trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
New Post version 2 (please read this ONLY if your last name beings with l–z)
by lukeprog — 2011-07-27T21:57:13.928Z

Note: I am testing two versions of my new post on rationality and romance.

Please upvote, downvote, or non-vote the below post as you normally would if you saw it on the front page (not the discussion section), but do not vote on the other version. Also, if your last name begins with l–z, please read and vote on this post first. If your last name begins with a–k, please stop reading and read this version instead.

Rationality Lessons from Romance

Years ago, my first girlfriend (let's call her 'Alice') ran into her ex-boyfriend at a coffee shop. They traded anecdotes, felt connected, a spark of intimacy...

And then she left the coffee shop, quickly.

She told me later: "You have my heart now, Luke."

I felt proud, but even Luke2005 also felt a twinge of "the universe is suboptimal," because she hadn't been able to engage that connection any further. The cultural scripts defining our relationship said that only one man owned her heart. But surely that wasn't optimal for producing utilons?

And thus began my journey toward rational romance — not at that exact moment, but with a series of realizations like that about monogamy, about the assumed progression toward marriage, about the ownership of another person's sexuality, etc. I began to explicitly notice the cultural scripts and see that they might not be optimal for me.

Rationality Skill: Notice when things are suboptimal. Think of ways to optimize them.

Gather data

But I didn't know how to optimize. I needed data. How did relationships work? How did women work? How did attraction work? I decided to become a social psychology nerd. The value of information was high. I began to spend less time with Alice so I could spend more time studying.

Rationality Skill: Respond to the value of information. Don't keep running in what is probably the wrong direction just because you've got momentum. Stop a moment, and invest some energy in figuring out which direction to go.

Sanity-check yourself

Before long, I noticed that Alice was always pushing me to spend more time with her, and I was always pushing to spend more time studying psychology. I was unhappy, and I knew I could one day attract better mates if I had time to acquire the skills that other men had; men who were "good with women."

So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that in...
New Post version 1 (please read this ONLY if your last name beings with a–k)
by lukeprog — 2011-07-27T21:57:09.481Z

Note: I am testing two versions of my new post on rationality and romance.

Please upvote, downvote, or non-vote the below post as you normally would if you saw it on the front page (not the discussion section), but do not vote on the other version. Also, if your last name begins with a–k, please read and vote on this post first. If your last name begins with l–z, please stop reading and read this version instead.

Rationality Lessons from Romance

Years ago, my first girlfriend (let's call her 'Alice') ran into her ex-boyfriend at a coffee shop. They traded anecdotes, felt connected, a spark of intimacy...

And then she left the coffee shop, quickly.

She told me later: "You have my heart now, Luke."

I felt proud, but even Luke2005 also felt a twinge of "the universe is suboptimal," because she hadn't been able to engage that connection any further. The cultural scripts defining our relationship said that only one man owned her heart. But surely that wasn't optimal for producing utilons?

This is an account of some lessons that I learned during my journey into rational romance. That journey started with a series of realizations like the one above — that I wasn't happy with the standard cultural scripts: monogamy, an assumed progression toward marriage, and ownership of another person's sexuality. I hadn't really noticed the cultural scripts up until that point. I was a victim of cached thoughts and a cached self.

Lesson: Until you explicitly notice the cached rules for what you're doing, you won't start thinking of them as something to be optimized. Ask: Which parts of romance do you currently think of as subjects of optimization? What else should you be optimizing?

Gather data

At the time, I didn't know how to optimize. I decided I needed data. How did relationships work? How did women work? How did attraction work? The value of information was high, so I decided to become a social psychology nerd. I began to spend less time with Alice so I could spend more time studying.

Lesson: Respond to the value of information. Once you notice you might be running in the wrong direction, don't keep going that way just because you've got momentum. Stop a moment, and invest some energy in the thoughts or information you've now realized is valuable because it might change your policies, i.e., figuring out which d...
[LINK] Father of Cryonics "Dies" at age 92
by JackEmpty — 2011-07-27T18:19:45.839Z

http://www.dailytech.com/Father+of+Cryonics+Dies+at+92+Frozen+in+Cryonics+Institute+/article22273.htm

Via Hacker News (comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813021)
Locating emotions
by Nisan — 2011-07-27T16:05:37.559Z

It's important that we understand how our emotions work. Sometimes emotions give us valuable information, and sometimes our emotions don't behave the way we want them to. A prerequisite for individually understanding anything about our emotions is the ability to notice and identify emotions. I sometimes find this difficult.

One piece of advice I get is to notice where different emotions are felt in my body. A graphic designer asked 250 people to draw where they feel different emotions, and superimposed the drawings. The results are evocative.
If your Cryonicism would be Movie Topic, would you go with it? (Real Issue)
by diegocaleiro — 2011-07-27T08:19:17.866Z

Today this girl I met comes to my place, allegedly to get some books about her new interests, singularity, immortalism, cryonics.

Actually, she wanted to ask me a question, a question about which I could use some rational opinion.

She says: "So, here is the real reason I came here. I'm thinking of making a documentary, a movie, and it would be about, well.... about you."

(I am shocked)

"So, yes, a movie about you, and the fact that you want to live forever, it would have interviews with friends, parents, girlfriend, and a lot with you" "What do you think?"

(I sit down in the floor to think about it)

The conversation continues and I generally sense she wants to do something interesting, somewhat controversial, kind of humoristic, but at the same time striking some topics that are really unheard of around here (Brazil)

Now, I am looking for opinions. From an utilitarian perspective, and given that I am directing the Humanity+ or Transhumanist group of Brazilians, should I go with it? My concern is basically not about me, but about how will a movie about me influence, positively or negatively, the growing H+ movement in Brazil, given the inferential distances, prejudices, and mysterianism that might surround the whole interaction between the movie's memes, and the spectator's memes.

(from here below, the translation is google tradutor, not mine)

Positive aspects: The film would be seen at festivals, and at least a few hundred to tens of thousands of people would see it. These people might be intrigued by the prospect of living much, and it could become a platform for attracting people to transhumanismolatino (and eventually to other stuff, like GWWC and Singinst, but that is a side dish).

It would be a good opportunity to bring out various issues that in Brazil have been neglected until now. (cryonics, transhumanism, biological immortality, singularity)

Reinforce my good habits, like eating healthily, work more earnestly, etc ...

Negative aspects: it may end up passing a bad image of me (imagine the mythical average person, not that smart, somewhat religious, seeing a guy who wants to li

...
How to enjoy being wrong
by lincolnquirk — 2011-07-27T05:48:01.005Z

Related to: Reasoning Isn't About Logic, It's About Arguing; It is OK to Publicly Make a Mistake and Change Your Mind.

Examples of being wrong

A year ago, in arguments or in thought, I would often:

avoid criticizing my own thought processes or decisions when discussing why my startup failed

overstate my expertise on a topic (how to design a program written in assembly language), then have to quickly justify a position and defend it based on limited knowledge and cached thoughts, rather than admitting "I don't know"

defend a position (whether doing an MBA is worthwhile) based on the "common wisdom" of a group I identify with, without any actual knowledge, or having thought through it at all

defend a position (whether a piece of artwork was good or bad) because of a desire for internal consistency (I argued it was good once, so felt I had to justify that position)

defend a political or philosophical position (libertarianism) which seemed attractive, based on cached thoughts or cached selves rather than actual reasoning

defend a position ("cashiers like it when I fish for coins to make a round amount of change"), hear a very convincing argument for its opposite ("it takes up their time, other customers are waiting, and they're better at making change than you"), but continue arguing for the original position. In this scenario, I actually updated -- thereafter, I didn't fish for coins in my wallet anymore -- but still didn't admit it in the original argument.

defend a policy ("I should avoid albacore tuna") even when the basis for that policy (mercury risk) has been countered by factual evidence (in this case, the amount of mercury per can is so small that you would need 10 cans per week to start reading on the scale).

provide evidence for a proposition ("I am getting better at poker") where I actually thought it was just luck, but wanted to believe the proposition

when someone asked "why did you [do a weird action]?", I would regularly attempt to justify the action in terms of reasons that "made logical sense", rather than admitting that I didn't know why I made a choice, or examining myself to find out why.

Now, I very rarely get into these sorts of situations. If I do, I state out loud: "Oh, I'm rationalizing," or perhaps "You're right," abort that line of thinking, and retreat to analyzing reasons why I emitted such a wrong statement.

We rationalize becaus...
What's wrong with simplicity of value?
by Wei Dai — 2011-07-27T03:09:18.130Z

In the Wiki article on complexity of value, Eliezer wrote:

The thesis that human values have high Kolmogorov complexity - our preferences, the things we care about, don't compress down to one simple rule, or a few simple rules.

[...]

Thou Art Godshatter describes the evolutionary psychology behind the complexity of human values - how they got to be complex, and why, given that origin, there is no reason in hindsight to expect them to be simple.

But in light of Yvain's recent series of posts (i.e., if we consider our "actual" values to be the values we would endorse in reflective equilibrium, instead of our current apparent values), I don't see any particular reason, whether from evolutionary psychology or elsewhere, that they must be complex either. Most of our apparent values (which admittedly are complex) could easily be mere behavior, which we would discard after sufficient reflection.

For those who might wish to defend the complexity-of-value thesis, what reasons do you have for thinking that human value is complex? Is it from an intuition that we should translate as many of our behaviors into preferences as possible? If other people do not have a similar intuition, or perhaps even have a strong intuition that values should be simple (and therefore would be more willing to discard things that are on the fuzzy border between behaviors and values), could they think that their values are simple, without being wrong?
[SEQ RERUN] Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence
by MinibearRex — 2011-07-27T03:05:33.563Z

Title: [SEQ RERUN] Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence Tags: sequence_reruns Today's post, Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence was originally published on 19 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

For good social reasons, we require legal and scientific evidence to be more than just rational evidence. Hearsay is rational evidence, but as legal evidence it would invite abuse. Scientific evidence must be public and reproducible by everyone, because we want a pool of especially reliable beliefs. Thus, Science is about reproducible conditions, not the history of any one experiment.

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 Hindsight Devalues Science, 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.
Meetup : Madison
by fiddlemath — 2011-07-27T02:30:35.680Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Madison

WHEN:
02 August 2011 06:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
1225 Regent St. Madison, WI

With the intent of being the first of many regular meetups, let's get together on Tuesday. I plan to conduct a few exercises on brainstorming, including the "alternatives procedure" that Anna Salamon taught at the rationality minicamp. Mostly, though: discussion, meeting people, and assigning names, faces and personalities to usernames.

If you'd like to come but this time doesn't work for you, say something. I plan on doing this at least once every two weeks, so we should try to settle on a time that accommodates everyone in the long run.

Discussion article for the meetup : Madison
Against improper priors
by DanielLC — 2011-07-26T23:50:44.020Z

An improper prior is essentially a prior probability distribution that's infinitesimal over an infinite range, in order to add to one. For example, the uniform prior over all real numbers is an improper prior, as there would be an infinitesimal probability of getting a result in any finite range. It's common to use improper priors for when you have no prior information.

The mark of a good prior is that it gives a high probability to the correct answer. If I bet 1,000,000 to one that a coin will land on heads, and it lands on tails, it could be a coincidence, but I probably had a bad prior. A good prior is one that results in me not being very surprised.

With a proper prior, probability is conserved, and more probability mass in one place means less in another. If I'm less surprised when a coin lands on tails, I'm more surprised when it lands on heads. This isn't true with an improper prior. If I wanted to predict the value of a random real number, and used a normal distribution with a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one, I'd be pretty darn surprised if it doesn't end up being pretty close to zero, but I'd be infinitely surprised if I used a uniform distribution. No matter what the number is, it will be more surprising with the improper prior. Essentially, a proper prior is better in every way. (You could find exceptions for this, such as averaging a proper and improper prior to get an improper prior that still has finite probabilities and they just add up to 1/2, or by using a proper prior that has zero in some places, but you can always make a proper prior that's better in every way to a given improper prior).

Dutch books also seems to be a popular way of showing what works and what doesn't, so here's a simple Dutch argument against improper priors: I have two real numbers: x and y. Suppose they have a uniform distribution. I offer you a bet at 1:2 odds that x has a higher magnitude. They're equally likely to be higher, so you take it. I then show you the value of x. I offer you a new bet at 100:1 odds that y has a higher magnitude. You know y almost definitely has a higher magnitude than that, so you take it again. No matter what happens, I win.

You could try to get out of it by using a different prior, but I can just perform a transformation on it to get what I want. For example, if you choose a logarithmic prior for the magnitude, I can just take th...
What would you do if AI were dangerous?
by cousin_it — 2011-07-26T21:11:48.647Z

If we knew how to build a machine that chooses its outputs as to maximize some property of the surrounding universe, such a machine would be very dangerous, because maximizing almost any easily defined property leads to a worthless universe (without humans, or with humans living pointless lives, etc.) I believe the preceding statement is uncontroversial, and most arguments around the necessity of Friendly AI are really about how likely we are to build such a machine, or maybe something else will happen first, etc.

Instead of adding to the existing arguments, I want to reframe the question thus: what course of action would you recommend to a small group of smart people, assuming for the moment that the danger is real? In other words, what should SingInst do on an alternate Earth where normal human science will eventually build unfriendly AI? In particular:

- How do you craft your message to the public?

- What's your hiring policy?

- Do you keep your research secret?

- Do you pursue alternate avenues like uploads, or focus only on FAI?

For the sake of inconvenience, assume that many (though not all) of the insights required for developing FAI can also be easily repurposed to hasten the arrival of UFAI.

Thanks to Wei Dai for the conversation that sparked this post.
SIAI Logo In SVG Format?
by  — 2011-07-26T07:29:21.178Z

(Motivated by this comment.)

The Singularity Institute's new logo, chosen from a competition, doesn't seem to be publicly available in SVG format. But presumably, the winner delivered an SVG (or another vector format) instead of a JPEG. The vector form should be made publicly available, like how Wikipedia's logo is available as an SVG here.

To start with, this could be used to improve the Singularity Institute page on Wikipedia, which is in dire need of a logo.

(I actually have no personal use for this, I'm simply a connoisseur of high-quality logos.)
Shortening the Unshortenable Way
by Duk3 — 2011-07-26T06:44:19.588Z

or

A Starting Point for Defense against Flexible Dark Artists and Circumstances

In On Seeking a Shortening of the Way the assertion “Maybe we're not geniuses because we don't bother paying attention to ordinary things” caught my eye. Certainly! I said. Obviously if we were able to pay the appropriate amount of attention to every occurrence so as to gain enough data to update our models in an optimal way, we would rapidly increase our overall ability to model the world and increase our probability of insights at the level currently considered ‘genius.’

And then I remembered that I can’t really do that, on account of having crappy models of what is actually important, and thinking that i can't improve those models quickly. Whoops! I, like so many others, fail to know how much attention to pay to ordinary things so as to become a genius. C’est la vie. Fortunately the lesson here was not the factuality of the statement, which is high, but a reminder that you could probably gain benefits from paying more attention and being more disciplined in your thought.

Which is even better because it’s great advice, and eminently doable. Thanks, Yvain! So I set about paying attention to how I currently pay attention and, like usual, paid attention to the cues I get about how other people pay attention, assuming that I make the mistakes they do at least some of the time.

And then I realized… wait a minute, whenever other people aren’t actually paying attention is when I could most easily shanghai them into doing things they normally wouldn’t do (Were I a dark artist. Hypothetically.). So learning how to pay more attention and pay attention in the correct way is probably the best reflexive method of avoiding being dutch booked by people who are highly adaptable dark artists.

And here’s my low-hanging fruit of techniques to build the foundational

...
[SEQ RERUN] Hindsight Devalues Science
by MinibearRex — 2011-07-26T01:27:44.163Z

Title: [SEQ RERUN] Hindsight Devalues Science Tags: sequence_reruns Today's post, Hindsight Devalues Science was originally published on 17 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Hindsight bias leads us to systematically undervalue scientific findings, because we find it too easy to retrofit them into our models of the world. This unfairly devalues the contributions of researchers. Worse, it prevents us from noticing when we are seeing evidence that doesn't fit what we really would have expected. We need to make a conscious effort to be shocked enough.

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 Hindsight bias, 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.
Bayesian justice
by gwern — 2011-07-26T00:58:31.010Z

"The mathematical mistakes that could be undermining justice"

They failed, though, to convince the jury of the value of the Bayesian approach, and Adams was convicted. He appealed twice unsuccessfully, with an appeal judge eventually ruling that the jury's job was "to evaluate evidence not by means of a formula... but by the joint application of their individual common sense."

But what if common sense runs counter to justice? For David Lucy, a mathematician at Lancaster University in the UK, the Adams judgment indicates a cultural tradition that needs changing. "In some cases, statistical analysis is the only way to evaluate evidence, because intuition can lead to outcomes based upon fallacies," he says.

Norman Fenton, a computer scientist at Queen Mary, University of London, who has worked for defence teams in criminal trials, has just come up with a possible solution. With his colleague Martin Neil, he has developed a system of step-by-step pictures and decision trees to help jurors grasp Bayesian reasoning (bit.ly/1c3tgj). Once a jury has been convinced that the method works, the duo argue, experts should be allowed to apply Bayes's theorem to the facts of the case as a kind of "black box" that calculates how the probability of innocence or guilt changes as each piece of evidence is presented. "You wouldn't question the steps of an electronic calculator, so why here?" Fenton asks.

It is a controversial suggestion. Taken to its logical conclusion, it might see the outcome of a trial balance on a single calculation. Working out Bayesian probabilities with DNA and blood matches is all very well, but quantifying incriminating factors such as appearance and behaviour is more difficult. "Different jurors will interpret different bits of evidence differently. It's not the job of a mathematician to do it for them," says Donnelly.

The linked paper is "Avoiding Probabilistic Reasoning Fallacies in Legal Practice using Bayesian Networks" by Norman Fenton and Martin Neil. The interesting parts, IMO, begin on page 9 where they argue for using the likelihood ratio as the key piece of information for evidence, and not simply raw probabilities; page 17, where a DNA example is worked out; and page 21-25 on the key piece of evidence in the Bellfield trial, no one claiming a lost possession (nearly worthless evidence)

Related reading: Inherited Impro...