trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Human values differ as much as values can differ
by PhilGoetz — 2010-05-03T19:35:25.533Z

George Hamilton's autobiography Don't Mind if I Do, and the very similar book by Bob Evans, The Kid Stays in the Picture, give a lot of insight into human nature and values. For instance: What do people really want? When people have the money and fame to travel around the world and do anything that they want, what do they do? And what is it that they value most about the experience afterward?

You may argue that the extremely wealthy and famous don't represent the desires of ordinary humans. I say the opposite: Non-wealthy, non-famous people, being more constrained by need and by social convention, and having no hope of ever attaining their desires, don't represent, or even allow themselves to acknowledge, the actual desires of humans.

I noticed a pattern in these books: The men in them value social status primarily as an ends to a means; while the women value social status as an end in itself.

"Male" and "female" values

This is a generalization; but, at least at the very upper levels of society depicted in these books, and a few others like them that I've read, it's frequently borne out. (Perhaps a culture chooses celebrities who reinforce its stereotypes.) Women and men alike appreciate expensive cars and clothing. But the impression I get is that the flamboyantly extravagant are surprisingly non-materialistic. Other than food (and, oddly, clothing), the very wealthy themselves consistently refer to these trappings as things that they need in order to signal their importance to other people. They don't have an opinion on how long or how tall a yacht "ought" to be; they just want theirs to be the longest or tallest. The persistent phenomenon whereby the more wealthy someone appears, the more likely they are to go into debt, is not because these people are too stupid or impulsive to hold on to their money (as in popular depictions of the wealthy, eg., A New Leaf) . It's because they are deliberately trading monetary capital for the social capital that they actually desire (and expect to be able to trade it back later if they wish to, even making a profit on the "transaction", as Donald Trump has done so well).

With most of the women in these books, that's where it ends. What they want is to be the center of attention. They want to walk into a famous night-club and see everyone's ...
Connotations are indelible
by KatjaGrace — 2010-05-03T13:20:18.000Z

Once a connection exists between two concepts, there is no easy way to remove it. For instance if it was publicly decided tomorrow that ‘f***’ should no longer carry connotations of anything other than sweet lovemaking, it would be virtually impossible to remove the other meanings even if everyone wanted to. The connotation will always be a Schelling point for what the word might imply. Whenever the banned connotation made the most sense, people would understand it as that. Listeners know that the speaker knows they will be reminded of the connotation, and since the speaker used the word anyway, they intentionally sent the message.

This is part of why polite terms are constantly changed for concepts which are followed by unwanted negative connotations, such as terms for physically and mentally disabled people and ethnic and racial minorities. As Steven Pinker probably pointed out, the negative connotations people attach to the subject matter get attached to the word, so the word becomes derogatory and we have to get another one for when offense isn’t meant. So these words cycle much faster than other words.

You can’t even refuse to use or accept a connotation yourself. Some people insist that gender stereotypes don’t apply, are offensive, and should never be used. But if someone says to them ‘David was being a bit of a girl’, they can’t help but receive the message. They might refuse to respond, but they have no defenses to receiving. They would like to remove the association of wimpiness from the public understanding of femalehood, but they can’t even opt out themselves.

This is similar to the game mentioned in The Strategy of Conflict where two people are to privately pick a letter from several which have different payoffs to both of them without communicating. If a single suggestion is accidentally uttered, they must pick the letter spoken even if neither of them prefer it to others. It’s the only way to coordinate. If one of them managed to speak another letter, that would weaken the original Schelling point, but not destroy it. Similarly, if you make it clear that femininity suggests strength to you, you can confuse the communication somewhat by making it difficult for either the speaker or listener to guess which of the prominent possible meanings is being communicated, but you can’t destroy the existing meaning. At be

...
Enjoy ≠ want, but why should wants submit?
by KatjaGrace — 2010-05-02T11:17:07.000Z

There are things that we try to get. There are things that we enjoy when we have them. There’s overlap, but they aren’t the same. When people notice they aren’t the same, they often try to change or override their wants – or more often others’ wants – in the direction of reflecting what’s actually enjoyable*.

This observed disconnect seems for instance to underlie many people’s support for government interference into personal choices and markets, indifference to taking money from the wealthy, advice about personal choices, and the ethical position which says that if a person expects a lifetime of pain, yet wants to live regardless, it is still a good thing if they die.

An argument I’ve heard sometimes for this last manifestation in hedonistic utilitarianism is this: on introspection, it seems that enjoyment is the only thing that could be valuable. Since we should try to get things that are valuable, we should try to get that, and forget the things we thought we wanted. We were either wrong about our wants or just downright silly.

This seems to use a trick though, of only sometimes assuming the identity of different definitions of value, ‘that which feels good now’ and ‘that which we want’. In working out intuitively what could possibly be valuable, the user of this reasoning presumably considers what seems good now – really what is meant is something like ‘the only thing which seems good at the time is enjoyment’. But then the argument goes on to implicitly assume ‘value’ as in what we enjoy is equivalent to ‘value’ as in what we seek, so as to conclude that it’s good to seek enjoyable things. But if from the outset we used ‘value’ to mean both to what we like currently and what we want, ‘things we want’ must be another contender for what intuitively might be inherently valuable. If we are going by intuitions, ‘we should try to get what we want to get’ looks far more self evident than ‘we should try to get what we enjoy’.

If there is a disconnect between wants and enjoyment, there are three possible resolutions. First, we could leave it be and believe simultaneously that it’s good to pursue what we want, and good to have what we enjoy, without them having to be the same thing. After...
Rationality quotes: May 2010
by ata — 2010-05-01T05:48:10.694Z

This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Why is bad teaching attached to uni certification?
by KatjaGrace — 2010-04-30T06:28:28.000Z

When most things are certified, like coffee or wood or insanity, the stuff is produced by one party, then someone else judges it. University is meant to be a certification of something or another, so a nagging question for all those who can think of a zillion better ways to learn things than by moving their morning sleep to a lecture theater is ‘why can’t university work like those other things?’

If the learning bit were done with a different party from the certification bit, everyone could buy their preferred manner of education, rather than being constrained by the need for it to be attached to the most prestigious certification they could get hold of. This would drastically increase efficiency for those people who learn better by reading, talking, or listening to pausable, speedupable, recordings of good lecturers elsewhere than they do by listening to someone gradually mumble tangents at them for hour-long stints, or listening to the medical autobiographies of their fellow tutorial-goers.

This is an old and seemingly good idea, assuming university is for learning stuff, so probably I should assume something else.

Many other things university could be for face the same argument – if you are meant to learn to be a ‘capable and cultivated human being’ or just show you can put your head down and do work, these could be achieved in various ways and tested later.

One explanation for binding the ‘learning’ to the certification is that the drudgery is part of the test. The point is to demonstrate something like the ability to be bored and pointlessly inconvenienced for years on end, without giving up and doing something interesting instead, purely on the vague understanding that it’s what you’re meant to do. That might be a good employee characteristic.

That good though? Surely there is far more employment related usefulness you could equip a person with in several years than just checking they have basic stamina and normal deference to social norms. Presumably just having them work cheaply for that long would tell you the same and produce more. And aren’t there plenty of jobs where the opposite characteristics, such as initiative and responding fast to suboptimal situations, are useful? Why would everyone want signals of placid obedience?

Bryan Caplan argued that university must be long because it is...
Averaging value systems is worse than choosing one
by PhilGoetz — 2010-04-29T02:51:31.138Z

A continuation of Only humans can have human values. Revised late in the evening on April 30.

Summary: I will present a model of value systems, and show that under it, the "averaged value system" found by averaging the values of all the agents,

(RESTATED:) has more internal inconsistency than you would on average get by picking one agent's values at random

is a less stable value system than you would get by picking one agent's values at random

ADDED: The reason for doing this is that numerous people have suggested implementing CEV by averaging different value systems together. My intuition is that value systems are not random; they are optimized in some way. This optimization is undone if you mix together different value systems simply by averaging them. I demonstrate this in the case where we suppose they are optimized to minimize internal conflict.

To someone working with the assumptions needed for CEV, the second bullet point is probably more important. Stability is central to CEV, while internal inconsistency may be a mere computational inconvenience.

ADDED: Inconsistencies in value systems

We find consistent correlations in value systems. The US has two political parties, Republican and Democrat; and many people who find one or the other obviously, intuitively correct. Most countries have a conservative/liberal dimension that many values line up along. It's hard to know whether this is because people try to make their values consistent; or because game theory tends to produce two parties, or even because parties form along the first principle component of the scatterplot of the values of members of society, so that some essentially artifactual vector is guaranteed to be found to be the main dimension along which opinions vary. However, it's at least suggestive. You seldom find a country where the conservatives favor peace and the liberals favor war; or where the liberals value religious rules more than the conservatives. I seldom find vegetarians who are against welfare, or loggers or oilmen who are animal-rights activists.

If it's a general principle that some process causes people to form value systems with less inconsistencies than they would have by gathering different pieces from different value systems at random, it's not a great leap of faith to say that value systems with less...
Who observes being you, and do they cheat in SIA?
by KatjaGrace — 2010-04-29T00:58:55.000Z

Warning: this post is somewhat technical – looking at this summary should help.

1,000,000 people are in a giant urn. Each person is labeled with a number (number 1 through number 1,000,000).

A coin will be flipped. If heads, Large World wins and 999,999 people will be randomly selected from the urn. If tails, Small World wins and 1 person will be drawn from the urn.

After the coin flip, and after the sample is selected, we are told that person #X was selected (where X is an integer between 1 and 1,000,000).

Prior probability of Large World: P(heads)=0.5

Posterior probability of Large World: P(heads|person #X selected)=P(heads)=0.5

Regardless of whether the coin landed heads or tails, we knew we would be told about some person being selected. So, the fact that we were told that someone was selected tells us nothing about which world we are in.

Jason Roy argues that the self indication assumption (SIA) is equivalent to such reasoning, and thus wrong. For the self indication assumption to be legitimate it would have to be analogous to a selection procedure where you can only ever hear about person number 693465 for instance – if they don’t come up you hear nothing.

In both cases you can only hear about one person in some sense, the question is whether which person you could hear about was chosen before the experiment, or afterwards from those which came up. The self indication assumption looks at first like a case of the latter; nothing that can be called you existed before the experiment to have dibs on a particular physical arrangement if it came up, and you certainly didn’t start thinking about the self indication assumption until you were well chosen. These things are not really important though.

Which selection procedure is analogous to using SIA seems to depend on what real life thing corresponds to ‘you’ in the thought experiment when ‘you’ are told about people being pulled out of the urn. If ‘you’ are a unique entity with exactly your physical characteristics, then if you didn’t exist, you wouldn’t have heard of someone else – someone else would have heard of someone else. Here SIA stands; my number was chosen before the experiment as far as I’m concerned, even if I wasn’t there to choose it.

On the other hand ‘you’ can be thought of as an abstract observer who has the same identity regardless of characteristics. Then if a person wit...
What are our domains of expertise? A marketplace of insights and issues
by Morendil — 2010-04-28T22:17:12.713Z

We have recently obtained evidence that a number of people, some with quite interesting backgrounds and areas of expertise, find LessWrong an interesting read but find limited opportunities to contribute.

This post is an invitation to engage, in relative safety but just a little beyond saying "Hi, I'm a lurker". Even that little is appreciated, to be sure, and it's OK for anyone who feels the slightest bit intimidated to remain on the sidelines. However, I'm confident that most readers will find it quite easy to answer at least the first of the following questions:

What is your main domain of expertise? (Your profession, your area of study, or even a hobby!)

...and possibly these follow-ups:

What issues in your domain call most critically for sharp thinking?

What do you know that could be of interest to the LessWrong community?

What might you learn from experts in other domains that could be useful in yours?

Comments like the following, from the "Attention Lurkers" thread, suggest untapped resources:

I'm a Maternal-Fetal Medicine specialist. [...] I lurk because I feel that I'm too philosophically fuzzy for some of the discussions here. I do learn a great deal. Anytime anyone wants to discuss prenatal diagnosis and the ethical implications, let me know.

My own area of professional expertise is computer programming - perhaps one of the common sub-populations here. I'm also a parent, and have been a beneficiary of prenatal diagnosis (toxoplasmosis: turned out not to be a big deal, but it might have been). My curiosity is often engaged by what goes on "behind the scenes" of the professions I interact with as an ordinary citizen.

Yes, I would be quite interested in striking up a conversation about applying the tools discussed here to prenatal diagnosis; or in a conversation about which conceptual tools that I don't know about yet turn out to be useful in dealing with the epistemic or ethical issues in prenatal diagnosis.

Metaphorically, the intent of this post is to provide a marketplace. We already have the "Where are we?" thread, which makes it easier for LessWrongers close to each other to meet up if they want to. ("Welcome to LessWrong" is the place to collect biographical information, but it specifically emphasizes the "rationalist" side of people, rather than their professional knowledge.)

In a similar spirit, please post a comment here offering (or requ...
Possibilities for converting useless fun into utility in Online Gaming
by Aleksei_Riikonen — 2010-04-27T22:21:56.251Z

Online gaming in immersive MMOs such as World of Warcraft or EVE Online is a common way of having fun. As technology progresses, MMO gaming will likely become ever more popular, until MMOs are fully immersive virtual realities, leading many to consider them as the primary venue of their lives, instead of "the old(/real) world" (without such thinking being pathological anymore).
Currently, however, many people such as myself mostly find MMO gaming a threat to their productivity. MMOs can be very fun, druglike even, without providing any utility to valued real-world pursuits such as reducing existential risk and having money to buy food.
The default recommendation regarding MMOs for most rationalists should probably be "stay away from them -- or at least don't get into active gaming". This is also my current attitude.
Despite this, it may actually be worth considering whether some utility could be extracted from MMO gaming, specifically from the point of view of SIAI supporters such as myself. (From here on, I'll use the term "SIAIfolk" to refer to people interested in furthering SIAI's and allied organizations' mission.)
It seems that the amount of SIAIfolk is undergoing strong growth, and that this may continue. At some point, which we may currently have passed or not, there may therefore (despite all recommendations) be a substantial number of SIAIfolk engaging in somewhat active MMO gaming.
In such a circumstance, it may be beneficial to form a "Singularitarian Gaming Group", which along with functioning as a gaming clan in the various MMOs participated in, would include an internal reward and ranking system that would motivate people *away* from spending too much time on gaming, and encourage more productive activities. Some amount of MMO gaming would be done, with the company of other SIAIfolk making it more fun, but incentives and social support would be in place to keep gaming down to a rational level.
It would be critical to build the incentive system well. A poorly built system would lead SIAIfolk to spend more resources on gaming and less effort on productive stuff than would have happened if "Singularitarian Gaming Group" didn't exist in the first place. I however believe that "SGG" can be set up in a meaningful way, at least if we already have SIAIfolk who are spending more time on MMO gaming than they find optimal.
With this article, my main intention i...
MathOverflow as an example for LessWrong
by Academian — 2010-04-27T18:30:53.857Z

"How can LessWrong maintain high post quality while obtaining new posters? How can we encourage everyone to read everything, but not everyone to post everything? How can we be less intimidating to newcomers?"

A lot of Meta conversation goes on here, and the longer it goes on without having a great example to learn from, the longer our discussion will be more aimless and less informed than it could be. Consider speculating whether blue mould from bread could treat supporating eye infections before you knew it also treated supporating flesh wounds... it would seem pretty random, and the discussion would be fairly aimless.

But LessWrong.com is the first successful community of its kind! There is no example to learn from, right?

With the latter, I wouldn't agree: http://mathoverflow.net

[What I've already said in comments: MathOverflow is a Q&A forum for research-level mathematicians, aimed at each other, created by a math grad student and a post-doc in September 2009. As hoped, it expanded very quickly, involving many famous mathematicians around the world. You can even see Fields Medalist — the math equivalent of Nobel Laurate — Terrence Tao is a regular contributor (bottom right).]

MathOverflow awards Karma for good questions and good answers, it's moderated, it's open to new users, and maintains a high standard so professionals stay interested and involved. Sound familliar? Well, what about these features...

The top of every page links to:

Frequently Asked Questions

How to write a good MathOverflow question

meta.mathoverflow.net, a separate forum for questions/suggestions about site policy.

Have a look at those links. If your first reaction is "Sure, precise guidelines worked for a professional mathematics Q&A site...", consider this: they didn't start out as a professional mathematics Q&A site. They started out wanting to be one. They had to defend against wave after wave of undergraduate calculus students posting for homework help. They had to defy the natural propensity of the community to become an open discussion forum for mathematicians. I watched as these problems arose, were dealt with, and subsided. For example:

I can attest that the MathOverflow guidelines made me both more careful and more confide

...
Anthropic summary
by KatjaGrace — 2010-04-27T17:35:10.000Z

I mean to write about anthropic reasoning more in future, so I offer you a quick introduction to a couple of anthropic reasoning principles. There’s also a link to it in ‘pages’ in the side bar. I’ll update it later – there are arguments I haven’t written up yet, plus I’m in the middle of reading the literature, so hope to come across more good ones there.