trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Does evolution select for mortality?
by DanArmak — 2013-02-23T19:33:12.534Z

At a recent Reddit AMA, Eric Lander, a professor of biology who played an important part in the Human Genome Project, answered this question:

Do you think immortatility is technically possible for human beings?

His response:

I don't think immortality is technically possible -- evolution has installed many many mechanisms to ensure that organisms die and make room for the next generation. I bet it is going to be very hard to completely overcome all these mechanisms.

This seems to me, at first blush, to exhibit the Evolution of Species Fairy fallacy. Evolution doesn't work to benefit species, populations, or the "next generation". If a mutation arises that increases longevity, and has no other downsides, then animals with that mutation should become more common in the gene pool, because they die less often. I remember reading that the effect would not be very strong, because most animals don't die of old age. But why would there be the opposite effect?

I am loath to attribute a very basic error to a distinguished professor of biology. Is there another explanation? Is the claim that evolution selects for mortality true?

Note: Eric went on to add:

I'm also not convinced immortality is such a good idea. A lot of human progress depends on having a new generation with new ideas. Immortality may equal stagnation.

This seems to be blatant rationalization of a preconceived idea that death is good. (I doubt he truly believes that extra progress is worth everybody dying.) So perhaps his first statement is also a form of rationalization. But it seems improbable to me that he would make such a statement about biology if he didn't think it well-founded. More likely there's something I'm misunderstanding.

ETA: one of the first Google results is this page at nature.com, The Evolution of Aging by Daniel Fabian, which goes into some depth on the subject. The bottom line is that it agrees with my expectation that evolution does not select for mortality. Choice quotes:

The Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, for example, argued in his De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) that aging and death are beneficial because they make room for the next generation (Bailey 1947), a view that persisted among biologists well into the 20th century. [...]

A more parsimonious evolutionary explanation for the existence of aging therefore requires an explanation that

...
Call for discussion: Signalling and/vs. accomplishment
by NancyLebovitz — 2013-02-23T16:12:41.725Z

It seems to me that when people discover signalling, they see it everywhere and write essays about how no human activity is aimed at its stated purpose.

However, stated purposes and other sorts of useful work get done anyway, and I'm sure there are constraints which mostly keep signalling under enough control that it's mostly not deadly. When I try to think about the subject, I don't get anywhere, possibly because the constraints on signalling are mostly tacit.

Any thoughts or resources on the subject?
[Link] Tomasik's "Quantify with Care"
by Pablo — 2013-02-23T13:52:10.309Z

Brian Tomasik's latest article, 'Quantify with Care', seems to be of sufficient interest to readers of this forum to post a link to it here. Abstract:

Quantification and metric optimization are powerful tools for reducing suffering, but they have to be used carefully. Many studies can be noisy, and results that seem counterintuitive may indeed be wrong because of sensitivity to experiment conditions, human error, measurement problems, or many other reasons. Sometimes you're looking at the wrong metric, and optimizing a metric blindly can be dangerous. Designing a robust set of metrics is actually a nontrivial undertaking that requires understanding the problem space, and sometimes it's more work than necessary. There can be a tendency to overemphasize statistics at the expense of insight and to use big samples when small ones would do. Finally, think twice about complex approaches that sound cool or impressive when you could instead use a dumb, simple solution.
[SEQ RERUN] (Moral) Truth in Fiction?
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-23T10:24:18.188Z

Today's post, (Moral) Truth in Fiction? was originally published on 09 February 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It is possible to convey moral ideas in a clearer way through fiction than through abstract argument. Stories may also help us get closer to thinking about moral issues in near mode. Don't discount moral arguments just because they're written as fiction.

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 ...And Say No More Of It, 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.
Disorganized collection growth
by KatjaGrace — 2013-02-23T01:23:15.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

When I was a teenager, I lived in a nice house with my mother, stepfather and three younger brothers. The contents of the house were what you would expect if you took a normal house, multiplied the number of things in it by ten, then shook it very hard. Almost – a greater proportion of the things were in boxes or containers of some kind than you would expect by chance, and also there were narrow trails cleared along the important thoroughfares. For instance there was a clear path to the first few chairs in the living room, from which the more athletic members of the household could jump to most of the other chairs.

This state of affairs interested me. From what little I had seen of other families’ houses, it was pretty unusual. Yet looking at the details of of the processes which produced it, I couldn’t see what was unusual. I don’t remember my exact thoughts, but I figured it had to be something that affected the relative inflow and outflow of stuff from the house. But it wasn’t that we had way more spending power than other families, or that we kept a lot of garbage. Most of the things in the house were useful, or would be if you had a non-negligible chance of finding them. It seemed like my family bought usual kinds of things for usual kinds of reasons. A set of lego for the children to play with, a blender because sometimes we wanted to blend things, a box of second hand books or two because they were only 50c.

The last one there looks a bit problematic, but is not that unusual. People often buy marginally valuable items because they are cheap. There were a few other things like that that looked a bit problematic – a tendency to keep drawings, an inclination to buy several shirts if you found one that was good. But nothing that should obviously cause this massive phase transition into chaos.

In the end I’m still not sure what the dominant problem was, or if there was one. But I can tell you about one kind of failure that I think contributed, which I also notice in other places.

Suppose you have a collection of things, for instance household items. You want to use one, for instance a pair of scissors. Depending on the organization of your collection of household items, it can be more or less tricky to find the scissors. At a certain level of trickiness, it is cheaper to just buy some new scissors than to f...
Meetup : Brussels meetup
by Axel — 2013-02-22T21:50:00.228Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup

WHEN:
16 March 2013 01:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles

We are once again meeting at 'la fleur en papier doré' close to the Brussels Central station. If you feel like an intelligent discussion and are in the neighborhood, consider dropping by. As always, I'll have a sign. The meeting will be in English to facilitate both French and Dutch speaking members.

If you are coming for the first time, please consider filling out this one minute form, to share your contact information.

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup
"What-the-hell" Cognitive Failure Mode: a Separate Bias or a Combination of Other Biases?
by Shmi — 2013-02-22T21:44:01.437Z

The "what-the-hell" effect, when you break a rule and then go on a rule-breaking rampage, like binge eating after a single dietary transgression, is a very common failure mode. It was recently mentioned in the Overcoming Bias blog comments on the Which biases matter most? Let’s prioritise the worst! post. I have not been able to find an explicit discussion of this issue here, though there are quite a few comments on binge-<something>.

From the Psyblog entry quoting this paper:

Although everyone was given the same slice of pizza; when it was served up, for some participants it was made to look larger by comparison.

This made some people think they'd eaten more than they really had; although in reality they'd all eaten exactly the same amount. It's a clever manipulation and it means we can just see the effect of thinking you've eaten too much rather than actually having eaten too much.

When the cookies were weighed it turned out that those who were on a diet and thought they'd blown their limit ate more of the cookies than those who weren't on a diet. In fact over 50% more! [Emphasis mine]

Other examples include sliding back into one's old drinking/smoking/surfing habit. For example, that's how I stopped using Pomodoro.

My (title) question is, what's the mechanism of this cognitive failure and whether it can be reduced to a combination of existing biases/fallacies? If the latter is true, can addressing one of the components counteract the what-the-hell effect? If so, how would one go about testing it?

For completeness, the top hit from Google scholar to the "what-the-hell effect" query is chapter 5 of Striving and Feeling: Interactions Among Goals, Affect, and Self-regulation, by Martin and Tesser.

EDIT: personal anecdotes are encouraged, they may help construct a more complete picture.
Meetup : Munich Meetup (updated)
by cadac — 2013-02-22T21:43:34.335Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup (updated)

WHEN:
01 April 2013 04:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
48.151006,11.590769

The next Munich meetup will take place on April 1st (as decided in the doodle). If the weather is sunny, we will meet outside, somewhere in Englischer Garten, in case of bad weather, the location is the café at Gasteig (right behind the escalator going up to the Stadtbücherei). Edit: Yeah, that’s indoors weather. We’ll meet at Gasteig. We don’t have any specific activities planned, but I think it would be fun to try Zendo. You should come and say hi, no matter how long you’ve been reading LessWrong.
If you plan to attend, please (optionally) post a comment saying what topics you’d like to discuss.

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup (updated)
An attempt to dissolve subjective expectation and personal identity
by Kaj_Sotala — 2013-02-22T20:44:08.870Z

I attempt to figure out a way to dissolve the concepts of 'personal identity' and 'subjective expectation' down to the level of cognitive algorithms, in a way that would let one bite the bullets of the anthropic trilemma. I proceed by considering four clues which seem important: 1) the evolutionary function of personal identity, 2) a sense of personal identity being really sticky, 3) an undefined personal identity causing undefined behavior in our decision-making machinery, and 4) our decision-making machinery being more strongly grounded in our subjective expectation than in abstract models. Taken together, these seem to suggest a solution.

I ended up re-reading some of the debates about the anthropic trilemma, and it struck me odd that, aside for a few references to personal identity being an evolutionary adaptation, there seemed to be no attempt to reduce the concept to the level of cognitive algorithms. Several commenters thought that there wasn't really any problem, and Eliezer asked them to explain why the claim of there not being any problem regardless violated the intuitive rules of subjective expectation. That seemed like a very strong indication that the question needs to be dissolved, but almost none of the attempted answers seemed to do that, instead trying to solve the question via decision theory without ever addressing the core issue of subjective expectation. rwallace's I-less Eye argued - I believe correctly - that subjective anticipation isn't ontologically fundamental, but still didn't address the question of why it feels like it is.

Here's a sketch of a dissolvement. It seems relatively convincing to me, but I'm not sure how others will take it, so let's give it a shot. Even if others find it incomplete, it should at least help provide clues that point towards a better dissolvement.

Clue 1: The evolutionary function of personal identity.

Let's first consider the evolutionary function. Why have we evolved a sense of personal identity?

The first answer that always comes to everyone's mind is that our brains have evolved for the task of spreading our genes, which involves surviving at least for as long as it takes to reproduce. Simpler neural functions, like maintaining a pulse and having reflexes, obviously do fine without a concept of personal identity. But if we wish to use abstract, explicit reasoning to advance our own interests, we need som...
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Bielefeld, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge MA, Cambridge UK, Cincinnati, Frankfurt, Montreal, Moscow, Purdue, Salt Lake City, Vancouver, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2013-02-22T16:33:22.576Z

This summary was posted to LW main on February 15th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Brussels meetup: 16 February 2013 01:00PM
Cincinnati February: Predictions: 16 February 2013 02:00PM
Vancouver Boredom vs Scope Insensitivity, and life-debugging: 16 February 2013 03:00PM
Purdue Meetup: 16 February 2013 07:00PM
Washington DC fun and games meetup: 17 February 2013 03:00PM
Moscow: Rationality in our daily life: 17 February 2013 04:00PM
Buffalo Meetup: 17 February 2013 04:00PM
Montreal LessWrong Meetup - The Science of Winning at Life: 18 February 2013 06:30PM
Bielefeld Meetup, February 20th: 20 February 2013 07:00PM
First meetup in Frankfurt (Main) : 22 February 2013 06:30PM
London Meetup, 24th Feb: 24 February 2013 02:00PM
Tokyo Meetup: 01 March 2013 07:00PM
Vienna Meetup 9th March: 09 March 2013 04:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 16 February 2019 01:30PM
Love and Sex in Salt Lake City: 16 February 2014 01:00PM
Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-02]: 17 February 2013 11:00AM
Cambridge, MA third-Sunday meetup: 18 February 2013 02:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feat...
Meetup : Moscow, Expanding rationality
by Yuu — 2013-02-22T07:50:19.058Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, Expanding rationality

WHEN:
03 March 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

Please use the following guide to get to the meetup: link. You need the second revolving door with the sign “Yandex Money” in Russian. We will meet you at 15:45 MSK with “LW” sign. And we will also check the entrance at 16:00 and 16:15, so please do not be late.

Main topics:

Short presentations. Two or three people will tell us about something interesting.

Rationality in examples from motion pictures and books.

Problem solving, we will apply our rationality skills to real life.

If you are going for the first time, you can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information. You can also use personal messages here, or drop a message at lw@lesswrong.ru to contact me for any reason.

Reports from previous sessions can be found here, in Russian, now with photos.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, Expanding rationality
[SEQ RERUN] ...And Say No More Of It
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-22T05:38:39.232Z

Today's post, ...And Say No More Of It was originally published on 09 February 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

In the previous couple of months, Overcoming Bias had focused too much on singularity related issues and not enough on rationality. A two month moratorium on the topic of the singularity/intelligence explosion is imposed.

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 The Thing That I Protect, 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.
Calibrating Against Undetectable Utilons and Goal Changing Events (part2and1) 
by diegocaleiro — 2013-02-22T01:09:16.987Z

Here is the original unchanged post with sections 1-3 and the new sections 4-8. If you read the first post, go straight to section 4.

Summary: Random events can preclude or steal attention from the goals you set up to begin with, hormonal fluctuation inclines people to change some of their goals with time. A discussion on how to act more usefully given those potential changes follows, taking in consideration the likelihood of a goal's success in terms of difficulty and length.

Throughout I'll talk about postponing utilons into undetectable distances. Doing so (I'll claim), is frequently motivationally driven by a cognitive dissonance between what our effects on the near world are, and what we wish they were. In other words it is:

A Self-serving bias in which Loss aversion manifests by postponing one's goals, thus avoiding frustration through wishful thinking about far futures, big worlds, immortal lives, and in general, high numbers of undetectable utilons.

I suspect that some clusters of SciFi, Lesswrong, Transhumanists, and Cryonicists are particularly prone to postponing utilons into undetectable distances, and here I try to think of which subgroups might be more likely to have done so. The phenomenon, though composed of a lot of biases, might even be a good thing depending on how it is handled.

Sections will be:

What Significantly Changes Life's Direction (lists)

Long Term Goals and Even Longer Term Goals

Proportionality Between Goal Achievement Expected Time and Plan Execution Time

A Hypothesis On Why We Became Long-Term Oriented

Adapting Bayesian Reasoning to Get More Utilons

Time You Can Afford to Wait, Not to Waste

Reference Classes that May Be Postponing Utilons Into Undetectable Distances

The Road Ahead

1What Significantly Changes Life's Direction

1.1 Predominantly external changes

As far as I recall from reading old (circa 2004) large scale studies on happiness, the most important life events in how much they change your happiness for more than six months are:

Becoming the caretaker of someone in a chronic non-curable condition

Separation (versus marriage)

Death of a Loved One

Losing your Job

Child rearing per child including the first

Chronic intermittent disease

Separation (versus being someone's girlfriend/boyfriend)

Roughly in descending order.

That is a list...
Recommended reading on the ethics of Animal Cognitive Enhancement
by  — 2013-02-22T01:07:46.812Z

Does anyone have recommendations of good things to read on the ethics of animal cognitive enhancement? By this I mean applying various methods of human cognitive enhancement (pharmacological, technological, etc) to animals such as the Great Apes. I've also heard this referred to as 'up-lifting' an animal.

I'm looking for articles, books, lectures - anything really. Obviously one can just google this but I find getting recommendations from others a better bet. I think this may be a useful resource for other people interested in the same topic. Interesting issues might include:

- Possible obligations to enhance

- Possible negative consequences

- Possible side-effects (such as radically different perspective)
VNM agents and lotteries involving an infinite number of possible outcomes
by AlexMennen — 2013-02-21T21:58:30.280Z

Summary: The VNM utility theorem only applies to lotteries that involve a finite number of possible outcomes. If an agent maximizes the expected value of a utility function when considering lotteries that involve a potentially infinite number of outcomes as well, then its utility function must be bounded.

Outcomes versus Lotteries

One way to formulate the VNM utility theorem is in terms of outcomes and lotteries over outcomes. That is, there is some set of outcomes, and a set of lotteries defined as . In other words, the set of lotteries is the set of probability distributions over a finite number of outcomes. The finiteness is very important; we'll get to that later. Note that for each outcome, there is a corresponding lottery that guarantees this outcome, and these “pure outcome” lotteries are a basis for .

Given that formulation, and given the VNM axioms, there exists some function such that given any 2 lotteries and , iff .

The other formulation does not mention . Instead, there is simply a set of lotteries, such that iff . In this formulation, there exists some function such that if , then (notice still must be finite) and for any 2 lotteries and , iff .

The formulation in terms of outcomes and lotteries over outcomes is more intuitively appealing (to me, at least), since real life has outcomes and uncertainty about outcomes, so I will use it when I can, but the formulation purely in terms of lotteries, which is more similar to what von Neumann and Morgenstern did in their original paper, will be useful sometimes, so I will switch back to it intermittently.

Infinite lotteries

Myth: Given some utility function that accurately describes a VNM-rational agent's preferences over finite lotteries, if you expand to include lotteries with an infinite number of possible outcomes (let's call the expanded set of lotteries ), then for any 2 lotteries and , iff .

Reality: Knowing an agent's preferences over finite lotteries, and that the agent obeys the VNM axioms, does not tell you everything about the agent's preferences over lotteries with an infinite number of possible outcomes. To demonstrate this, I'm going to construct a VNM-rational agent that maximizes a utility function , where . This construction relies on the axiom of choice (please let me know if you figure out whether or not it is pos...