trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Evolution just might be chaotic
by NancyLebovitz — 2010-10-18T14:52:14.393Z

The Chaos Theory of Evolution

:

Research on animals has come to similarly unexpected conclusions, albeit based on sparser fossil records. For example, palaeontologist Russell Graham at Illinois State Museum has looked at North American mammals and palaeontologist Russell Coope at the University of Birmingham in the UK has examined insects (Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, vol 10, p 247). Both studies show that most species remain unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps longer, and across several ice ages. Species undergo major changes in distribution and abundance, but show no evolution of morphological characteristics despite major environmental changes. That is not to say that major evolutionary change such as speciation doesn't happen. But recent "molecular clock" research suggests the link between speciation and environmental change is weak at best. Molecular clock approaches allow us to estimate when two closely related modern species split from a common ancestor by comparing their DNA. Most of this work has been carried out in birds, and shows that new species appear more or less continuously, regardless of the dramatic climatic oscillations of the Quaternary or the longer term cooling that preceded it

The hypothesis is that there's very little possibility of finding patterns in evolution. What do you think?
Bayesian Doomsday Argument
by DanielLC — 2010-10-17T22:14:17.440Z

First, if you don't already know it, Frequentist Doomsday Argument:
There's some number of total humans. There's a 95% chance that you come after the last 5%. There's been about 60 to 120 billion people so far, so there's a 95% chance that the total will be less than 1.2 to 2.4 trillion.
I've modified it to be Bayesian.
First, find the priors:
Do you think it's possible that the total number of sentients that have ever lived or will ever live is less than a googolplex? I'm not asking if you're certain, or even if you think it's likely. Is it more likely than one in infinity? I think it is too. This means that the prior must be normalizable.
If we take P(T=n) ∝ 1/n, where T is the total number of people, it can't be normalized, as 1/1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + ... is an infinite sum. If it decreases faster, it can at least be normalized. As such, we can use 1/n as an upper limit.
Of course, that's just the limit of the upper tail, so maybe that's not a very good argument. Here's another one:
We're not so much dealing with lives as life-years. Year is a pretty arbitrary measurement, so we'd expect the distribution to be pretty close for the majority of it if we used, say, days instead. This would require the 1/n distribution.
After that,
T = total number of people
U = number you are
P(T=n) ∝ 1/n
U = m
P(U=m|T=n) ∝ 1/n
P(T=n|U=m) = P(U=m|T=n) * P(T=n) / P(U=m)
= (1/n^2) / P(U=m)
P(T>n|U=m) = ∫P(T=n|U=m)dn
= (1/n) / P(U=m)
And to normalize:
P(T>m|U=m) = 1
= (1/m) / P(U=m)
m = 1/P(U=m)
P(T>n|U=m) = (1/n)*m
P(T>n|U=m) = m/n

So, the probability of there being a total of 1 trillion people total if there's been 100 billion so far is 1/10.

There's still a few issues with this. It assumes P(U=m|T=n) ∝ 1/n. This seems like it makes sense. If there's a million people, there's a one-in-a-million chance of being the 268,547th. But if there's also a trillion sentient animals, the chance of being the nth person won't change that much between a million and a billion people. There's a few ways I can amend this.

First: a = number of sentient animals. P(U=m|T=n) ∝ 1/(a+n). This would make the end result P(T>n|U=m) = (m+a)/(n+a).

Second: Just replace every mention of people with sentients.

Third: Take this as a prediction of the number of sentients who aren't humans who have lived so far.

The first would work well if we can find the number of sentient animals without knowing h...
Ranking the "competition" based on optimization power
by blogospheroid — 2010-10-17T16:55:51.772Z

Most long term users on Less Wrong understand the concept of optimization power and how a system can be called intelligent if it can restrict the future in significant ways. Now I believe that in this world, only institutions are close to superintelligence in any significant way.

I believe it is important for us to have atleast some outside idea of which institutions/systems are powerful in today's world so that we can atleast see some outlines of how the increasing optimization power will end up affecting normal people.

So, my question is - what are the present institutions or systems that you would classify as having the maximum optimization power. Please present your thought behind it if you feel you are mentioning some unknown institution. I am presenting my guesses after the break.

Blogospheroid's guess list

NSA / US Intelligence and defence community

Harvard University

The Chinese Politburo

Goldman Sachs

The Kremlin / Russian intelligence and defence community

Google Inc

Oracle Inc

Microsoft Inc

Murdoch's media empire

Institutions I found significant outside this list is the Singaporean and Abu Dhabi city governments, very rational and increasing their significance in the world, but highly restricted from fooming because of constraints.
Number bias
by  — 2010-10-17T14:03:46.227Z

The New York Times ran an editorial about an interesting type of cognitive bias: according to the article, the fact that our system of timekeeping is based on factors of 24, 7, etc. and the fact that we have 10 fingers profoundly influences our way of thinking. As the article explains, this bias is distinct from scope neglect and misunderstanding of probability. Has anyone else heard of this kind of "number bias" before? Also, is this an issue that deserves further study on LessWrong?
Re: sub-reddits
by Scott Alexander — 2010-10-17T13:34:52.398Z

A while back, I polled the community on the possibility of subreddits. Most people said they wanted them, and I said I'd investigate.

I talked to a couple of people and eventually ended up talking to Tricycle, the developers of this site. They told me about their own proposed solution to the community organization problem, which is this new Discussion section. They said that searching the discussion section by tag was equivalent to a sub-reddit. For example, if you want a sub-reddit on consciousness, the discussion consciousness tag search is an amazing imitation

I told them I wasn't entirely convinced by this and sent some reasons why, but I haven't heard back from them lately and I'm not going keep pursuing this and make a big deal of it unless a large percentage of the people who wanted sub-reddits are unsatisfied.
Monetary Incentives and Performance
by multifoliaterose — 2010-10-16T16:01:09.279Z

I've been thinking about incorporating my Vanity and Ambition in Mathematics into a top level posting. If possible I would like to situation my remarks and the quotations that I cite with respect to the existing experimental psychology literature. When I've discussed the material in the aforementioned article with people in psychology they've sometimes made reference to recent findings that monetary incentives reduce performance on certain kinds of tasks, perhaps suggesting that intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation is key for performance on certain kinds of tasks.

I'll do my own research, but does anybody know of any relevant studies?
Mixed strategy Nash equilibrium
by Meni_Rosenfeld — 2010-10-16T16:00:05.537Z

Inspired by: Swords and Armor: A Game Theory Thought Experiment
Recently, nick012000 has posted Swords and Armor: A Game Theory Thought Experiment. I was disappointed to see many confused replies to this post, even after a complete solution was given by Steve_Rayhawk. I thought someone really ought to post an explanation about mixed strategy Nash equilibria. Then I figured that that someone may as well be me.
I will assume readers are familiar with the concepts of a game (a setting with several players, each having a choice of strategies to take and a payoff which depends on the strategies taken by all players) and of a Nash equilibrium (an "optimal" assignment of strategies such that, if everyone plays their assigned strategy, no player will have a reason to switch to a different strategy). Some games, like the famous prisoner's dilemma, have a Nash equilibrium in so-called "pure strategies" (as opposed to mixed strategies, to be introduced later). Consider, however, the following variant of the matching pennies game:
Player 1 is a general leading an attacking army, and player 2 is the general of the defending army. The attacker can attack from the east or west, and the defender can concentrate his defenses on the east or west. By the time each side learns the strategy of its enemy, it is too late to switch strategies. Attacking where the defenses aren't concentrated gives a great advantage; additionally, due to unspecified tactical circumstances, attacking from the east gives a slight advantage. The sides have no interest in cooperating, so this is a zero-sum game (what one side wins, the other loses).
This elaborate description can be summarized in the following payoff matrix (these payoffs are for the attacker; the defender's payoffs are their negatives):

2: East
2: West

1: East
-1
2

1: West
1
-2

What strategy should each side play? The attacker can think, "Overall, going east is advantageous. So I'll go east." The defender, anticipating this, might say, "Surely they will go east, so that's where I'll wait for them." But after some deliberation, the attacker will realize this, and say "They will expect me from the east! I'll surprise them and go west." You can see where this is going - the defender will think "they'll try to be smart and go west; I'll be smarter and be ready for them", the attacker will think "I was right the first time, eas...
Rationality Dojo
by freyley — 2010-10-15T18:04:35.160Z

Last night, here in Portland (OR), some friends and I got together to try to start Rationality Dojo. We talked about it for a while and came up with exactly 4 exercises that we could readily practice:

Play Paranoid Debating

Play the AI-Box experiment

Read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Write fanfiction in the style of #3

We also had a whole bunch of semi-formed ideas about selecting a target (happiness, health) and optimizing it a month at a time. Starting a dojo, in a time before organized martial arts, was surely incredibly difficult. I hope we can accrete exercises rather than require a single sensei to invent the majority of the discipline. So I've added a category to the wiki, and I'm asking here. Do you have ideas or refinements for exercises to fit within rationality dojo?
Human performance, psychometry, and baseball statistics
by Craig_Heldreth — 2010-10-15T13:13:25.322Z

I. Performance levels and age

Human ambition for achievement in modest measure gives meaning to our lives, unless one is an existentialist pessimist like Schopenhauer who taught that life with all its suffering and cruelty simply should not be. Psychologists study our achievements under a number of different descriptions--testing for IQ, motivation, creativity, others. As part of my current career transition, I have been examining my own goals closely, and have recently read a fair amount on these topics which are variable in their evidence.
A useful collection of numerical data on the subject of human performance is the collection of Major League Baseball player performance statistics--the batting averages, number home runs, runs batted in, slugging percentage--of the many thousands of participants in the hundred years since detailed statistical records have been kept and studied by the players, journalists, and fans of the sport. The advantage of examining issues like these from the angle of Major League Baseball player performance statistics is the enormous sample size of accurately measured and archived data.
The current senior authority in this field is Bill James, who now works for the Boston Red Sox; for the first twenty-five years of his activity as a baseball statistician James was not employed by any of the teams. It took him a long time to find a hearing for his views on the inside of the industry, although the fans started buying his books as soon as he began writing them.
In one of the early editions of his Baseball Abstract, James discussed the biggest fallacies that managers and executives held regarding the achievements of baseball players. He was adamant about the most obvious misunderstood fact of player performance: it is sharply peaked at age 27 and decreases rapidly, so rapidly that only the very best players were still useful at the age of 35. He was able to observe only one executive that seemed to intuit this--a man whose sole management strategy was to trade everybody over the age of 30 for the best available player under the age of 30 he could acquire.
There is a fair amount of more formal academic research on this issue. It is described in the literature as the field of Age and Achievement. The dean of the psychologists studying Age and Achievement is Dean Simonton. A decent overview of their findings is here. This is a meta-study of hu...
Picking your battles
by SeventhNadir — 2010-10-15T11:17:33.191Z

I think that raising the sanity waterline is a worthwhile goal, but picking your battles is absolutely necessary. It doesn't matter how formidable your argument is if you're arguing in the comments of a youtube video, you've lost by default. So where is the line in the sand? Where would you feel compelled to take action, and to what lengths would you go to? What price would you be willing to pay?

I'm a psychology student, third year and currently doing a unit called "cultural psychology". The lecturer has advanced notions of "multiple truths" and how "reality is socially constructed". To quote him directly in regards to this:

"There is a tendency for those who believe in one reality to use the physical world as a basis for argument, while those who believe in multiple realities use the social world. Even in physics we have 'reality' changing as you get closer to the speed of light, and the laws of physics don't apply prior to the big bang. These are fairly extreme situations. In this course we are dealing with social realities and the point is that different cultures operate in worlds that can be quite different. To see this purely as a perspective risks the dominant social grouping seeing their reality as the true reality, and others as having a different perspective on that reality. The assumption that cultures can have different realities places every on a level playing field with a dominant culture calling all the shots."

You can see in the last line the conclusion he wants his premises to support. The exercise is not to pick his argument apart, find all the holes and write a crushing riposte (although you can if you're so inclined).

The question is, if the goal is to raise the sanity waterline, is this a battle worth picking?
You don't need barefoot shoes to start walking differently. 
by Kevin — 2010-10-15T06:41:34.772Z

I bought into the hype and decided that I was going to get a pair of Vibrams. My intention was not to use them as running shoes, but as everyday walking shoes. Then my girlfriend told me that I wasn't allowed, that they were too hideous to be worn in public. In almost two years together, this is the only thing that she has forbidden me from doing, and I regularly do completely ridiculous things so I deferred to her judgement. I thought about getting barefoot dress shoes but $150 seemed excessive.

I then decided that I didn't need fancy shoes to stop walking heel first. I started wearing a pair of casual brown slip-on shoes with a fair amount of cushioning but little support. From the start, I thought it felt good to actually walk on the balls of my feet.

It took three weeks for my feet to stop hurting, but now I naturally walk on the balls of my feet. You can do the same thing. It will probably be easier in a light pair of shoes rather than a clunky pair of dress shoes or boots.
Lifelogging: the recording device
by gwern — 2010-10-15T01:04:57.530Z

The old idea of lifelogging seems to be a reality now. It has the potential to be quite useful, and not just in distant contrived scenarios like cryonics or being recreated by an AI.

One of the classic objections was that we couldn’t afford to store the many gigabytes - possibly hundreds of gigabytes a year! - such a practice would generate, but right now you can buy 1 terabyte for <$50. And there’s no end in sight to whatever Moore’s law has been governing hard-drives over the past decade or two.

But how is one to record it? That seems to be the rub. All the storage space we could want, all sorts of new formats like WebM or Dirac or x264 to store the videos in - but what camera generates the data in the first place?

We don’t care about sleep time, so we don’t need any more than 16 hours or so of recording a day. We can probably get away with 12. Even 8 might be enough (to record yourself on the job - or off). An encoded compressed video might be 1 megabyte a minute or 60 megabytes an hour, but let’s be generous and assume 15x worse than that, or about 1 gigabyte an hour. So perhaps 16 gigabytes.

16 gigabytes of Flash costs $40 or less. So that’s not an issue either.

And presumably optics and microprocessors are very cheap given the incredible popularity of web cameras, digital cameras, digital camcorders and whatnot over the last decade.

But for all that, I can’t seem to find a mini-camcorder which will record even 8 hours and be a useful lifelogger!

Looxcie costs an absurd $200, and has no more than 4 hours battery life

Flip MinoHD costs a far more reasonable $70 but only gets 2 hours of battery life; the other Flips do little better

the IRDC250 uCorder is $90, possibly better video than the Looxcie, and perfect - except for its 2 hour battery life

the Video Clipper is similar to the uCorder but claims better battery life & to be just $44

Am I wrong? Are there existing products? It seems to me that it ought to be perfectly possible to take something like the uCorder, slap in $110 of batteries, and get it up to 8 or 12 hours’ life. But I have yet to find such a thing.
Retirement leads to loss of cognitive abilities
by nick012000 — 2010-10-14T17:53:57.292Z

Here's something I found after surfing a few links. Given the interest in intelligence augmentation and biological immortality here, I figured you guys would find it useful to know; I wasn't particularly planning on retiring (given biological immortality or uploading technologies), but if this is true, I definitely won't be for as long as I can avoid it.

The two economists call their paper “Mental Retirement,” and their argument has intrigued behavioral researchers. Data from the United States, England and 11 other European countries suggest that the earlier people retire, the more quickly their memories decline.

The implication, the economists and others say, is that there really seems to be something to the “use it or lose it” notion — if people want to preserve their memories and reasoning abilities, they may have to keep active.

“It’s incredibly interesting and exciting,” said Laura L. Carstensen, director of the Center on Longevity at Stanford University. “It suggests that work actually provides an important component of the environment that keeps people functioning optimally.”

While not everyone is convinced by the new analysis, published recently in The Journal of Economic Perspectives, a number of leading researchers say the study is, at least, a tantalizing bit of evidence for a hypothesis that is widely believed but surprisingly difficult to demonstrate.

Researchers repeatedly find that retired people as a group tend to do less well on cognitive tests than people who are still working. But, they note, that could be because people whose memories and thinking skills are declining may be more likely to retire than people whose cognitive skills remain sharp.

And research has failed to support the premise that mastering things like memory exercises, crossword puzzles and games like Sudoku carry over into real life, improving overall functioning.

“If you do crossword puzzles, you get better at crossword puzzles,” said Lisa Berkman, director of the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard. “If you do Sudoku, you get better at Sudoku. You get better at one narrow task. But you don’t get better at cognitive behavior in life.”

The study was possible, explains one of its authors, Robert Willis, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, becau

...
1993 AT&T "You Will" ads
by nick012000 — 2010-10-14T12:49:24.851Z

Here's something I found while wasting time on Youtube today. Sort of surprising how close they got to the truth, though of course the aesthetics are all wrong, and AT&T wasn't the company who brought them about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8&feature=grec_index
Standing Desks and Hunter-Gatherers
by James_Miller — 2010-10-14T00:03:26.507Z

I recently started using a standing desk and found it increases my productivity perhaps because my mostly caveman brain "thinks" that I will usually stand when facing cognitively challenging tasks, but I will sit when I want to relax and save energy.

Are there other ways we can attempt to increase our cognitive powers by taking into account that many of the genes which influence human emotion and cognition were selected for to make our ancestors better hunter-gatherers?

Edited because of Reisqui's comment.
A Fundamental Question of Group Rationality
by steven0461 — 2010-10-13T20:32:08.085Z

What do you believe because others believe it, even though your own evidence and reasoning ("impressions") point the other way?

(Note that answers like "quantum chromodynamics" don't count, except in the unlikely case that you've seriously tried to do your own physics, and it suggested the mainstream was wrong, and that's what you would have believed if not for it being the mainstream.)
Is there evolutionary selection for female orgasms?
by NancyLebovitz — 2010-10-13T14:07:31.195Z

>Elisabeth Lloyd: I don’t actually know. I think that it’s at a very problematic intersection of topics. I mean, you’re taking the intersection of human evolution, women, sexuality – once you take that intersection you’re bound to kind of get a disaster. More than that, when evolutionists have looked at this topic, I think that they’ve had quite a few items on their agenda, including telling the story about human origins that bolsters up the family, monogamy, a certain view of female sexuality that’s complimentary to a certain view of male sexuality. And all of those items have been on their agenda and it’s quite visible in their explanations.
>Natasha Mitchell: I guess it’s perplexed people partly, too, because women don’t need an orgasm to become pregnant, and so the question is: well, what’s its purpose? Well, is its purpose to give us pleasure so that we have sex, so that we can become pregnant, according to the classic evolutionary theories?
>Elisabeth Lloyd: The problem is even worse than it appears at first because not only is orgasm not necessary on the female side to become pregnant, there isn’t even any evidence that orgasm makes any difference at all to fertility, or pregnancy rate, or reproductive success. It seems intuitive that a female orgasm would motivate females to engage in intercourse which would naturally lead to more pregnancies or help with bonding or something like that, but the evidence simply doesn’t back that up.

The whole discussion. It backs my theory that using evolution to explain current traits seriously tempts people to make things up.