trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Recent de-convert saturated by religious community; advice?
by jwhendy — 2011-04-04T03:25:02.450Z

Edit/Update: Wow, not even a day later this has had quite the number of comments. Hopefully more will come in, but I'd like to thank those who have contributed so far. The suggestions that I think I'm really going to run with are:

Finishing my "statement" (in progress already) and deferring to that when specifics are requested (Yvain)

Have a suggestion of a convincing book or online article to which I can refer challengers (David Gerard)

Reminding myself that I haven't eaten any babies, to date, and that questioning is/was okay (jsalvatier, RobinZ)

Just try to avoid the topic (pretty much what I already do) (Risto Saarelma, thakil, MinibearRex)

Focus on the point of a "quest" -- enough confidence to practically advance, not pursuing a question so far that no progres is made anymore or because doubt/uncertainty seems virtuous (Desrtopa, Vladimir_Nesov)

Come to accept that since such a large amount of energy and time was invested in this particular belief system, the nagging I feel about my research into it might never go away/take some time to go away (beriukay)

I'd like to "honorable mention" a suggestion begun by James Miller that I could just pretend to believe for the sake of preserving relationships and social satisfaction. I see some merit to this but think it might have been based on thinking that my closer/est friends/wife didn't already know (they do). The comment made for some interesting comments, but I think I'd just feel like a phony and even more miserable if I were to really implement this suggestion for any extended period of time.

---

This issue has been negatively affecting me for quite some time and for lack of clear solutions on my own and knowing that some here have traversed the same stream, I thought I'd ask for help and suggestions. If you're interested, some background information about my story exists here, here, and here.

Background

For the sake of having at least some information here, the brief synopsis is like so:

In my middle school/high school years, I was quite insecure, attention-hungry, and had poor methods of dealing with emotional burdens. This manifested itself in highly addictive tendencies, specifically my use of tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana as often as possible. This led my parents to send me from my hometown of Milwaukee, WI to a twelve-step boarding school in up

...
Sequence Posts Exercises
by folkTheory — 2011-04-04T01:39:53.567Z

Based on this thread from this month's (April 2011) Open Thread, we have started work on exercises to go along with the posts and help readers internalize the material better. The idea is to have exercises covering all of the sequences eventually (though there doesn't have to be a 1:1 correspondence between exercises and single posts)

help is very much appreciated. If you want to take up writing exercises for a post, please claim it on our wiki page.

A few drafts have started to circulate, and soon we will have our first exercises posted.
Just Try It: Quantity Trumps Quality
by atucker — 2011-04-04T01:13:45.765Z

Followup to: Don't Fear Failure

In the same theme as the last article, I think that failure is actually pretty important in learning. Rationality needs data, and trying is a good source of it.
When you're trying to do something new, you probably won't be able to do it right the first time. Even if you obsess over it. Jeff Atwood is a programmer who says Quantity Always Trumps Quality

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Where have I heard this before?

Stop theorizing.

Write lots of software.

Learn from your mistakes.

Quantity always trumps quality.

When it comes to software, the same rule applies. If you aren't building, you aren't learning. Rather than agonizing over whether you're building the right thing, just build it. And if that one doesn't work, keep building until you get one that does.

The people who tried more did better, even though they failed more too. Of course you shouldn't try to fail, but you shouldn't let the fear of it stop you from tyring.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that quantity always trumps quality, but where the cost of failure is low lots of failures that you pay attention to is a pretty good way of learning. You should hold off on proposing solutions, but you also need to get around to actually trying the proposed solution.
I'm normed such that I'll spend more time talking about if something will work than trying it out to see if it works. The problem is tha...
Don't Fear Failure
by atucker — 2011-04-03T22:52:32.694Z

Last post, I talked about how trying things out yourself is a good way to learn about them. This post, I'm going to talk about ideas that helped me overcome one of my major obstacles to trying something -- fear of failure.

Overestimation of Damages: "Its not that big a deal"

In most cases, failure really isn't that big of a deal. Really. The difference between failure and a null action is the attempt. If the attempt isn't damaging, failure isn't damaging.

A few cases:

Trying a new food/recipe? Maybe you don't like it and waste a few dollars. Maybe you mess it up. So you eat something else. Just don't do it for your first dinner with the in-laws and it should be fine. But a new dish might be totally delicious.

Total stranger you think might be a cool person? Maybe they get annoyed at you. Then you can just break off and never talk to/see them again. Chatting with people I run into has made college visits much more enjoyable.

Competition you might want to enter? Worst case scenario is that you lose. I learned a lot from Moody's Mega Math Challenge, and even though I don't think we did a particularly good job at modeling Lake Powell I still learned a lot about how mathematical modeling works.

Dance you want to try? The worst that's likely is that you look a bit silly. Laugh it off.

There's lots of things where an attempt is actually worse than doing nothing. Jumping halfway to the other side of the ledge, for instance. Or only removing most of the toxic part of a pufferfish. But for a lot of potentially high-value things, a failed attempt doesn't really do much, so you might as well try them.

Rationality and Failure: "Don't panic"

Some people I know basically buckle under failure. A common failure mode seems to be to do something badly, establish an ugh field around that area, and then continue in a downward spiral. Getting a B on a math test turns into "Ugh, math", turns into "well I was never really good at that anyway", turns into a complete lack of effort. Here a little failure becomes a huge problem. A failure isn't catastrophic on its own, but giving up is.

Rather than focusing on what you didn't accomplish, try to figure out what happened insofar as understanding that helps you fix it. Toyota apparently emphasized this as their 5 Whys system, and it has become widespread in industry.

Another good reaction to failure fr...
An Anchoring Experiment: Results
by prase — 2011-04-03T22:48:08.851Z

This post summarises the results of the experiment which tested how anchoring works on the LW audience. Here is the original post which describes the experiment in more detail. The experiment was supposed to decide between two ways of how anchoring may work. The first hypothesis is that the subject always starts from the anchor and continues in the direction of his/her unbiased estimate, but doesn't go far enough. The alternative hypothesis is that anchoring shifts the centre of the subject's probability distribution towards the anchor, and the whole distribution moves along.

To illustrate the difference, consider the first experimental question, which was about the population of the Central African Republic. The correct value (i.e. the estimate for 2009 listed on Wikipedia) is 4,422,000. The anchor which I have offered here was 20 million. Now, if the first hypothesis is true, the people who, in their unbiased state of mind, would guess less than 20 million, would slide down starting from the 20 million value and stop prematurely; their guesses will be attracted towards the anchor, but not across. The distribution of the biased guesses would be narrower and overall closer to 20 million than the unbiased distribution, but the probability of answering whatever number lower than 20 million would not be changed by anchoring. On the other hand, if the second hypothesis holds, the biased group should guess more than 20 million more often than the control group.

The actual results are such:

Group I (biased; 36 answers collected)

more than 20 million: 15 (41.7%)

less than 20 million: 21 (58.3%)

Group II (control; 16 answers collected)

more than 20 million: 3 (18.7%)

less than 20 million: 13 (81.3%)

20 million: 1 (6.3%)

The second question asked for the altitude of the highest point in Sweden (2140 m / 6903 ft). The anchor was 3500 m or 11500 ft (there is about 5 m / 18 ft difference between the values, but I wanted both the metric and the imperial anchor to be round numbers). Here the results are:

Group I (biased; 24 answers collected)

more than 3500 m: 9 (37.5%)

less than 3500 m: 15 (62.5%)

Group II (control; 30 answers collected)

more than 3500 m: 5 (16.7%)

less than 3500 m: 13 (83.3%)

The results seem to favour the second hypothesis.

Some more remarks: The participants were expected to change the groups between both parts and the numbers should reflect t...
Manufacturing prejudice
by PhilGoetz — 2011-04-03T17:26:54.597Z

There's a tradition in England - I don't know how old - of abusing red-headed people. It's a genuine prejudice in England. From this facebook page:

'Ginger' in England basically is like saying:
"Look there's an ugly, smelly, no friends, socially unacceptable, negative, aggressive, angry, violent, unclean, nasty, non boyfriend material, low self esteem, unattractive, social misfit, nerdy, moron, low education, non human...etc etc etc"
The term 'ginger' didn't become 'mainstream' just because of that South Park episode, I was being shot at, having acid thrown over me, stabbed, headbutted, punched, spat on, kicked, dehumanised, singled out, socially excluded, avoided, belittled, character assassinated etc since I can remember and to be fair I found that treatment was at its peak years before that South Park episode was even thought up.

This spread to the US in 2005, when Cartman tried to incite violence against redheads in a South Park episode with "Kick a Ginger Day".

What's interesting is how this meme is spreading in the US: As humor. This meme is promoted by sites like CollegeHumor.com and MyLifeIsAverage.com, which mine it as a source of ironic humor. The Cheezburger Network is pushing ginger-hatred almost as aggressively as they push pedophilia as a fount of humor.

Are humans capable of, collectively, keeping real and humorous/ironic racism separate? No, they are not. What South Park "kicked" off as an ironic commentary on racism is becoming actual racism.

One clue that you're going too far in your ironic humor is when you start finding the real thing funny.

Do humans have an instinctive need to bond over shared prejudices? Is combating racism a game of whack-a-mole, in which society invents new prejudices to replace the ones being taken away?
The peril of ignoring emotions
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2011-04-03T17:15:24.712Z

Related to: Luminosity Sequence, Unknown Knowns,

Let me introduce you to a hypothetical high school student, Sally. She’s smart and pretty and outgoing, and so are her friends. She considers herself a modern woman, sexually liberated, and this is in line with the lifestyle her friends practice. They think sex is normal and healthy and fun. Sally isn’t just pretending in order to fit in; these really are her friends, this really is her milieu, and according to health class, sex between consenting adults is nothing to be ashamed of. Sally isn't a rigorous rationalist, although she likes to think of herself as rational, and she's no more self-aware than the average high school girl.

Now Sally meets a boy, Bob, and she things he’s cute, and he thinks she’s cute too. Bob is part of her crowd. Her friends like him; he respects women and treats Sally well and, like any healthy teenage boy, fairly horny. According to her belief system, that shouldn’t set off any alarm bells. She’s been warned about abusive relationships, but Bob is a nice guy. So when they go upstairs together at her friend’s party, she has every reason to be excited and a little nervous, but not uncomfortable. The idea that Mom wouldn’t approve is so obviously irrelevant that she ignores it completely.

...And afterwards, she feels guilty and violated and horrible about herself, even though it was her decision.

I used this example because I expect it’s not unusual. On the surface, Sally’s discomfort seems to come out of nowhere, but modern North American society is chock-full of contradictory beliefs about sex. Sex is normal and healthy. Sex is dirty. Sex is only for when you’re married. If Sally’s mother is Christian, or even just conservative, Sally would have internalized those beliefs when she was a child. It would have been hard not to. They’re her unknown knowns, and she may not have noticed them before, because there’s a wide psychological gap between believing it’s okay for others to behave a particular way, and believing it’s okay for you. The meme ‘don’t pass judgement on other people’ is, I think, pretty widespread in North America and maybe more so in Canada, but so is holding oneself to a high standard...and those are contradictory.

I think that the nagging,

...
London meetup, Sunday 1 May, 2pm, near Holborn
by Paul Crowley — 2011-04-03T09:47:23.852Z

The London LessWrong meetup takes place on the first Sunday of every other month. We're getting good at these now! The next one is 2011-05-01 14:00, at the Shakespeares Head (official page) on Kingsway near Holborn Tube station. Note that there's more than one pub in London with that name, so make sure you get the right one. As always, we'll have a big picture of a paperclip on the table so you can find us; I look like this. Hope to see lots of you there!
Helsinki meetup Saturday 9.4 (cancelled)
by Bongo — 2011-04-03T07:56:35.589Z

Time: Saturday 9th of April from 15:00 onwards

Place: Cafe Picnic at Yliopistonkatu 5

This is the second Helsinki meetup. The last one was successful, going on for three hours with around ten people there. Like before, lurkers and newbies are extremely welcome, as well as people who don't speak Finnish but do speak English.

This time, User:Erebus thought we could talk about at least these topics:

concrete benefits of having read Less Wrong

optimal career or study choices.

but suggest more.

EDIT: The original time was a bad time, so the meetup at that time is hereby cancelled. What time would be better?
Cambridge Meetup
by atucker — 2011-04-03T03:16:34.335Z

I'm going to be in Boston from the 16th to 20somethingth doing college visits (Harvard and MIT).
If I understand correctly, there are Cambridge meetups on the first and third Sundays of the month. However, the Harvard visit program has other things for me to do during that time, so I'm going to have to miss that.
Is there anyone in Cambridge who I could meet up with while I'm there? I'll probably be pretty flexible while I'm at MIT, since I'm just planning to stay with friends there.
Anthropics in a Tegmark Multiverse
by paulfchristiano — 2011-04-02T18:34:09.781Z

I believe that the execution of a certain computation is a necessary and sufficient condition for my conscious experience. Following Tegmark, by "execution" I don't refer to any notion of physical existence--I suspect that the mathematical possibility of my thoughts implies conscious experience. By observing the world and postulating my own representativeness, I conjecture the following measure on different possible experiences: the probability of any particular experience drops off exponentially with the complexity required to specify the corresponding computation.

It is typical to use some complexity prior to select a universe, and then to appeal to some different notion to handle the remaining anthropic reasoning (to ask: how many beings have my experiences within this universe?). What I am suggesting is to instead apply a complexity prior to our experiences directly.

If I believe a brain embodying my thoughts exists in some simple universe, then my thoughts can be described precisely by first describing that universe and then pointing to the network of causal relationships which constitute my thoughts. If I have seen enough of the universe, then this will be the most concise description consistent with my experiences. If there are many "copies" of that brain within the universe, then it becomes that much easier to specify my thoughts. In fact, it is easy to check that you recover essentially intuitive anthropics in this way.

This prior has a significant impact on the status of simulations. In general, making two simulations of a brain puts twice as much probability on the associated experiences. However, we no longer maintain substrate independence (which I now consider a good thing, having discovered that my naive treatment of anthropics for simulations is wildly inconsistent). The significance of a particular simulation depends on how difficult it is to specify (within the simple universe containing that simulation) the causal relationships that represent its thoughts. So if we imagine the process of "splitting" a simulation running on a computer which is two atoms thick, we predict that (at least under certain circumstances) the number of copies doubles but the complexity of specifying each one increases to cancel the effect.

This prior also gives precise answers to anthropic questions in cosmology. Even in an infinite universe, description complexity sti...
Where does uncertainty come from?
by paulfchristiano — 2011-04-02T17:18:35.530Z

Idealized rational agents are often discussed as operating in an uncertain environment, or as using probabilities to correctly reason anthropically (especially in MWI or Tegmark style multiverses). I believe that both of these sources of uncertainty are essential for a rational agent, but thinking about them obscures an important (I suspect ultimately more important) type of uncertainty, faced by computationally bounded agents making predictions about a fixed, perfectly understood, deterministic universe. This type of uncertainty is described by Eliezer in his description of TDT, but he doesn't deal there with any of the mathematical theory that would govern such uncertainties. I am somewhat surprised that I have not encountered more discussion of this form of uncertainty and the difficulty of dealing with it mathematically.

Consider a system consisting of two interacting algorithms: a predictor and a universe. Periodically the universe sends observations to the predictor, or asks the predictor to make a prediction (ie to answer some question about the state of the universe). The observer must answer these queries using some bounded resource as dictated by the universe; typically we imagine that the observer is allotted a fixed length of time. We rate the quality of a predictor by measuring how often its predictions agree with what the universe expects.

Now suppose I give you the description of the universe, and ask for the description of a good predictor. In some universes, I believe that there are very good predictors who perform something like Bayesian inference over mathematical statements---despite the fact that any consistent assignment of probabilities gives most statements of interest probability either 0 or 1.

For example, suppose that a particular theorem X would be useful to make future predictions. I would like to know whether or not X is true, but the proof may be too complex to deal with (or X may be independent of whatever axioms I have programmed the predictor to believe, or finding a perfectly valid proof may be too hard a problem...). To this end, the predictor may develop much more powerful rules of inference which allow it to establish the truth of X more directly, but which are only valid heuristically. That is, it may use rules of the form "If A and B are true, C is probably true."

This immediately raises two questions: how can we formally ...
[LINK] Clothing as status signalling, logos and co-operation
by Barry_Cotter — 2011-04-02T15:41:39.303Z

http://www.economist.com/node/18483423?story_id=18483423&CFID=160796263&CFTOKEN=71303356

After reading this, I'm seriously considering finding someplace online that sells those little Lacoste crocodiles and sewing them onto all my shirts. The power of logos appears to be ridiculous for the trivial outlay.
Describing how much attention you've paid to an argument
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-04-02T14:01:05.081Z

There seems to be a hole in English (I don't know about other languages) for efficiently describing how much attention you've paid to an argument.

I can think of a variety of amounts and sorts of attention-- looks cool and plausible, examined for attractive arguments against the other side, checked math for accuracy, checked math for plausibility of application, looked for counter-arguments, looked for evidence in favor, checked factual material, checked for whether some parts are sound even if there are some errors.....

Any other suggestions for types of attention?
Paris Meetup, Saturday April 30th, 2PM
by Emile — 2011-04-02T12:27:11.672Z

When: Saturday, April 16st, 2:00 PM Saturday, April 30th, 2PM.

Where: Au Pt'it Chat, a little Café near Châtelet, which is here. I'll be there with a LessWrong sign.

I know there are a few LessWrongers that live around Paris, but I've only met Morendil ... so let's try a more formal meetup.

Depending on the attendance, we could organize something more regular.

Lurkers and newbies are very welcome!