trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Talking to Children: A Pre-Holiday Guide
by daenerys — 2011-12-20T21:54:01.573Z

Note: This is based on anecdotal evidence, personal experience (I have worked with children for many years. It is my full-time job.) and "general knowledge" rather than scientific studies, though I welcome any relevant links on either side of the issue.

The holidays are upon us, and I would guess that even though most of us are atheists, that we will still be spending time with our extended families sometime in the next week. These extended families are likely to include nieces and nephews, or other children, that you will have to interact with (probably whether you like it or not...)

Many LW-ers might not spend a lot of time with children in their day-to-day lives, and therefore I would like to make a quick comment on how to interact with them in a way that is conducive to their development. After all, if we want to live in a rationalist world tomorrow, one of the best ways to get there is by raising children who can become rationalist adults.
PLEASE READ THIS LINK if there are any little girls you will be seeing this holiday season:

How To Talk to Little Girls: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-bloom/how-to-talk-to-little-gir_b_882510.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false
I know it's hard, but DON'T tell little girls that they look cute, and DON'T comment on their adorable little outfits, or their pony-tailed hair. The world is already screaming at them that the primary thing other people notice and care about for them is their looks. Ask them about their opinions, or their hobbies. Point them toward growing into a well-rounded adult with a mind of her own.
This does not just apply to little girls and their looks, but can be extrapolated to SO many other circumstances. For example, when children (of either gender) are succeeding in something, whether it is school-work, or a drawing, DON'T comment on how smart or skilled they are. Instead, say something like: "Wow, that was a really difficult math problem you just solved. You must have studied really hard to understand it!" Have your comments focus on complementing their hard work, and their determination.
By commenting on children's innate abilities, you are setting them up to believe that if they are good at something, it is solely based on talent. Conversely, by commenting on the amount of work or effort that went into their progress, you are setting them up to believe that they ne...
[link] Innocentive challenge: $8000 for examples promoting altruistic behavior
by dvasya — 2011-12-20T21:17:37.794Z

A challenge recently posted on Innocentive seemed to me like something that may interest many LWers: "Models Motivating and Supporting Altruism Within Communities", with a grand prize of $8000. To quote from the challenge:

We are interested in looking at novel concepts from nature, business, or other areas that may elucidate the dynamics that help promote and maintain altruistic behaviors.

Further details are available on innocentive.com. I think that it would be a nice opportunity for our LW decision theory experts.

[For anybody who decides to participate: the links I provided contain a referral string so that, in case you win a prize, I can match your donation to the SIAI with the same fraction of my referral award ;) Please use them to register.]
Ritual Report: NYC Less Wrong Solstice Celebration
by Raemon — 2011-12-20T20:37:58.229Z

Note: Secular Solstice has evolved a bit since this original post (most noteably, it no longer has a major Lovecraft theme.

Last Friday, the NYC Less Wrong community held their first Winter Solstice Celebration. Approximately twenty of us gathered for dinner and a night of ritual. We sang songs, told stories, and recited litanies. The night celebrated ancient astronomers, and the work that humanity has done for the past 5000 years. It paid tribute to the harshness of the universe, respecting it as worthy opponent. We explored Lovecraftian mythology, which intersects with our beliefs in interesting ways.

And finally, we looked to the future, vowing to give a gift to tomorrow.

This is the first of 2-3 posts on this subject. In this one, I'm telling a story about what we did and why I wanted to. In the followup(s), I’ll explain the design principles that went into planning such an event, and what we learned from our first execution of it. I’ll also be posting a PDF of a ritual book, similar to the one we read from but with a few changes based on initial, obvious observations.

Why exactly did we do this? Doesn’t this smack of organized religion? Who the hell is Lovecraft and why do we care?

Depending on your background, this may require the bridging of some inferential distance, as well as emotional distance. Bear with me.

(If at the end, you DO still think this was a dangerous idea, or one you don't want popularized on Less Wrong, I want you to let me know. We're probably just going to disagree, but I want a sense of what the costs are of emphasizing this type of thing here)

Winter Solstice

To begin, a Just So Story, true enough for our purposes:

The Winter Solstice is the longest night of the year. It ushers in a time of cold and darkness.

For young civilizations, it was a time when if you HADN’T spent the year preparing adequately for the future, then before spring returned, you would run out of food and die. If you hadn’t striven to use your tribe’s collective wisdom, to work hard beyond what was necessary for immediate gratification... if you hadn’t harnessed the physical and mental tools that humans have but that few other animals do... then the universe, unflinchingly neutral, would destroy you without a second thought. And even if you did do these things, it might kill you anyway. Because fairness isn’t built into the equations of the cosmos.

But it was...
What is your rationality blind spot?
by Shmi — 2011-12-20T19:18:58.259Z

It has been noticed since the time immemorial that cognitive biases have a nasty tendency of being invisible to self (note the proverbial log in one's eye). Uncovering their own blind spot is probably the hardest task for an aspired rationalist. EY and others have devoted a number of posts to this issue (e.g. the How To Actually Change Your Mind sequence), and I am wondering if it is bearing fruit for the LW participants.

To this end, I suggest that people post what they think their current rationality blind spot they are struggling with is (not the usual sweet success stories of "overcoming bias"), and let others comment on whether they agree or not, given their impressions of the person here and possibly in real life. My guess is that most of us would miss the mark widely (it's called a blind spot for a reason). Needless to say, if you post, you should expect to get crockered. Also needless to say, if you disagree with a person pointing out your bias, odds are that you are the one who is wrong.

(Who, me, go first? Oh, I have no biases, at least none that I can see.)
Is anyone else worried about SOPA? Trying to do anything about it?
by false_vacuum — 2011-12-20T14:07:44.396Z

Referring, of course, to the proposed U.S. legislation which could cause severe damage to the Internet—at least, that's what a lot of people are saying. See, e.g., this Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress (the first signatory listed is Vint Cerf). On Wikipedia, people including Jimbo Wales are discussing strategies as extreme as blanking the entire site (except for an explanatory message) to get people's attention, and thereby perhaps incite them to action, such as calling their Congressional representative.

I just happened to find out about all this a few hours ago, being someone who tries to avoid distractions like most kinds of news, so possibly others here with similar habits will appreciate having it called to ther attention. Or possibly they won't. But to those of you who possess relevant kinds of expertise:

Is it possible to project likely consequences of this legislation's being passed?

What are those consequences?

Assuming they are on net undesirable, what can be done that would be most likely to prevent its passage?

(I think this subject can be discussed without political advocacy, in which I am mostly not at all interested anyway. It just looks like a practical problem to me.)

Edited to Add: I forgot to include a fourth bullet point:

Again assuming they are undesirable, what can be done to ameliorate|circumvent them?

It seems to have been assumed by many commenters, nevertheless.
Visual Map of US LW-ers
by daenerys — 2011-12-20T07:40:09.245Z

Earlier this month, Metus did a post asking for LW-ers locations. I thought it would even more useful to have this information in visual format, so I created a Google map. You can access it on the website below. Unfortunately, I am terrible at this post-writing interface, so I can't get the image of the map to load onto here. You'll have to click the link to view it.

Original Post: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8sm/where_do_you_live_meetup_planners_want_to_know/

(If you haven't filled out the poll yet, please do it! If more people submit their location info, I'll add them to the map.)

Link to the Map

These are only for US locations that had a 5-digit zip-code, or a city name. I may or may not map the other countries. If someone else wants to volunteer, send me a message, and I'll add you as a collaborator to the map, so you can edit.
[SEQ RERUN] 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities
by MinibearRex — 2011-12-20T07:39:13.731Z

Today's post, 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities was originally published on 10 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

In the ordinary way of writing probabilities, 0 and 1 both seem like entirely reachable quantities. But when you transform probabilities into odds ratios, or log-odds, you realize that in order to get a proposition to probability 1 would require an infinite amount of evidence.

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 Infinite Certainty, 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.
Presents for impoving rationality or reducing superstition?
by mtaran — 2011-12-19T22:19:20.868Z

It's traditional in many parts of the world to buy (or make) presents for at least the closest members one's family around this time of the year. I would like to know if anyone here has ideas for presents to give to people from college age to middle age who are not rationalists, but not completely closed off to the idea.

So far I've considered mostly things that would help rid them of various superstitions, particularly astrology and the 2012 apocalypse myth. For this purpose I've looked at books and videos on

the history of astrology

the actual causes of various natural disasters

modern cosmology

Has anyone else on LW faced this sort of situation before? Or does anyone here have general advice on this topic?
"Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us"
by gwern — 2011-12-19T18:48:08.015Z

Jonah Lehrer has up another of his contrarian science articles: "Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us".

Main topics: the failure of drugs in clinical trials, diminishing returns to pharmaceutical research, doctors over-treating, and Humean causality-correlation distinction, with some Ioannidis mixed through-out.

See also "Why epidemiology will not correct itself"

In completely unrelated news, Nick Bostrom is stepping down from IEET's Chairman of the Board.
Q&A with Michael Littman on risks from AI
by XiXiDu — 2011-12-19T09:51:15.496Z

[Click here to see a list of all interviews]

Michael L. Littman is a computer scientist. He works mainly in reinforcement learning, but has done work in machine learning, game theory, computer networking, Partially observable Markov decision process solving, computer solving of analogy problems and other areas. He is currently a professor of computer science and department chair at Rutgers University.

Homepage: cs.rutgers.edu/~mlittman/

Google Scholar: scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Michael+Littman

The Interview:

Michael Littman: A little background on me. I've been an academic in AI for not-quite 25 years. I work mainly on reinforcement learning, which I think is a key technology for human-level AI---understanding the algorithms behind motivated behavior. I've also worked a bit on topics in statistical natural language processing (like the first human-level crossword solving program). I carried out a similar sort of survey when I taught AI at Princeton in 2001 and got some interesting answers from my colleagues. I think the survey says more about the mental state of researchers than it does about the reality of the predictions.
In my case, my answers are colored by the fact that my group sometimes uses robots to demonstrate the learning algorithms we develop. We do that because we find that non-technical people find it easier to understand and appreciate the idea of a learning robot than pages of equations and graphs. But, after every demo, we get the same question: "Is this the first step toward Skynet?" It's a "have you stopped beating your wife" type of question, and I find that it stops all useful and interesting discussion about the research.
Anyhow, here goes:

Q1: Assuming no global catastrophe halts progress, by what year would you assign a 10%/50%/90% chance of the development of roughly human-level machine intelligence?

Michael Littman:

10%: 2050 (I also think P=NP in that year.)
50%: 2062
90%: 2112

Q2: What probability do you assign to the possibility of human extinction as a result of badly done AI?

Michael Littman: epsilon, assuming you mean: P(human extinction caused by badly done AI | badly done AI)
I think complete human extinction is unlikely, but, if society as we know it collapses, it'll be because people are being stupid (not because machines are being smart).

Q3: What probability do you ass...
[SEQ RERUN] Infinite Certainty
by MinibearRex — 2011-12-19T05:30:11.497Z

Today's post, Infinite Certainty was originally published on 09 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you say you are 99.9999% confident of a proposition, you're saying that you could make one million equally likely statements and be wrong, on average, once. Probability 1 indicates a state of infinite certainty. Furthermore, once you assign a probability 1 to a proposition, Bayes' theorem says that it can never be changed, in response to any evidence. Probability 1 is a lot harder to get to with a human brain than you would think.

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 Absolute Authority, 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.
The Controls are Lying: A Note on the Memetic Hazards of Video Games [Link]
by Nic_Smith — 2011-12-19T05:25:26.835Z

Chris Pruett writes on the Robot Invader blog:

Good player handling code is often smoke and mirrors; the player presses buttons and sees a reasonable result, but in between those two operations a whole lot of code is working to ensure that the result is the best of many potential results. For example, my friend Greggman discovered that Mario 3's jumping rules change depending on whether or not a level has slopes in it. Halo's targeting reticle famously slows as it passes over an enemy to make it easier to target with an analog stick without using an auto-aim system. When Spider-Man swings, he certainly does not orient about the spot where his web connects to a building (at least, he didn't in the swinging system I wrote).

Good player handling code doesn't just translate the player's inputs into action, it tries to discern the player's intent. Once the intended action has been identified, if the rules of the game allow it, good player handling code makes the action happen–even if it means breaking the rules of the simulation a little. The goal of good handling code isn't to maintain a "correct" simulation, it's to provide a fun game. It sucks to miss a jump by three centimeters. It sucks to take the full force of a hit from a blow that visually missed. It sucks to swing into a brick wall at 80 miles per hour instead of continuing down the street. To the extent that the code can understand the player's intent, it should act on that intent rather than on the raw input. Do what I mean, not what I say.

I suppose this explains why I am better at arcade bowling games than I am at actual bowling. More seriously, while I had some vague awareness of this, I am slightly surprised at the breadth (Mario 3!?) and depth to which this "control re-interpretation" takes place.
The Generalized Anti-Pascal Principle: Utility Convergence of Infinitesimal Probabilities
by jacob_cannell — 2011-12-18T23:47:31.817Z

Edit: Added clarification of the limit in response to gwern's comment.

Recently I've found several instances of this Pascal Mugging/Wager problem come up, and I'm somewhat surprised that 1.) a number of people apparently still consider it a real issue, and 2.) the rest don't rely on a standard goto defense.

For recent examples, see this post by MileyCyrus, or this post from XiXiDu (where I reply with unbounded utility functions, which is not the general solution).

I encountered this issue again while reading through a fascinating discussion thread on John Baez's blog from earlier this year where Greg Egan jumped in with a "Yudkowsky/Bostrom" criticism:

The Yudkowsky/Bostrom strategy is to contrive probabilities for immensely unlikely scenarios, and adjust the figures until the expectation value for the benefits of working on — or donating to — their particular pet projects exceed the benefits of doing anything else. Combined with the appeal to vanity of “saving the universe”, some people apparently find this irresistible, but frankly, their attempt to prescribe what rational altruists should be doing with their time and money is just laughable, and it’s a shame you’ve given it so much air time.

In short, Egan is indirectly accusing SIAI and FHI of Pascal Mugging(among else): something serious indeed. Egan in particular presents the following (presumably Yudkowsky) quote as evidence:

Anyway: In terms of expected utility maximization, even large probabilities of jumping the interval between a universe-history in which 95% of existing biological species survive Earth’s 21st century, versus a universe-history where 80% of species survive, are just about impossible to trade off against tiny probabilities of jumping the interval between interesting universe-histories, versus boring ones where intelligent life goes extinct, or the wrong sort of AI self-improves.

Yudkowsky responds with his Pascal's Wager Fallacy Fallacy, and points out that in fact he agrees there is no case for investing in defense against highly improbable existential risks:

And I don’t think the odds of us being wiped out by badly done AI are small. I think they’re easily larger than 10%. And if you can carry a qualitative argument that the probability is under, say, 1%, then that means AI

...
Inverse p-zombies: the other direction in the Hard Problem of Consciousness
by gwern — 2011-12-18T21:32:26.850Z

402. "Nothing is so certain as that I possess consciousness." In that case, why shouldn't I let the matter rest? This certainty is like a mighty force whose point of application does not move, and so no work is accomplished by it.

403. Remember: most people say one feels nothing under anaesthetic. But some say: It could be that one feels, and simply forgets it completely.

--Wittgenstein, Zettel (1929-1948)

I offer for LW's consideration the interesting 2008 paper "Inverse zombies, anesthesia awareness, and the hard problem of unconsciousness" (Mashour & LaRock; NCBI); the abstract:

Philosophical (p-) zombies are constructs that possess all of the behavioral features and responses of a sentient human being, yet are not conscious. P-zombies are intimately linked to the hard problem of consciousness and have been invoked as arguments against physicalist approaches. But what if we were to invert the characteristics of p-zombies? Such an inverse (i-) zombie would possess all of the behavioral features and responses of an insensate being, yet would nonetheless be conscious. While p-zombies are logically possible but naturally improbable, an approximation of i-zombies actually exists: individuals experiencing what is referred to as "anesthesia awareness." Patients under general anesthesia may be intubated (preventing speech), paralyzed (preventing movement), and narcotized (minimizing response to nociceptive stimuli). Thus, they appear--and typically are--unconscious. In 1-2 cases/1000, however, patients may be aware of intraoperative events, sometimes without any objective indices. Furthermore, a much higher percentage of patients (22% in a recent study) may have the subjective experience of dreaming during general anesthesia. P-zombies confront us with the hard problem of consciousness--how do we explain the presence of qualia? I-zombies present a more practical problem--how do we detect the presence of qualia? The current investigation compares p-zombies to i-zombies and explores the "hard problem" of unconsciousness with a focus on anesthesia awareness.

3. Inverse zombies

What would an inverse (i-) zombie look like? Since the p-zombie is a creature that behaves and responds as if it were conscious when in fact it is unconscious, we posit an i-zombie to be a creature that appears to be unconscious when in fact it is conscious. Any query of a p-zombie eli

...