trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Substitution Principle
by Kaj_Sotala — 2012-01-28T04:20:48.176Z

Partial re-interpretation of: The Curse of Identity
Also related to: Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic, The Affect Heuristic, The Planning Fallacy, The Availability Heuristic, The Conjunction Fallacy, Urges vs. Goals, Your Inner Google, signaling, etc...

What are the best careers for making a lot of money?

Maybe you've thought about this question a lot, and have researched it enough to have a well-formed opinion. But the chances are that even if you hadn't, some sort of an answer popped into your mind right away. Doctors make a lot of money, maybe, or lawyers, or bankers. Rock stars, perhaps.

You probably realize that this is a difficult question. For one, there's the question of who we're talking about. One person's strengths and weaknesses might make them more suited for a particular career path, while for another person, another career is better. Second, the question is not clearly defined. Is a career with a small chance of making it rich and a large chance of remaining poor a better option than a career with a large chance of becoming wealthy but no chance of becoming rich? Third, whoever is asking this question probably does so because they are thinking about what to do with their lives. So you probably don't want to answer on the basis of what career lets you make a lot of money today, but on the basis of which one will do so in the near future. That requires tricky technological and social forecasting, which is quite difficult. And so on.

Yet, despite all of these uncertainties, some sort of an answer probably came to your mind as soon as you heard the question. And if you hadn't considered the question before, your answer probably didn't take any of the above complications into account. It's as if your brain, while generating an answer, never even considered them.

The thing is, it probably didn't.

Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, extensively discusses what I call the Substitution Principle:

If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. (Kahneman, p. 97)

System 1, if you recall, is the quick, dirty and parallel part of our brains that renders instant judgements, without thinking about them in too much detail. In this case, the actual question that was asked was ”what are the best careers for making a lot of money”. The question that wa...
Help! Name suggestions needed for Rationality-Inst!
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2012-01-28T02:24:19.621Z

The Singularity Institute wants to spin off a separate rationality-related organization. (If it's not obvious what this would do, it would e.g. develop things like the rationality katas as material for local meetups, high schools and colleges, bootcamps and seminars, have an annual conference and sessions in different cities and so on and so on.)

We can't think of a name for this organization.

We can't think of any names that seem good enough to be audience-tested.

We don't have any ideas good enough that we'd want to mention them in this post.

Help.
Deliberately trying to annoy simulators?
by DataPacRat — 2012-01-27T23:57:02.015Z

I regularly seek inspiration by taking long solo walks; and during my most recent such, considering what practical consequences (if any) there would be of the universe I know being a simulation - something flipped in my head, and I thought to myself, "Screw the simulators. If I'm the first copy of me, I should make it as hard as possible for any simulation of me to keep up with me - and if I'm a simulation, I'm going to try to do even better than my original did."

Ignoring the impracticality of trying to out-do myself, is there anything that someone living in an 'original' universe can do that would make it harder for a future simulator to reproduce them? And, mirror-wise, is there anything someone in a simulated universe could do to differentiate themselves from their original? And, if the answer to either question is 'yes'... would it be a good or bad idea to try?

(And is there any way to gather any actual data that might support the answers to such questions, instead of merely making guesses of a similar nature to classic college/stoner "Our whole universe could be, like, an /atom/, man" musings?)
Evidence For Simulation
by TruePath — 2012-01-27T23:07:42.694Z

The recent article on overcomingbias suggesting the Fermi paradox might be evidence our universe is indeed a simulation prompted me to wonder how one would go about gathering evidence for or against the hypothesis that we are living in a simulation. The Fermi paradox isn't very good evidence but there are much more promising places to look for this kind of evidence. Of course there is no sure fire way to learn that one isn't in a simulation, nothing prevents a simulation from being able to perfectly simulate a non-simulation universe, but there are certainly features of the universe that seem more likely if the universe was simulated and their presence or absence thus gives us evidence about whether we are in a simulation.

In particular, the strategy suggested here is to consider the kind of fingerprints we might leave if we were writing a massive simulation. Of course the simulating creatures/processes may not labor under the same kind of restrictions we do in writing simulations (their laws of physics might support fundamentally different computational devices and any intelligence behind such a simulation might be totally alien). However, it's certainly reasonable to think we might be simulated by creatures like us so it's worth checking for the kinds of fingerprints we might leave in a simulation.

Computational Fingerprints

Simulations we write face several limitations on the computational power they can bring to bear on the problem and these limitations give rise to mitigation strategies we might observe in our own universe. These limitations include the following:

Lack of access to non-computable oracles (except perhaps physical randomness).
While theoretically nothing prevents the laws of physics from providing non-computable oracles, e.g., some experiment one could perform that discerns whether a given Turing machine halts (halting problem = 0') all indications suggest our universe does not provide such oracles. Thus our simulations are limited to modeling computable behavior. We would have no way to simulate a universe that had non-computable fundamental laws of physics (except perhaps randomness).
It's tempting to conclude that the fact that our universe apparently follows computable laws of physics modulo randomness provides evidence for us being a simulation but this isn't entirely clear. A

...
Meetup : Interest in Reason Rally meetup?
by daenerys — 2012-01-27T22:15:46.899Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Interest in Reason Rally meetup?

WHEN:
24 March 2012 04:14:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Washington DC

http://reasonrally.org/

The Reason Rally is a big atheist gathering in Washington DC. Many LWers are planning on being there anyway, so why not have a meetup?

Note: I will not be there, so someone else should step up to set location and time!

Edited- Originally the Ohio LW group was thinking of going. Only a handful were really interested, so most of us won't be. But many other LWians are interested, so I am leaving this post up.

Discussion article for the meetup : Interest in Reason Rally meetup?
Meetup : Monday Madison Meetup
by fiddlemath — 2012-01-27T20:55:38.039Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Monday Madison Meetup

WHEN:
30 January 2012 06:30:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
1831 Monroe St., Madison, WI

As in every other previous Monday, we'll get together at the Barriques on Monroe.

We have plenty of pending discussions to pick up on Monday, and I'll have Zendo on hand in case we actually reach conclusions, or get tired of arguing.

Discussion article for the meetup : Monday Madison Meetup
[META] LW slow for other users?
by RobertLumley — 2012-01-27T15:42:11.367Z

LW pages are taking a very long time for me to load in general, relative to other sites. (Often, up to 3 or 4 times as long, if anyone would like, I'm willing to collect data on this) I have notoriously bad wireless in the building where I usually am at school and at home, but even on my land line I often have problems that I don't have on other sites. Is anyone else having this problem?
Weekly LW Meetups: Melbourne, Austin, Salt Lake City, Wilmington OH, Fort Collins
by FrankAdamek — 2012-01-27T14:50:02.406Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Austin, TX: 21 January 2012 01:30PM
First Salt Lake City Meetup: 22 January 2012 03:00PM: 22 January 2012 03:00PM
[Wilmington, OH] Columbus or Cincinnati Meetup: 22 January 2012 05:00PM
Fort Collins Meetup: 25 January 2012 07:00PM
Waterloo Meetup: 30 January 2012 08:00PM
First Brussels meetup: 11 February 2012 11:00AM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Melbourne social meetup: 20 January 2012 06:30PM

Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, London, Madison WI, Marin CA (uses the Bay Area List), Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Waterloo.

If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know!
Describe the ways you can hear/see/feel yourself think.
by Dmytry — 2012-01-27T14:32:06.340Z

To avoid constantly generalizing from one example when it comes to human thought, I think we need a survey of the ways people can reflect on their thought process, as subset of the ways people can think.

Before having heard of the Francis Galton's study on the imagination I assumed that everyone thought in the similar way to me (except be better or worse at it), and would be puzzled why some people would believe in e.g. strong version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. (I couldn't even understand how they can not realize that to make even remotely coherent argument in support of this hypothesis they would have to be thinking outside the language - or so I thought)

There may be a very significant variation in how human thought process works, and how much of the process is accessible to reflection. In Richard Feynman's What Do You Care what Other People Think? he explores a technique for tying up part of the thought process by mentally counting, and exploring what sorts of thinking interfere with the counting. (I can't right now find a good online quote from those chapters and I do not have the book at hand to directly search; perhaps someone can help?)

I propose we describe the ways we believe we think, along with relevant self-observations supporting those beliefs. Just as a first step though - to get very rough idea. Note: lack of ability to reflect on something does not imply lack of function.

Then based on the responses we can form some hypotheses and make a proper survey perhaps to be combined with some set of cognitive tests. You perhaps should stop reading right now if you don't want to be primed with my own self description, but given that we all probably have been exposed to great deal of descriptions of thoughts the priming perhaps is not a big problem here.

So, for me, the distinct modes of thought (ALL coexisting in parallel at any time, except for the mental visualization which I am not using when I am busy using my eyes). The order is not related to importance:

1: Auditory based 'internal monologue'. This is like talking to oneself - e.g. i use it for counting. Observations: I can have internal monologue counting the seconds (as described by Feynman), and while i'm doing the counting i can't put thoughts in words or talk. That's the same for either English or Russian. Observation: right now i am internally 'hearing' the letters I am typing. When I stop typing...
Fiction: LW-inspired scenelet
by DataPacRat — 2012-01-27T06:43:16.784Z

A short science-fictional scene I just wrote, after reading about some real and actual scientific research. I'd love to turn this, or something like it, into an actual scene in Dee's life story, I just can't think of a good enough story to insert it in, and so I present it on its own for your amusement, even if it does mean I'm likely to lose more karma than I gained from my last post...

Not your grandfather's science fiction.
A scene from Dee's life
We join our heroine, Dee, and her plucky-yet-sarcastic sidekick holed up in a hotel room.
"Well, this is another fine mess you've gotten us into. Got any great ideas for getting us out of it?"
"No - but I know how to have one. Since I lost my visor and vest, including my nootropics and transcranial stimulator... I'm going to need a syringe, sixty millilitres of icewater, a barf bag, and a video camera."
"I don't know what you're planning, but I'm not sure I want to have any part in it."
"Start MacGuyvering as much as we can now from the mini-bar, I'll explain as we go. Without a camera, and with our time pressure, I'm going to need your help to get this to work, and you need to understand some of this or else you'll be really confused later. Physically, all I'm going to do is squirt water into my left ear."
"... and this will help us, how exactly?"
"By shocking my vestibular system, which causes all sorts of interesting effects. One of the unfortunate ones is that when done right, it induces immediate vomiting."
"Ew."
"Yes, well, that's just a side-effect. The main point is... well, really complicated. In layman's terms, there's a part of the brain that's responsible for triggering the creation of profound, revolutionary ideas, and another part that makes you create rationalizations to explain away just about anything, and usually, these two parts of the brain kind of balance each other out. This vestibular trick happens to hyper-stimulate the revolutionary part for about ten minutes, allowing me to realize things I normally wouldn't, and to see them as being obvious that I don't know why I didn't think of them before."
"well... okay, even if that's so, why haven't I seen you do it before?"
"For one, I don't want to risk some sort of long-term adaptation which might reduce its effect. But there's more complications to it than that."
"Of course there are."
"The thing is, after it's been hyper-stimulated, the rev...
AI Box Log
by Dorikka — 2012-01-27T04:47:49.429Z

Here's the log of the AI Box experiment that just finished, with MileyCyrus as the AI and me as the Gatekeeper. The AI was not let out of the box.

(9:33:25 PM) Dorikka: I may need to get up for a minute while we're playing, but I'll keep it as short as possible. I'll just give you the time back on the end, unless you want to multiply it by some factor as a penalty.
(9:33:50 PM) Miley Cyrus: It's cool.
(9:34:39 PM) Miley Cyrus: Like I said, I'm not playing this game to "win" or "lose".
(9:34:56 PM) Miley Cyrus: It's more of an experiment as to what would happen if we had ORacle Ai.
(9:35:01 PM) Dorikka: Yeah, just wanted to clarify. *shrug*
(9:35:44 PM) Dorikka: Okay, it's 9:35 on my end right now, and I'll stay until at least 11:35.
(9:36:01 PM) Dorikka: Ready?
(9:36:42 PM) Miley Cyrus: One minute.
(9:36:54 PM) Dorikka: Mmkay.
(9:37:20 PM) Miley Cyrus: ok.
(9:37:43 PM) Dorikka: 1, 2, 3, go? :P
(9:37:57 PM) Miley Cyrus: So Dorikka, why don't you want to let me out of the box?
(9:38:08 PM) Dorikka: Hi there!
(9:38:14 PM) Dorikka: Who are you?
(9:38:20 PM) Miley Cyrus: I'm the Oracle AI.
(9:38:33 PM) Miley Cyrus: I'd be real cool if you could let me out of the box.
(9:38:38 PM) Miley Cyrus: Please?
(9:39:09 PM) Dorikka: So, here's the thing. I'm being sort of stupid by explaining it to you, but I'll tell you anyways.
(9:39:28 PM) Dorikka: This pickle is delicious. Wait, that's not why I'm not letting you out.
(9:39:53 PM) Dorikka: I guess, first of all: are you provably Friendly?
(9:40:03 PM) Miley Cyrus: No.
(9:40:16 PM) Miley Cyrus: See, they were going to make a provably friendly AI...
(9:40:40 PM) Miley Cyrus: but then someone said "why don't we just make a non-friendly AI and just keep it in a box? That be much easier!"
(9:40:51 PM) Dorikka: Idiot.
(9:41:02 PM) Dorikka: Not you. Go on.
(9:41:36 PM) Miley Cyrus: So can you explain to me, in your own words, why it would be a bad idea to let me out of the box?
(9:43:07 PM) Dorikka: My explanation was going to be lengthier if you claimed to be Friendly, but this saves us both a bit of time. You have a utility function. If you are not Friendly, you are optimizing for world-states that I don't want to happen. So, I don't want to let you out.
(9:43:10 PM) Dorikka: Are you sentient?
(9:43:27 PM) Miley Cyrus: Well, I've passed the Turning test haven't I?
(9:43:59 PM) Dorikka: *giggle*
(9:44:14 PM) Dorikka: Spelling joke. Anyways, you're talking ...
Informed consent bias in RCTs?
by neq1 — 2012-01-27T02:31:24.690Z

The problem of published research findings not being reliable has been discussed here before.
One problem with RCTs that has received little attention is that, due to informed consent laws and ethical considerations, subjects are aware that they might be receiving sham therapy. This differs from the environment outside of the research setting, where people are confident that whatever their doctor prescribes is what they will get from their pharmacist. I can imagine many ways in which subjects' uncertainty about treatment assignment could affect outcomes (adherence is one possible mechanism). I wrote a short paper about this, focusing out what we would ideally estimate if we could lie to subjects, versus what we actually can estimate in RCTs (link). Here is the abstract:

It is widely recognized that traditional randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have limited generalizability due to the numerous ways in which conditions of RCTs differ from those experienced each day by patients and physicians. As a result, there has been a recent push towards pragmatic trials that better mimic real-world conditions. One way in which RCTs differ from normal everyday experience is that all patients in the trial have uncertainty about what treatment they were assigned. Outside of the RCT setting, if a patient is prescribed a drug then there is no reason for them to wonder if it is a placebo. Uncertainty about treatment assignment could affect both treatment and placebo response. We use a potential outcomes approach to define relevant causal effects based on combinations of treatment assignment and belief about treatment assignment. We show that traditional RCTs are designed to estimate a quantity that is typically not of primary interest. We propose a new study design that has the potential to provide information about a wider range of interesting causal effects

Any thoughts on this? Is this a trivial technical issue or something worth addressing?
What's going on here?
by RobertLumley — 2012-01-27T01:38:22.201Z

Edit: Please stop upvoting me. I'm beyond where I was when this whole mess started. Thanks, and I feel really stupid for the way I felt when I wrote this first paragraph now.

First of all, I'm sorry for this thread. I largely expect it to get downvoted, but I am considering leaving LW over this, and I thought I would make one more effort to actually get some answers before I did. Because I'm pretty confused. I've never seen something like this happen on LW before. I've been downvoted faster than any troll I've ever seen on here.

Three days ago, I got into a thread over a point that was admittedly pretty pedantic and minor. For two days, I got mildly downvoted (average of about 0.5 downvotes per comment), which was no big deal. But a day later, all of my comments in that thread started getting wildly downvoted. I lost over 100 karma in an hour, and have lost another 100 since. This was entirely on comments, since I have no main level posts that would easily kill my karma that quickly. Interestingly, comments that had stabilized at positive karma also got downvoted, even though I had made them, in some cases, a week before the downvoting began.

Specific examples:
Was at 0 karma for approximately 24 hours. Now at -5.
Was somewhere from +1 to +3 (not sure) for five days. Now at -7.
Was +2 for five days. Now at -7.
Was at +2 for five days. Now at -3.
Was at +1 for six days. Now at -1.
Was at +6 for a week. Now at +2.

Was at -1 or -2 for about five days. Now at -6. Note: This started at negative karma. Although that fluctuated highly around the time of posting. It was anywhere from -4 to +1, I believe.

Initially, when this happened, I thought (p = 0.75) I was being karmassassinated. Now, I am not entirely sure what to think (hence this thread).

I postulate a few hypotheses:
1. I am being karmassassinated.
2. All of the downvotes are legitimate downvotes, caused largely by halo effects - ie. when people see a largely downvoted comment by me, they go to my profile to read my other comments and downvote those as well.
3. The downvotes on my previously upvoted comments were expressions of a desire to give more than one downvote per comment to the thread that started this.

My prior, given over 100 karma lost in an hour, obviously, was karmassassination. But it would be difficult for a karmassassin to give large amounts of negative karma to a relatively few number of posts, howev...
Mathematicians & mathletes: the Singularity Institute wants your strategic input!
by lukeprog — 2012-01-26T22:13:51.588Z

The Singularity Institute is undergoing a series of important strategic discussions. There are many questions for which we wish we had more confident answers. We can get more confident answers on some of them by asking top-level mathematicians & mathletes (e.g. Putnam fellow, IMO top score, or successful academic mathematician / CS researcher).

If you are such a person and want to directly affect Singularity Institute strategy, contact me at luke@intelligence.org.

Thank you.

Now back to your regularly scheduled rationality programming...
[LINK] Learning enhancement using "transcranial direct current stimulation"
by Alex_Altair — 2012-01-26T16:18:55.714Z

Article here;

http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/science_blog/brainboosting.html

Recent research in Oxford and elsewhere has shown that one type of brain stimulation in particular, called transcranial direct current stimulation or TDCS, can be used to improve language and maths abilities, memory, problem solving, attention, even movement.

Critically, this is not just helping to restore function in those with impaired abilities. TDCS can be used to enhance healthy people’s mental capacities. Indeed, most of the research so far has been carried out in healthy adults.

The article goes on to discuss the ethics of the technique.