:22:21.432Z

The Flaws of Fermi Estimates

Why don’t we use more Fermi estimates?[1] Many of us want to become more rational. We have lots of numbers we can think of and important variables to consider. There are a few reasons.

Fermi calculations get really messy. After a few variables introduced, they could quickly become difficult to imagine and outline a problem. Many people, especially those who were not used to writing academic papers, do not practice the skills of formalizing inputs and outputs. It can be tedious for those who do.

Fermi models typically do not include estimates of certainty. Certainty propagates. It creates bottlenecks. As a Fermi model grows, specific uncertain assumptions could underscore the result. Certainty estimates are typically not measured, and when they are they require formalization and significant calculation.

Fermi calculations are not fun to share. Most of them are pretty simple; they just involve multiplication and addition and 3–5 variables. However, in order to write them one must formalize them as few lines of math him or few long paragraphs which really should be math.

Graphical Assumption Modeling

We propose the use of simple graphical models in order to represent estimates and Fermi models. We think these have the capacity to solve the issues mentioned above and make complex estimations more simple, more sharable, and more calculable. A formal and rigorous graphical model could not only improve on existing Fermi calculations, but it could also extend them to functions they have not yet been used for.

Multiplication

Let’s say we are trying to estimate the number of smiles per day in a park. A first attempt at this may be to guess the number of people in the park and to estimate the number of smiles on average per person in the park.

This is easy to calculate directly. 100 People x 10 smiles/(day * person) = 1000 smiles/day.

As a model, we can represent the variables as lines and the function as a box in between them. This fits nicely with similar diagramming standards. The function of multiplication acts as an object with inputs and outputs.

Independent variables, or user selected variables, are shown in black, and dependent variables are shown in blue.

We can condense this diagram by moving the number of smiles per day per person into the multiplication block.

Say we wanted to find the total smiles per year in the park. We can simply extend ...
What are the thoughts of Less Wrong on property dualism?
by casebash — 2015-01-03T13:24:43.193Z

I did a search about property dualism and I couldn't see much written here on this site.

What is your opinion on this topic?

Are there any articles on this site that I should read, including articles that aren't directly about property dualism? I'll add links to articles here as I find them (I'm still doing some searching myself)