trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[link] Scott Aaronson on free will
by DanielVarga — 2013-06-10T23:24:07.259Z

Scott Aaronson has a new 85 page essay up, titled "The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine". (Abstract here.) In Section 2.11 (Singulatarianism) he explicitly mentions Eliezer as an influence. But that's just a starting point, and he then moves in a direction that's very far from any kind of LW consensus. Among other things, he suggests that a crucial qualitative difference between a person and a digital upload is that the laws of physics prohibit making perfect copies of a person. Personally, I find the arguments completely unconvincing, but Aaronson is always thought-provoking and fun to read, and this is a good excuse to read about things like (I quote the abstract) "the No-Cloning Theorem, the measurement problem, decoherence, chaos, the arrow of time, the holographic principle, Newcomb's paradox, Boltzmann brains, algorithmic information theory, and the Common Prior Assumption". This is not just a shopping list of buzzwords, these are all important components of the author's main argument. It unfortunately still seems weak to me, but the time spent reading it is not wasted at all.
Are imaginary and complex numbers of decibans meaningful?
by DataPacRat — 2013-06-10T16:14:35.863Z

It's well-established that 0 decibans means 1:1 odds or 50% confidence; that 10 decibans means 10:1 odds; that -10 decibans means 1:10 odds; and that fractional numbers of decibans have similar meaning.

Does it make sense to talk about "i decibans", or "10 + 20i decibans"? If so, what does that actually mean?

I'm currently roughing out what may eventually become a formal specification for a protocol. It includes a numerical field for a level of confidence, measured in decibans. I'd like to know if I should simply define the spec as only allowing real numbers, or if there could be some purpose in allowing for complex numbers, as well.
Weak evidence that eating vegetables makes you live longer
by jefftk — 2013-06-10T13:09:21.691Z

People vary in how much they can taste bitter things. If you go around giving people the chemical Phenylthiocarbamide (PTC), which you shouldn't do, because it is toxic, you'll find that some people taste it as a strongly bitter while others can't taste it at all. Same with 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP). While these aren't common in food, they're very similar to chemicals that are in a lot of foods, so you might think that how much you can taste PTC or PROP might influence what foods you like.

We can test this. Give people various foods that there is dispute about the bitterness of, and then compare their preferences to their sensitivity to PTC or PROP. Several studies have done this:

Genetic Taste Markers and Food Preferences (2001, n=121) found that people who could taste PROP better were more likely to say they didn't like cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cabbage, etc).

Taste and food preferences as predictors of dietary practices in young women (1999, n=157) found that "sensitivity to the bitter taste of PROP was associated with reduced preferences for Brussels sprouts, cabbage, spinach and coffee beverages". But it's behind a paywall, so this is just from the abstract. The same authors in a related study, Food preferences and reported frequencies of food consumption as predictors of current diet in young women (1999, n=87) found that people who reported liking cruciferous vegetables less ate them 1/3 as often.

Bitter taste markers explain variability in vegetable sweetness, bitterness, and intake (2006, n=110) found that people "who taste PROP as most bitter also tasted the vegetables as most bitter and least sweet." This one is also paywalled, so I've only looked at the abstract.

Vegetables like broccoli are often thought to be good for you, so shouldn't we expect to see people who taste PROP and PTC not live as long, because they're eating less of those? Ideally we would test how sensitive people are to bitterness at some youngish age, and then watch them for the next 80 years to see how long they lived. But 80 years is a long time to wait, and you're going to need a large sample because we don't expect the effect to be that big. Another option would be to measure sensitivity to bitterness, and see whether it decreased with age in the same way we would expect if the people with increased bitterness sensitivity were dying earlier. But this is going ...
Meetup : Rationalist Housewarming at Isengard (Melbourne)
by BraydenM — 2013-06-10T12:07:21.442Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationalist Housewarming at Isengard (Melbourne)

WHEN:
15 June 2013 08:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
2105 / 5 Caraval Lane Docklands

The first and only (as far as we know) Australian Rationalist share house is finally here, our lofty apartment that towers imposingly over the lower inhabitants of Docklands. Come and help us celebrate this occasion, by bringing your favourite middle-earth or fictional persona for a night of drinking and rational conversation. Some desserts will be provided.
We are easiest to get to by public transport, but 24hr carparking is available nearby for $6 (or even closer if you want to pay more) See http://www.harbourtownmelbourne.com.au/transport.html
Please RSVP below or at https://www.facebook.com/events/341169522677511/

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationalist Housewarming at Isengard (Melbourne)
Useful Concepts Repository
by Qiaochu_Yuan — 2013-06-10T06:12:49.639Z

See also: Boring Advice Repository, Solved Problems Repository, Grad Student Advice Repository

I often find that my understanding of the world is strongly informed by a few key concepts. For example, I've repeatedly found the concept of opportunity cost to be a useful frame. My previous post on privileging the question is in some sense about the opportunity cost of paying attention to certain kinds of questions (namely that you don't get to use that attention on other kinds of questions). Efficient charity can also be thought of in terms of the opportunity cost of donating inefficiently to charity. I've also found the concept of incentive structure very useful for thinking about the behavior of groups of people in aggregate (see perverse incentive).

I'd like people to use this thread to post examples of concepts they've found particularly useful for understanding the world. I'm personally more interested in concepts that don't come from the Sequences, but comments describing a concept from the Sequences and explaining why you've found it useful may help people new to the Sequences. ("Useful" should be interpreted broadly: a concept specific to a particular field might be useful more generally as a metaphor.)
All Debates Are Bravery Debates
by Scott Alexander — 2013-06-09T19:00:57.196Z

“I don’t practice what I preach because I’m not the kind of person I’m preaching to.”

— Bob Dobbs

I.

I read Atlas Shrugged probably about a decade ago, and felt turned off by its promotion of selfishness as a moral ideal. I thought that was basically just being a jerk. After all, if there’s one thing the world doesn’t need (I thought) it’s more selfishness.

Then I talked to a friend who told me Atlas Shrugged had changed his life. That he’d been raised in a really strict family that had told him that ever enjoying himself was selfish and made him a bad person, that he had to be working at every moment to make his family and other people happy or else let them shame him to pieces. And the revelation that it was sometimes okay to consider your own happiness gave him the strength to stand up to them and turn his life around, while still keeping the basic human instinct of helping others when he wanted to and he felt they deserved it (as, indeed, do Rand characters).

II.

The religious and the irreligious alike enjoy making fun of Reddit’s r/atheism, which combines an extreme strawmanning of religious positions with childish insults and distasteful triumphalism. Recently the moderators themselves have become a bit embarrassed by it and instituted some rules intended to tone things down, leading to some of the most impressive Internet drama I have ever seen. In its midst, some people started talking about what the old strawmanning triumphalist r/atheism meant to them (see for example here).

A lot of them were raised in religious families where they would have been disowned if they had admitted to their atheism. Some of them were disowned for admitting to atheism, or lost boyfriends/girlfriends, or were terrified they might go to Hell. And then they found r/atheism, and saw people making fun of religion, and insulting it, in really REALLY offensive ways. And no one was striking them down with lightning. No one was shouting them down. No one was doing much of anything at all. And to see this taboo violated in the most shocking possible way with no repercussions sort of broke the spell for them, like as long as people were behaving respectfully to religion, even respectfully disagreeing, it still had this aura of invincibility about it, but if some perfectly normal person can post a a stupid comic where Jesus has gay sex with Mohammed, then there’s this whole other world o

...
Anticipating critical transitions
by PhilGoetz — 2013-06-09T16:28:51.006Z

(Mathematicians may find this post painfully obvious.)

I read an interesting puzzle on Stephen Landsburg's blog that generated a lot of disagreement. Stephen offered to bet anyone $15,000 that the average results of a computer simulation, run 1 million times, would be close to his solution's prediction of the expected value.

Landsburg's solution is in fact correct. But the problem involves a probabilistic infinite series, a kind used often on less wrong in a context where one is offered some utility every time one flips a coin and it comes up heads, but loses everything if it ever comes up tails. Landsburg didn't justify the claim that a simulation could indicate the true expected outcome of this particular problem. Can we find similar-looking problems for which simulations give the wrong answer? Yes.

Here's Perl code to estimate by simulation the expected value of the series of terms 2^k / k from k = 1 to infinity, with a 50% chance of stopping after each term.

my $bigsum = 0;
for (my $trial = 0; $trial < 1000000; $trial++) {
&nbsp; &nbsp; my $sum = 0;
&nbsp; &nbsp; my $top = 2;
&nbsp; &nbsp; my $denom = 1;
&nbsp; &nbsp; do {
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; $sum += $top / $denom;
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; $top *= 2;
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; $denom += 1;
&nbsp; &nbsp; }
&nbsp; &nbsp; while (rand(1) < .5);
&nbsp; &nbsp; $bigsum += $sum;
}
my $ave = $bigsum / $runs;
print "ave sum=$ave\n";

(If anyone knows how to enter a code block on this site, let me know. I used the "pre" tag, but the site stripped out my spaces anyway.)

Running it 5 times, we get the answers

ave sum=7.6035709716983

ave sum=8.47543819631431

ave sum=7.2618950097739

ave sum=8.26159741956747

ave sum=7.75774577340324

So the expected value is somewhere around 8?

No; the expected value is given by the sum of the harmonic series, which diverges, so it's infinite. Later terms in the series are exponentially larger, but exponentially less likely to appear.

Some of you are saying, "Of course the expected value of a divergent series can't be computed by simulation! Give me back my minute!" But many things we might simulate with computers, like the weather, the economy, or existential risk, are full of power law distributions that might not have a convergent expected value. People have o...
Exercise isn't necessarily good for people
by NancyLebovitz — 2013-06-08T14:32:04.276Z

I would appreciate it very much if anyone would take a close look at this-- it looks sound to me, but it also appeals to my prejudices.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=E42TQNWhW3w#!

My comments are in square brackets. Everything else is my notes on the Jamie Timmons lecture from the video.

Short version: 12% of people become less healthy from exercise. 20% of people get nothing from exercise. This is a matter of genetics, not doing exercise wrong.

****

Ask a hundred people about exercise, you'll get a wide range of answers about what exercise is and what good it might do for health, and the same for health professionals.

You need to focus on the evidence that exercise affects particular health outcomes. Weight and health are not strongly correlated. BMI is problematic.

There's a recommendation for 150 minutes of exercise/week, but this isn't sound. People who *report* being active have better health. People who are fitter have better health. These are not evidence that having a person with low activity take up exercise will make them healthier.

Nothing but a supervised intervention study is good enough.

Improved lifestyle is better than Metformin for preventing diabetes. (Studies) Exercise + diet modification has a powerful effect of preventing and slowing the progression of Type II diabetes. People with Type II have more cardiovascular disease (heart attacks and strokes). However, it doesn't follow that the lifestyle changes which help with Type II will also help with CVD. [I'm surprised]

Diabetes doesn't kill, CVD does, and a major motivation for the NHS to care is that CVD is expensive.

[9:45] Two studies which find that lifestyle intervention has no effect on CVD in diabetics. [11:00] One study which found that lifestyle intervention prevents Type II but doesn't affect microvascular disease (blindness and ulcers). [I'm not sure what this means. Maybe people can have the ill effects of Type II without the disease showing up in their blood sugar levels?] There are no supervised exercise-only intervention studies which show that exercise prevents long term disease progression.

[13:00] The usual advice on exercise from the NHS (pretty similar in the US): Aerobic exerise must raise your heart rate and make you sweat to be benefiscial. The more exercise you do, the better. Do a minimum of 150 minutes/week of aerobic exercise + strength training....
Social Impact, Effective Altruism, and Motivated Cognition
by JonahS — 2013-06-08T02:31:37.659Z

Money is one measure of social status. People compare themselves favorably or unfavorably to others in their social circles based on their wealth and their earning power, and signals thereof, and compare their social circles favorably or unfavorably with other social circles based on the average wealth of people in the social circles. Humans crave social status, and this is one of people’s motivations for making money.

Effective altruists attempt to quantify “amount of good done” and maximize it. Once this framing is adopted, “amount of good done” becomes a measure of social status in the same way that money is. Most people who aspire to be effective altruists will be partially motivated by a desire to matter more than other people, in the sense of doing more good. People who join the effective altruism movement may do so partially out of a desire to matter more than people who are not in the movement.

Harnessing status motivations for the sake of doing the most good can have profound positive impacts. But under this paradigm, effective altruists will generally be motivated to believe that they’re doing more good than other people are. This motivation is not necessarily dominant in any given case, but it’s sufficiently strong to be worth highlighting.

With this in mind, note that effective altruists will be motivated to believe that the activities that they themselves are capable of engaging in have higher value than they actually do, and that activities that others are engaged in have lower value than they actually do. Without effort to counterbalance this motivation, effective altruists’ views of the philanthropic landscape will be distorted, and they’ll be apt to bias others in favor of the areas that use their own core competencies.

I worry that the effective altruist community hasn’t taken sufficient measures to guard against this issue. In particular, I’m not aware of any overt public discussion of it. Independently of whether or not there are examples of public discussion that I’m unaware of, the fact that I’m not aware of any suggests that any discussion that has occurred hasn’t percolated enough.

I’ll refrain from giving specific examples that I see as causes for concern, on account of political sensitivity. The effective altruist community is divid...
Some clarifications concerning my "many weak arguments" post
by JonahS — 2013-06-07T19:34:50.350Z

I put substantial of effort into making my post Many Weak Arguments vs. One Relatively Strong Argument as clear as possible, but as Luke said:

This is a messy subject, and one that's difficult write about, and I appreciate you tackling the topic. I think there are some important qualifications to make about this post, as others have noted. But I know that when writing about messy subjects, it's hard to avoid "death by a thousand qualifications."

So a lot of aspects of my thinking didn't percolate into my post. With this in mind, I decided to address some of the questions and concerns that people raised in the comments on my post. The discussion below is intended for people who read the aforementioned article, and who have nagging concerns and questions.

I'll address various questions and comments in turn.

Motivated cognition: Unnamed wrote:

Motivated reasoning is a bigger risk when dealing with weak arguments, since it is relatively easy to come up with weak arguments on the side that you favor, but it is hard to make an argument rigorous just because you want it to be true. It also seems easier to ignore various weak arguments on the other side (or dismiss them as not even worth considering) than to dismiss a strong argument on the other side.

I think that Unnamed raises a genuine weakness of the "many weak arguments" approach, but I think that the issue is smaller than it initially appears.

I didn't mean to suggest that one could consider question, choose a position, come up with a bunch of weak arguments in favor of the postion, note that they're largely independent, and conclude that the position is true. "Weak argument" is relative, and in general, the weak arguments on one side of the argument will be weaker than those on the other side.

My suggestion is that one should make a list of many weak arguments for a position and against a position, consider them all in juxtaposition, and then make an assessment of the direction in which the principle of consilience points, and how strongly it points in that direction. My reason for highlighting the argument that "Penrose is a great physicist and so is unusually likely to be right in his views about consciousness" was to give an example of a weak argument on "the other side" that one should pay (a small amount of) attention to.

If a question is a high stakes question, one should solicit we...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2013-06-07T15:26:09.241Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on May 31st. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta LessWrong June Meetup: Effective Altruism: 15 June 2013 07:00PM
Berlin Social Meetup: 15 June 2013 05:00PM
[Boston] The Science Of Happiness: 02 June 2013 02:00PM
Brussels meetup with Cat: 03 June 2013 01:00PM
Frankfurt meetup with special guest CatM (CFAR instructor): 01 June 2013 04:00PM
Helsinki meetup with CatM (CFAR instructor) as special guest star: 08 June 2013 03:00PM
London - Inaugural Practical Session - June 9th: 09 June 2013 02:00PM
[Moscow] Rational choice: 09 June 2013 04:00PM
Munich Meetup: 01 June 2013 03:00PM

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

Austin, TX: 01 June 2019 01:30PM
Melbourne, practical rationality: 07 June 2013 07:00PM
Vienna Meetup #3: 15 June 2013 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

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 feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, ...
Robust Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma
by orthonormal — 2013-06-07T08:30:25.557Z

I'm proud to announce the preprint of Robust Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma: Program Equilibrium via Provability Logic, a joint paper with Mihaly Barasz, Paul Christiano, Benja Fallenstein, Marcello Herreshoff, Patrick LaVictoire (me), and Eliezer Yudkowsky.

This paper was one of three projects to come out of the 2nd MIRI Workshop on Probability and Reflection in April 2013, and had its genesis in ideas about formalizations of decision theory that have appeared on LessWrong. (At the end of this post, I'll include links for further reading.)

Below, I'll briefly outline the problem we considered, the results we proved, and the (many) open questions that remain. Thanks in advance for your thoughts and suggestions!

Background: Writing programs to play the PD with source code swap

(If you're not familiar with the Prisoner's Dilemma, see here.)

The paper concerns the following setup, which has come up in academic research on game theory: say that you have the chance to write a computer program X, which takes in one input and returns either Cooperate or Defect. This program will face off against some other computer program Y, but with a twist: X will receive the source code of Y as input, and Y will receive the source code of X as input. And you will be given your program's winnings, so you should think carefully about what sort of program you'd write!

Of course, you could simply write a program that defects regardless of its input; we call this program DefectBot, and call the program that cooperates on all inputs CooperateBot. But with the wealth of information afforded by the setup, you might wonder if there's some program that might be able to achieve mutual cooperation in situations where DefectBot achieves mutual defection, without thereby risking a sucker's payoff. (Douglas Hofstadter would call this a perfect opportunity for superrationality...)

Previously known: CliqueBot and FairBot

And indeed, there's a way to do this that's been known since at least the 1980s. You can write a computer program that knows its own source code, compares it to the input, and returns C if and only if the two are identical (and D otherwise). Thus it achieves mutual cooperation in one important case where it intuitively ought to: when playing against itself! We call this program CliqueBot, since it cooperates only with the "clique" of agents identical to itself.

There's one pa...