trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Causal diagrams and software engineering
by Morendil — 2012-03-07T18:23:57.079Z

Fake explanations don't feel fake. That's what makes them dangerous. -- EY

Let's look at "A Handbook of Software and Systems Engineering", which purports to examine the insights from software engineering that are solidly grounded in empirical evidence. Published by the prestigious Fraunhofer Institut, this book's subtitle is in fact "Empirical Observations, Laws and Theories".

Now "law" is a strong word to use - the highest level to which an explanation can aspire to reach, as it were. Sometimes it's used in a jokey manner, as in "Hofstadter's Law" (which certainly seems often to apply to software projects). But this definitely isn't a jokey kind of book, that much we get from the appeal to "empirical observations" and the "handbook" denomination.

Here is the very first "law" listed in the Handbook:

Requirement deficiencies are the prime source of project failures.

Previously, we observed that in the field of software engineering, a last name followed by a year, surrounded by parentheses, seems to be a magic formula for suspending critical judgment in readers.

Another such formula, it seems, is the invocation of statistical results. Brandish the word "percentage", assert that you have surveyed a largish population, and whatever it is you claim, some people will start believing. Do it often enough and some will start repeating your claim - without bothering to check it - starting a potentially viral cycle.

As a case in point, one of the most often cited pieces of "evidence" in support of the above "law" is the well-known Chaos Report, according to which the first cause of project failure is "Incomplete Requirements". (The Chaos Report isn't cited as evidence by the Handbook, but it's representative enough to serve in the following discussion. A Google Search readily attests to the wide spread of the verbatim claim in the Chaos Report; various derivatives of the claim are harder to track, but easily verified to be quite pervasive.)

Some elementary reasoning about causal inference is enough to show that the same evidence supporting the above "law" can equally well be suggested as evidence supporting this alternative conclusion:

Project failures are the primary source of requirements deficiencies.

"Wait", you may be thinking. "Requirements are written at the start of a project, and the outcome (success or failure) happens at the end. The latter cannot be t...
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 10
by Oscar_Cunningham — 2012-03-07T16:46:49.993Z

(The HPMOR discussion thread after this one is here.)

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. There haven't been any chapters recently, but it looks like there are a bunch in the pipeline and the old thread is nearing 700 comments. The latest chapter as of 7th March 2012 is Ch. 77.

There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author's Notes.

The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it's fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that "Eliezer said X is true" unless you use rot13.
[Link] Atlantic Interview with Nick Bostrom - "We're Understimating the Risk of Human Extinction"
by Airedale — 2012-03-07T16:25:05.253Z

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/

My apologies if I've missed this posted anywhere else (google and my scanning the sidebar didn't turn it up). I'm not sure that there's much that will be new to those who have been following existential risk elsewhere, but it's nice to see an article like this in a relatively mainstream publication. Bostrom discusses issues such as the concept of existential risk and certain specific types of existential risk, why we as humans underestimate that risk, possible strategies to address existential risk, the simulation argument, how Hollywood and literature don't generally portray existential risk helpfully, and other issues.
One aspiring rationalist's response to KONY 2012
by  — 2012-03-07T12:16:09.333Z

I like to imagine myself a rational creature. I know myself to be an idealist.

I'm a level-headed, if perhaps starry-eyed, futurist; a romantic, if slightly cynical, transhumanist; an intellectual altruist who also very much wants to be an immortal, star-faring, nanotech-blooded space-angel when he grows up.

I'm a professional comedy, horror, mystery & fantasy writer; I'm still an amateur rationalist. This site has helped me immensely, in my personal, professional and private life. I want to become stronger.

So here's my point:

I don't believe in the supernatural god of the Christian faith, or of the Buddhist faith ... yet I sure as hell would like to be more Christ-like, and more Buddha-like, as well. But smarter, and funnier, and a million times more knowledgeable, and a billion times more efficient.
I DO believe that the world can be made a better place, that tomorrow can be grander than yesterday, and that humans can be a force for genuine good. But - because of this site - I also understand (not believe) that there certain "less impractical" ways to improve the world.

At the suggestion of this fantastic article, I consulted GiveWell to find out if they recommend the Invisible Children charity after watching the KONY 2012 video currently going viral on Youtube and Facebook.

They do not. GiveWell does NOT consider them a top-rated or even stand-out charity. Last year, only of 32% contributions to Invisible Children went to direct services, with the rest going to staff salaries, travel and transport, film production and other expenses.

But hell with it ... I sent them some cash anyway. That donation was from the heart, and I do not regret it one damn bit. It made me feel good.

Then I made a matching donation to the Against Malaria Foundation - the #1 rated charity on GiveWell - because it "will accomplish the most good, per dollar contributed," and is "proven, cost-effective, underfunded, and outstanding."

If you're interested, write a check & send it here:

Against Malaria Foundation
Citibank NA
PO Box 7247-6370
Philadelphia
PA 19170-6370

Which made me feel good in a different way.

You see, they don't accept PayPal. That annoyed me, which was actually kind of a nice little buzz - it's sort of fun to feel righteously indignant that a charity can't even take my money properly, like Netflix does.

I wouldn't have understood why being indignant at AMF - and gett...
[link] New Scientist, on the distant future
by fortyeridania — 2012-03-07T10:15:44.297Z

The magazine has a bunch of articles dealing with what the world may be like 98,000 years hence. What with the local interest in the distant future, and with prediction itself, I thought I'd bring it to your attention.

http://www.newscientist.com/special/deep-future?cmpid=NLC|NSNS|2012-0503-GLOBAL|deepfuture&utm_medium=NLC&utm_source=NSNS&utm_content=deepfuture
"How We Decide", by Jonah Lehrer, kindle version on sale for 99 cents at amazon
by buybuydandavis — 2012-03-07T06:43:20.092Z

http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Decide-ebook/dp/B003WMAAMG/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1331098417&sr=1-1

I don't know how proper this is, but I'm quite cheap and like a bargain, and I've seen Lehrer referred to a number of times here. I hadn't read Kahneman before, but bought the kindle version and read him on my phone whenever I had some wait time somewhere.

It's better than a mokeskin pouch! I can have the top *thousand* books I'm reading on me at all times, and just pull one out anywhere! I never have to waste another minute of my life!

I don't like spam anymore than anyone else, but I'm going to be getting it cheap, and I just want everyone else who wants it to get it cheap too. It's okay to spam people about cheap books, right? That's a family tradition.
[SEQ RERUN] If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help
by MinibearRex — 2012-03-07T04:24:07.317Z

Today's post, If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help was originally published on 22 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Magic (and dragons, and UFOs, and ...) get much of their charm from the fact that they don't actually exist. If dragons did exist, people would treat them like zebras; most people wouldn't bother to pay attention, but some scientists would get oddly excited about them. If we ever create dragons, or find aliens, we will have to learn to enjoy them, even though they happen to exist.

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 Bind Yourself to Reality, 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.
Delicious Luminosity, Om Nom Nom
by Alicorn — 2012-03-07T03:02:12.694Z

I have decided that it would be valuable for me to read books (blog posts, articles, random conversations between smart people who store chatlogs) about introspection, take notes, and try to distill and clarify the information. This could result in me eventually giving up, or in a Luminosity Sequence: Second Edition (Now With Literature, Part Of This Complete Breakfast!), or (optimism!) me being able to sort ~90% of people into some number of categories such that their category membership tells me how to help them develop luminosity superpowers in N simple steps with exercises/therapy-ish stuff/etc.

Help me eat luminosity! I need recommendations for stuff to read. This stuff should be:

readable (I will not long slog through something I'm stylistically allergic to)

not obvious nonsense (but if it didn't work on you/your personal friends, that's not "obvious nonsense", it could be cognitive heterogeneity; I just want to filter out crap like "The Secret")

something I can probably get my hands on (library, 100% legal! electronic acquisition, it being on the Internet).

I read really fast. Don't worry about oversaturating me with recommendations, but please do say a little about why you recommend a thing (even if it's "I haven't read this, but I keep hearing about it, so I guess some people like it") and post recommendations in separate comments so people with information about the item can vote up and down separately. Recommendations for non-written things will be heavily discounted but not outright disqualified.

I would also like a supply of guinea-pigs-in-waiting for if and when I get to the point of trying the sorting or the superpower-giving part of the optimistic end state of the project.

If people want me to, I can document the process of luminosity-eating so there is a template to follow for other subject-eating projects, but I wouldn't do this by default because in general I only do things that someone would care if I didn't do them.
Using degrees of freedom to change the past for fun and profit
by CarlShulman — 2012-03-07T02:51:55.367Z

Follow-up to: Follow-up on ESP study: "We don't publish replications", Feed the Spinoff Heuristic!

Related to: Parapsychology: the control group for science, Dealing with the high quantity of scientific error in medicine

Using the same method as in Study 1, we asked 20 University of Pennsylvania undergraduates to listen to either “When I’m Sixty-Four” by The Beatles or “Kalimba.” Then, in an ostensibly unrelated task, they indicated their birth date (mm/dd/yyyy) and their father’s age. We used father’s age to control for variation in baseline age across participants. An ANCOVA revealed the predicted effect: According to their birth dates, people were nearly a year-and-a-half younger after listening to “When I’m Sixty-Four” (adjusted M = 20.1 years) rather than to “Kalimba” (adjusted M = 21.5 years), F(1, 17) = 4.92, p = .040

That's from "False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant," which runs simulations of a version of Shalizi's "neutral model of inquiry," with random (null) experimental results, augmented with a handful of choices in the setup and analysis of an experiment. Even before accounting for publication bias, these few choices produced a desired result "significant at the 5% level" 60.7% of the time, and at the 1% level 21.5% at the time.

I found it because of another paper claiming time-defying effects, during a search through all of the papers on Google Scholar citing Daryl Bem's precognition paper, which I discussed in a past post about the problems of publication bias and selection over the course of a study. For Bem, Richard Wiseman established a registry for the methods, and tests of the registered studies could be set prior to seeing the data (in addition to avoiding the file drawer).

Now a number of purported replications have been completed, with several available as preprints online, including a large "straight replication" carefully following the methods in Bem's paper, with some interesting findings discussed below. The picture does not look good for psi, and is a good reminder of the sheer cumulative power of applying a biased filter to many small choices.

Background

When Bem's article was published the skeptic David ...
How to Fix Science
by lukeprog — 2012-03-07T02:51:49.666Z

Like The Cognitive Science of Rationality, this is a post for beginners. Send the link to your friends!

Science is broken. We know why, and we know how to fix it. What we lack is the will to change things.

In 2005, several analyses suggested that most published results in medicine are false. A 2008 review showed that perhaps 80% of academic journal articles mistake "statistical significance" for "significance" in the colloquial meaning of the word, an elementary error every introductory statistics textbook warns against. This year, a detailed investigation showed that half of published neuroscience papers contain one particular simple statistical mistake.

Also this year, a respected senior psychologist published in a leading journal a study claiming to show evidence of precognition. The editors explained that the paper was accepted because it was written clearly and followed the usual standards for experimental design and statistical methods.

Science writer Jonah Lehrer asks: "Is there something wrong with the scientific method?"

Yes, there is.

This shouldn't be a surprise. What we currently call "science" isn't the best method for uncovering nature's secrets; it's just the first set of methods we've collected that wasn't totally useless like personal anecdote and authority generally are.

As time passes we learn new things about how to do science better. The Ancient Greeks practiced some science, but few scientists tested hypotheses against mathematical models before Ibn al-Haytham's 11th-century Book of Optics (which also contained hints of Occam's razor and positivism). Around the same time, Al-Biruni emphasized the importance of repeated trials for reducing the effect of accidents and errors. Galileo brought mathematics to greater prominence in scientific method, Bacon described eliminative induction, Newton demonstrated the power of consilience (unification), Peirce clarified the roles of deduction, induction, and abduction, and Popper emphasized the importance of falsification. We've also discovered the usefulness of peer review, control groups, blind and double-blind studies, plus a variety of statistical methods, and added these to "the" scientific method.

In many ways, the best science done today is better than ever — but it still has problems, and most science is done poorly. The good news is that we know what these problems are and we kno...
Ray Kurzweil is speaking at my university tonight.  What questions should I ask him?
by TylerJay — 2012-03-07T01:17:46.043Z

I realize this is late notice, but I just found out. He goes on at 8pm and will likely be answering questions by 9:30. I would like to ask him some great questions and I will ask as many of the best that I see here as possible. Any ideas?
The Fox and the Low-Hanging Grapes
by Strange7 — 2012-03-06T23:19:55.482Z

One day a clever, itinerant fox came upon a vineyard. Being unfamiliar with the local customs, and not wanting to make a fool of himself, he planted his haunches on a nearby hill and observed.
In the morning of the first day he saw tortoises crawl lazily out of their beds and lean against rocks. At midday he saw tortoises marching out to the vines and chatting among themselves. All afternoon he saw tortoises climb the poles supporting the vines and nibble away at grapes. As the sun set he saw tortoises crawl back to their beds, and with clever eyes in the darkness he saw many low-hanging bunches of grapes left uneaten.
On the first night the fox thought to himself, "Why do the turtles leave without eating the low-hanging fruit?" For he did not yet know that they called themselves tortoises. "Perhaps it's actually sour. No, that's absurd, how could someone possibly tell sour fruit from ripe without tasting it? I'll have to make more observations."
In the morning of the second day the fox saw tortoises crawl lazily out of their beds and lean against rocks. At midday he saw tortoises marching out to the vines and chatting among themselves. All afternoon he saw tortoises climb the poles supporting the vines and nibble away at grapes. As the sun set he saw tortoises crawl back to their beds, and with clever eyes in the darkness he saw many low-hanging bunches of grapes still left uneaten.
On the second night the fox thought to himself, "Ah, of course, the turtles simply can't reach those grapes! That's why they lean against the rocks, to slowly move them into place as ladders. I can't see the progress they've made, of course, because I've only been here two days and turtles necessarily plan for the longer term. To justify such effort, the low-hanging grapes must be very sweet indeed."
In the morning of the third day the fox saw tortoises crawl lazily out of their beds and lean against rocks. At midday he saw tortoises marching out to the vines and chatting among themselves. At this point his hunger got the better of him, and he ran out to greet them and present various clever schemes by which he could help the turtles (for now he had been properly introduced) harvest the low-hanging grapes in a more timely fashion, in exchang...
A Rationality Lab Notebook/Workbook/Vade Mecum
by Voltairina — 2012-03-06T20:52:14.470Z

I'm interested in keeping a notebook to check my ideas / knowledge on subjects. For example, if I wanted to find out whether there were anything in the notion of ESP that was worth merit, I could create a section titled "ESP", where I'd keep copies of research papers, critical commentary on methodology, questions, personal experiments if any, and so on. There might be some appendixes or cheat sheets with common errors in thinking and information about them, notes on the scientific method/philosophy of science, statistics formulae for estimating error and likelihood and doing hypothesis testing, maybe a few inspirational quotes. I'm pretty busy, so it might be a very backburnered project, but I feel like it could be useful. I can already see some benefits and disadvantages, eg it can be on subjects a person might like to keep private, like dating, overcoming psychological issues, sex, and so on, but peer review might not be as readily available.

Any thoughts on the format or arrangement for something like this? Is anybody doing anything similar?
Which drives can survive intelligence's self modification?
by Dmytry — 2012-03-06T17:33:30.103Z

If you gave a human ability to self modify, many would opt to turn off or massively decrease the sense of pain (and turn it into a minor warning they would then ignore), the first time they hurt themselves. Such change would immediately result in massive decrease in the fitness, and larger risk of death, yet I suspect very few of us would keep the pain at the original level; we see the pain itself as dis-utility in addition to the original damage. Very few of us would implement the pain at it's natural strength - the warning that can not be ignored - out of self preservation.

The fear is a more advanced emotion; one can fear the consequences of the fear removal, opting not to remove the fear. Yet there can still be desire to get rid of the fear, and it still holds that we hold sense of fear as dis-utility of it's own even if we fear something that results in dis-utility. Pleasure modification can be a strong death trap as well.

The boredom is easy to rid of; one can just suspend itself temporarily, or edit own memory.

For the AI, the view adopted in AI discussions is that AI would not want to modify itself in a way that would interfere with it achieving a goal. When a goal is defined from outside in human language as 'maximization of paperclips', for instance, it seems clear that modifications which break this goal should be avoided, as part of the goal itself. Our definition of a goal is non-specific of the implementation; the goal is not something you'd modify to achieve the goal. We model the AI as a goal-achieving machine, and a goal achieving machine is not something that would modify the goal.

But from inside of the AI... if the AI includes implementation of a paperclip counter, then rest of the AI has to act upon output of this counter; the goal of maximization of output of this counter would immediately result in modification of the paperclip counting procedure to give larger numbers (which may in itself be very dangerous if the numbers are variable-length; the AI may want to maximize it's RAM to store the count of imaginary paperclips - yet the big numbers processing can similarly be subverted to achieve same result without extra RAM).

That can only be resisted if the paperclip counting arises as inseparable part of the intelligence itself. When the intelligence has some other goal, and comes up with the paperclip maximization, then it wouldn't want to ...
[Link] Research on Christian deconversion
by NancyLebovitz — 2012-03-06T12:07:10.627Z

These are written from the angle that Christians deconverting is bad.

Cognitive reasons

Breaking up because a relationship with God becomes unworkable

Leaving because other Christians aren't empathetic about doubt

At what age do people leave?

It looks as though there may be more articles in the series.