trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Be Logically Informative
by steven0461 — 2009-05-15T13:23:31.277Z

What's the googolplexth decimal of pi? I don't know, but I know that it's rational for me to give each possible digit P=1/10. So there's a sense in which I can rationally assign probabilities to mathematical facts or computation outcomes on which I'm uncertain. (Apparently this can be modeled with logically impossible possible worlds.)

When we debate the truth of some proposition, we may not be engaging in mathematics in the traditional sense, but we're still trying to learn more about a structure of necessary implications. If we can apply probabilities to logic, we can quantify logical information. More logical information is better. And this seems very relevant to a misunderpracticed sub-art of group rationality -- the art of responsible argumentation.

There are a lot of common-sense guidelines for good argumentative practice. In case of doubt, we can take the logical information perspective and use probability theory to ground these guidelines. So let us now unearth a few example guidelines and other obvious insights, and not let the fact that we already knew them blunt the joy of discovery.

Every time we move from the issue at hand to some other, correlated issue, we lose informativeness. (We may, of course, care about the correlated issue for its own sake. Informativeness isn't the same thing as being on-topic.) The less the issue is correlated with the issue we care about, the more informativeness we lose. Relevance isn't black and white, and we want to aim for the lighter shades of gray -- to optimize and not just satisfice. When we move from the issue at hand to some issue correlated with some issue correlated with the issue at hand, we may even lose all informativeness! Relevance isn't transitive. If governments subsidized the eating of raspberries, would that make people happier? One way to find out is to think about whether it would make you happier. And one way to find out whether it would make you happier is to think about whether you're above-averagely fond of raspberries. But wait! Almost nobody is you. Having lost sight of our original target, we let all relevance slip away.

When we repeat ourselves, when we focus our attention on points misunderstood by a few loud people rather than many silent people, when we invent clever verbose restatements of the sentence "I'm right and you're wrong", when we refute views that nobody holds, when we spend

...
Outward Change Drives Inward Change
by cousin_it — 2009-05-15T12:45:16.204Z

The subsumption architecture for robotics invented by Rodney Brooks is based on the idea of connecting behavior to perception more directly, with fewer layers of processing and ideally no central processing at all. Its success, e.g. the Roomba, stands as proof that something akin to control theory can be used to generate complex agent-like behavior in the real world. In this post I'll try to give some convincing examples from literature and discuss a possible application to anti-akrasia.

We begin with Braitenberg vehicles. Imagine a dark flat surface with lamps here and there. Further imagine a four-wheeled kart with two light sensors at the front (left and right) and two independent motors connected to the rear wheels. Now connect the left light sensor directly to the right motor and vice versa. The resulting vehicle will seek out lamps and ram them at high speed. If you connect each sensor to the motor on its own side instead, the vehicle will run away from lamps, find a dark spot and rest there. If you use inverted (inhibitory) connectors from light sensors to motors, you get a car that finds lamps, approaches them and stops as if praying to the light.

Fast forward to a real world robot [PDF] built by Brooks and his team. The robot's goal is to navigate office space and gather soda cans. A wheeled base and a jointed hand with two fingers for grabbing. Let's focus on the grabbing task. You'd think the robot's computer should navigate the hand to what's recognized as a soda can and send out a grab instruction to fingers? Wrong. Hand navigation is implemented as totally separate from grabbing. In fact, grabbing is a dumb reflex triggered whenever something crosses an infrared beam between the fingers. The design constraint of separated control paths for different behaviors has given us an unexpected bonus: a human can hand a soda can to the robot which will grab it just fine. If you've ever interacted with toddlers, you know they work much the same way.

A recurrent theme in those designs is coordinating an agent's actions through the state of the world rather than an internal representation - in the words of Brooks, "using the world as its own model". This approach doesn't solve all problems - sometimes you do need to shut up and compute - but it goes surprisingly far, and biological evolution seems to have used it quite a lot: for example a moth spirals into t...
Essay-Question Poll: Voting
by Alicorn — 2009-05-15T05:04:55.374Z

There has been a considerable amount of discussion scattered around Less Wrong about voting, what software features having to do with voting should be added or subtracted, what purpose voting should serve, etc. It seems as though it would be useful to have conveniently consolidated information on how people are actually voting, so we know what habits that we want to encourage or discourage are actually in use and how prevalently.

1. About what percentage of comments do you vote on at all? What percentage of top-level posts?

2. Do you use the boo vote or the anti-kibitzer extensions? Why or why not?

3. What karma threshold do you use to filter what you see, if any?

4. When you vote on a post, or read it and decide not to vote on it, what features of the post are you occurrently conscious of that influence your decision either way? (Submitter, current post score, length, style, topic, spelling, whatever.) What about comments?

5. When you vote on a post, or read it and decide not to vote on it, are there any features of the post that you suspect you may react to subconsciously? What about comments?

6. When you vote on a post, or read it and decide not to vote on it, how do the features to which you react influence you? What about comments?

7. Do you make comments saying how you voted and why, on posts or on other comments? Why or why not?

8. What do you think a vote should be for? (Moving comments around in attentionspace, signifying agreement or disagreement, nudging the score in the direction of the score you think it deserves, influencing user karma to reflect general trends of post/comment quality, pointing out comments that are entertaining or useful or have cogent reasoning, compensating for other people upvoting or downvoting something you don't think warrants it, rewarding people for completing surveys, something I didn't think of, some combination of purposes). Do you usually vote in a way consistent with your opinion about its purpose?

9. What software features would you like to see that are relevant to voting?

10. Does your replying behavior interact in any interesting way with your voting behavior? (For instance, do you usually reply to comments you find confusing with questions, and then downvote them only after getting an inadequate explanation? Do you vote only on discussions you have,...
Cheerios: An "Untested New Drug"
by MBlume — 2009-05-15T02:26:25.688Z

I found this letter from the US Food and Drug Administration to General Mills interesting. It appears on the surface that the agency is trying to protect the American public from ungrounded persuasion, yet I can't find anything in the letter claiming that GM has made an unsupported statement.

Does anyone understand this better than I do?
Religion, Mystery, and Warm, Soft Fuzzies
by Psychohistorian — 2009-05-14T23:41:06.878Z

Reaction to: Yudkowsky and Frank on Religious Experience, Yudkowksy and Frank On Religious Experience Pt 2, A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies

Frank's point got rather lost in all this. It seems to be quite simple: there's a warm fuzziness to life that science just doesn't seem to get, and some religious artwork touches on and stimulates this warm fuzziness, and hence is of value.1 Moreover, understanding this point seems rather important to being able to spread an ideology.

The main problem is viewing this warm fuzziness as a "mystery." This warm fuzziness, as an experience, is a reality. It's part of that set of things that doesn't go away no matter what you say or think about them. Women (or men) will still be alluring, food will still be delicious, and Michaelangelo's David will still be beautiful, no matter how well you describe these phenomenon. The view that shattering mysteries reduces their value is very much a result of religion trying to protect itself. EY is probably correct that science will one day destroy this mystery as it has so many others, but because it is an "experience we can't clearly describe" rather than an actual "mystery," the experience will remain. The argument is with the description, not the experience; the experience is real, and experiences of its nature are totally desirable.

The second, sub-point: Frank thinks that certain religious stories and artwork may be of artistic value. The selection of the story of Job is unfortunate, but both speakers value it for the same reason: its truth. One sees it as true (and inspiring) and likes it, the other sees it as false (and insidious) and hates it. I think both agree that if you put it on the shelf next to Tolkien, and rational atheists still buy it and enjoy it, hey, good for Job. And if not, well, throw it out with the rest of the trash.

Frank also has a point about rationality not being the only way to view the world. I think he's once again right, he's just really, tragically bad at expressing his point without borrowing heavily from religion. His point seems to be that rationality isn't the only way to *experience* the world, which is absolutely, 100% right. You don't experience the world through rationality. You experience it through your senses and the qualia of consciousness. Rationality is how you figure out what's going on, or what's going to be going on, or what causes one thin...
A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies
by Scott Alexander — 2009-05-13T22:51:50.133Z

Followup to: Yudkowsky and Frank on Religious Experience, Yudkowksy and Frank On Religious Experience Pt 2
With sincere apologies to: Mike Godwin

You are General Eisenhower. It is 1945. The Allies have just triumphantly liberated Berlin. As the remaining leaders of the old regime are being tried and executed, it begins to become apparent just how vile and despicable the Third Reich truly was.
In the midst of the chaos, a group of German leaders come to you with a proposal. Nazism, they admit, was completely wrong. Its racist ideology was false and its consequences were horrific. However, in the bleak poverty of post-war Germany, people need to keep united somehow. They need something to believe in. And a whole generation of them have been raised on Nazi ideology and symbolism. Why not take advantage of the national unity Nazism provides while discarding all the racist baggage? "Make it so," you say.
The swastikas hanging from every boulevard stay up, but now they represent "traditional values" and even "peace". Big pictures of Hitler still hang in every government office, not because Hitler was right about racial purity, but because he represents the desire for spiritual purity inside all of us, and the desire to create a better society by any means necessary. It's still acceptable to shout "KILL ALL THE JEWS AND GYPSIES AND HOMOSEXUALS!" in public places, but only because everyone realizes that Hitler meant "Jews" as a metaphor for "greed", "gypsies" as a metaphor for "superstition", and "homosexuals" as a metaphor for "lust", and so what he really meant is that you need to kill the greed, lust, and superstition in your own heart. Good Nazis love real, physical Jews! Some Jews even choose to join the Party, inspired by their principled stand against spiritual evil.
The Hitler Youth remains, but it's become more or less a German version of the Boy Scouts. The Party infrastructure remains, but only as a group of spiritual advisors helping people fight the untermenschen in their own soul. They suggest that, during times of trouble, people look to Mein Kampf for inspiration. If they open to a sentence like "The Aryan race shall conquer all in its path", then they can interpret "the Aryan race" to mean "righteous people", and the sentence is really just saying that good people can do anything if they set their minds to it. Isn't that lovely?
Soon, "Nazi" comes t...
Survey Results
by Scott Alexander — 2009-05-12T22:09:39.463Z

Followup to: Excuse Me, Would You Like to Take a Survey?, Return of the Survey

Thank you to everyone who took the Less Wrong survey. I've calculated some results out on SPSS, and I've uploaded the data for anyone who wants it. I removed twelve people who wanted to remain private, removed a few people's karma upon request, and re-sorted the results so you can't figure out that the first person on the spreadsheet was the first person to post "I took it" on the comments thread and so on. Warning: you will probably not get exactly the same results as me, because a lot of people gave poor, barely comprehensible write in answers, which I tried to round off to the nearest bin.
Download the spreadsheet (right now it's in .xls format)
I am not a statistician, although I occasionally have to use statistics for various things, and I will gladly accept corrections for anything I've done wrong. Any Bayesian purists may wish to avert their eyes, as the whole analysis is frequentist. What can I say? I get SPSS software and training free and I don't like rejecting free stuff. The write-up below is missing answers to a few questions that I couldn't figure out how to analyze properly; anyone who cares about them enough can look at the raw data and try it themselves. Results under the cut.

Out of 166 respondees:

160 (96.4%) were male, 5 (3%) were female, and one chose not to reveal their gender.
The mean age was 27.16, the median was 25, and the SD was 7.68. The youngest person was 16, and the oldest was 60. Quartiles were <22, 22-25, 25-30, and >30.
Of the 158 of us who disclosed our race, 148 were white (93.6%), 6 were Asian, 1 was Black, 2 were Hispanic, and one cast a write-in vote for Middle Eastern. Judging by the number who put "Hinduism" as their family religion, most of those Asians seem to be Indians.
Of the 165 of us who gave readable relationship information, 55 (33.3%) are single and looking, 40 (24.2%) are single but not looking, 40 (24.2%) are in a relationship, 29 (17.6%) are married, and 1 is divorced.
Only 138 gave readable political information (those of you who refused to identify with any party and instead sent me manifestos, thank you for enlightening me, but I was unfortunately unable to do statistics on them). We have 62 (45%) libertarians, 53 (38.4%) liberals, 17 (12.3%) socialists, 6 (4.3%) conservatives, and not one person willing to own up to being a c...
Rationality in the Media: Don't (New Yorker, May 2009)
by  — 2009-05-12T13:32:34.455Z

Link: "Don't: The secret of self-control", Jonah Lehrer. The New Yorker. May 18, 2009.

Article Summary

Walter Mischel, a psychologist at Columbia University, has spent a long time studying what correlates with failing or passing a test intended to measure a preschooler's ability to delay gratification. The original experiment, involving a marshmallow and the promise of another if the first one remained uneaten for fifteen minutes, took place at Bing Nursery School in the "late 1960's". Mischel found several correlates, none of them really surprising. He discovered a few methods that allowed children to learn better delay gratification, but it is unclear if the learning the tricks changed any of the correlations. He and the research tradition he started are now waiting for fMRI studies, because that's what the discriminating 21st century psychologist does.

Best line: "'I know I shouldn't like them,' she says. 'But they're just so delicious!'"

Article Criticism

The New Yorker is not exactly meant as a science journal for scientists, so it leads and weaves a couple human interest stories in with the boring science parts. We hear from a 'high delayer' (someone who did well at the test) and her 'low delayer' brother. This sort of opening seems terribly common in popular science writing, and it's so infuriating because it primes the reader with the conclusions of the science before the science is even discussed. The high delayer goes on to become a social psychologist; the low delayer goes to Hollywood and is now working on becoming a producer. So already we see anecdotal evidence that high delayers are successful, low delayers are unsuccessful, and that there's not a genetic component (because brothers and sisters share so much genetic material &mdash; right?).

At this point the author gives the impetus for Mischel's study as conversations he had with his daughters after they left Bing. Of course, that's not the whole story; that just explains the longitudinal part. According to Mischel's bio halfway through the article, he's been doing experiments like the marshmallow test every since his Ph. D. The article cites a chocolate bar test he did in Trinidad in 1955 that was intended to examine the racial stereotypes of Africans and East Indians.

The only technique mentioned that helped increase children's ability to delay gratification was "...a simple set of mental tri...
Willpower Hax #487: Execute by Default
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-05-12T06:46:11.993Z

This is a trick that I use for getting out of bed in the morning - quite literally: I count down from 10 and get out of bed after the "1".

It works because instead of deciding to get out of bed, I just have to decide to implement the plan to count down from 10 and then get out of bed. Once the plan is in motion, the final action no longer requires an effortful decision - that's the theory, anyway. And to start the plan doesn't require as much effort because I just have to think "10, 9..."

As usual with such things, there's no way to tell whether it works because it's based on any sort of realistic insight or if it works because I believe it works; and in fact this is one of those cases that blurs the boundary between the two.

The technique was originally inspired by reading some neurologist suggesting that what we have is not "free will" so much as "free won't": that is, frontal reflection is mainly good for suppressing the default mode of action, more than originating new actions.

Pondering that for a bit inspired the idea that - if the brain carries out certain plans by default - it might conserve willpower to first visualize a sequence of actions and try to 'mark' it as the default plan, and then lift the attention-of-decision that agonizes whether or not to do it, thus allowing that default to happen.

For the record, I can remember a time some years ago when I would have been all enthusiastic about this sort of thing, believing that I had discovered this incredible new technique that might revolutionize my whole daily life. Today, while I know that there are discoverables with that kind of power, I also know that it usually requires beginning from firmer foundations - reports of controlled experiments, a standard theory in the field, and maybe even math. On the scale of depth I now use, this sort of trick ranks as pretty shallow - and in fact I really do use it just for getting out of bed.

I offer this trick as an example of practical advice not backed by deep theories, of the sort that you can find on a hundred other productivity blogs. At best it may work for some of you some of the time. Consider yourself warned about the enthusiasm thing.
No One Knows Stuff
by talisman — 2009-05-12T05:11:45.183Z

Take a second to go upvote You Are A Brain if you haven't already...

Back? OK.

Liron's post reminded me of something that I meant to say a while ago. In the course of giving literally hundreds of job interviews to extremely high-powered technical undergraduates over the last five years, one thing has become painfully clear to me: even very smart and accomplished and mathy people know nothing about rationality.

For instance, reasoning by expected utility, which you probably consider too basic to mention, is something they absolutely fall flat on. Ask them why they choose as they do in simple gambles involving risk, and they stutter and mutter and fail. Even the Econ majors. Even--perhaps especially--the Putnam winners.

Of those who have learned about heuristics and biases, a nontrivial minority have gotten confused to the point that they offer Kahneman and Tversky's research as justifying their exhibition of a bias!

So foundational explanatory work like Liron's is really pivotal. As I've touched on before, I think there's a huge amount to be done in organizing this material and making it approachable for people that don't have the basics. Who's going to write the Intuitive Explanation of Utility Theory?

Meanwhile, I need to brush up on my Python and find a way to upvote Liron more than once. If only...

Update: Tweaked language per suggestion, added Kahneman and Tversky link.
You Are A Brain
by Liron — 2009-05-09T21:53:26.771Z

Here is a 2-hour slide presentation I made for college students and teens:

You Are A Brain

It's an introduction to realist thinking, a tour of all the good stuff people don't realize until they include a node for their brain's map in their brain's map. All the concepts come from Eliezer's posts on Overcoming Bias.

I presented this to my old youth group while staffing one of their events. In addition to the slide show, I had a browser with various optical illusions open in tabs, and I brought in a bunch of lemons and miracle fruit tablets. They had a good time and stayed engaged.

I hope the slides will be of use to others trying to promote the public understanding of rationality.

Note: When you view the presentation, make sure you can see the speaker notes. They capture the gist of what I was saying while I was showing each slide.

Added 6 years later: I finally made a video of myself presenting this, except this time it was an adult audience. See this discussion post.
Step Back
by Andy_McKenzie — 2009-05-09T18:07:34.526Z

From a recent Psychological Science,

In everyday life, individuals typically approach desired stimuli by stepping forward and avoid aversive stimuli by stepping backward... Cognitive functioning was gauged by means of a Stroop task immediately after a participant stepped in one direction... Stepping backward significantly enhanced cognitive performance compared to stepping forward or sideways. Considering the effect size, backward locomotion appears to be a very powerful trigger to mobilize cognitive resources.

As Chris Chatham notes,

This work is remarkable not only for demonstrating how a very concrete and simple bodily experience can influence even the highest levels of cognitive processing (in this case, the so-called "cognitive control" processes that enable focused attention), but also because performance on the Stroop task is notoriously difficult to improve.

When you suddenly realize that a task is more difficult than you assumed it would be, or when you face a particularly difficult choice in pursuit of rationality, you may find it useful to literally take a step back. For those of us who are particularly interested in making good decisions, this may also serve the purpose of self-signaling, as Yvain and commenters discussed earlier.

Chris's post has a link to a pdf of the paper.