trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Superstimuli, setpoints, and obesity
by taw — 2010-02-26T23:59:15.227Z

Related to: Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych, Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization.

The main proximate cause of increase in human weight over the last few decades is over-eating - other factors like decreased energy need due to less active lifestyle seem at best secondary if relevant at all. The big question is what misregulates homeostatic system controlling food intake towards higher calorie consumption?

The most common accepted answer is some sort of superstimulus theory - modern food is so tasty people find it irresistible. This seems backwards to me in its basic assumption - almost any "traditional" food seems to taste better than almost any "modern" food.

It is as easy to construct the opposite theory of tastiness set point - tastiness is some estimate of nutritional value of food - more nutritious food should taste better than less nutritious food. So according to the theory - if you eat very tasty food, your appetite thinks it's highly nutritious, and demands less of it; and if you eat bland tasteless food - your appetite underestimates its nutritious content and demands too much of it.

It's not even obvious that your appetite is "wrong" - if you need certain amount of nutritionally balanced food, and all you can gets is nutritionally balanced food with a lot of added sugar - the best thing is eating more and getting all the micro-nutrients needed in spite of excess calories. Maybe it is not confused at all, just doing its best in a bad situation, and prioritizes evolutionarily common threat of too little micronutrients over evolutionarily less common threat of excess calories.

As some extra evidence - it's a fact that poor people with narrower choice of food are more obese than rich people with wider choice of food. If everyone buys the tastier food they can afford, superstimulus theory says rich should be more obese, setpoint theory says poor should be more obese.

Is there any way in which setpoint theory is more wrong than superstimulus theory?
Improving The Akrasia Hypothesis
by pjeby — 2010-02-26T20:45:19.942Z

Abstract: This article proposes a hypothesis that effective anti-akrasia methods operate by reducing or eliminating the activation of conflicting voluntary motor programs at the time the user's desired action is to be carried out, or by reducing or eliminating the negative effects of managing the conflict. This hypothesis is consistent with the notion of "ego depletion" (willpower burnout) being driven by the need to consciously manage conflicting motor programs. It also supports a straightforward explanation of why different individuals will fare better with some anti-akrasia methods than others, and provides a framework for both classifying existing methods, and generating new ones. Finally, it demonstrates why no single technique can be a panacea, and shows how the common problems of certain methods shape the form of both the self-help industry, and most people's experiences with it.

The Hypothesis

Recently, orthonormal posted an Akrasia Tactics Review, collecting data from LessWrong members on their results using different anti-akrasia techniques. And although I couldn't quite put my finger on it at first, something about the review (and the discussion around it) was bothering me.

See, I've never been fond of the idea that "different things work for different people". As a predictive hypothesis, after all, this is only slightly more useful than saying "a wizard did it". It says nothing about how (or why) different things work, and therefore gives you no basis to select which different things might work for which different people.

For that reason, it kind of bugs me whenever I see discussion and advocacy of "different things", independent of any framework for classifying those things in a way that would help "different people" select or design the "different things" that would "work for" them. (In fact, this is a pretty big factor in why I'm a self-help writer/speaker in the first place!)

So in this post, I want to share two slightly better working hypotheses for akrasia technique classification than "different things work for different people":

Akrasia happens when there are conflicting active voluntary motor programs, and the opposite of akrasia is either the absence of such conflict, or a manageable quantity of it.

The nature and source of the specific motor program conflicts are individual, so the effectivenes

...
Creating a Less Wrong prediction market
by Kevin — 2010-02-26T11:48:36.092Z

I will bet 500 karma that a funny picture thread will appear on Less Wrong within one year. If anyone is interested in the bet, we can better define terms.

Right now the LW software doesn't support karma transfers. Until it does and we can develop a more robust prediction market, let's just record the karma transfers on the wiki page that already exists for this purpose.

I will also give 100 karma to anyone that donates $10 to the SIAI before the current fundraising campaign is over.

10,000 karma for the first person with a karma transfer source code patch?
What is Bayesianism?
by Kaj_Sotala — 2010-02-26T07:43:53.375Z

This article is an attempt to summarize basic material, and thus probably won't have anything new for the hard core posting crowd. It'd be interesting to know whether you think there's anything essential I missed, though.

You've probably seen the word 'Bayesian' used a lot on this site, but may be a bit uncertain of what exactly we mean by that. You may have read the intuitive explanation, but that only seems to explain a certain math formula. There's a wiki entry about "Bayesian", but that doesn't help much. And the LW usage seems different from just the "Bayesian and frequentist statistics" thing, too. As far as I can tell, there's no article explicitly defining what's meant by Bayesianism. The core ideas are sprinkled across a large amount of posts, 'Bayesian' has its own tag, but there's not a single post that explicitly comes out to make the connections and say "this is Bayesianism". So let me try to offer my definition, which boils Bayesianism down to three core tenets.
We'll start with a brief example, illustrating Bayes' theorem. Suppose you are a doctor, and a patient comes to you, complaining about a headache. Further suppose that there are two reasons for why people get headaches: they might have a brain tumor, or they might have a cold. A brain tumor always causes a headache, but exceedingly few people have a brain tumor. In contrast, a headache is rarely a symptom for cold, but most people manage to catch a cold every single year. Given no other information, do you think it more likely that the headache is caused by a tumor, or by a cold?
If you thought a cold was more likely, well, that was the answer I was after. Even if a brain tumor caused a headache every time, and a cold caused a headache only one per cent of the time (say), having a cold is so much more common that it's going to cause a lot more headaches than brain tumors do. Bayes' theorem, basically, says that if cause A might be the reason for symptom X, then we have to take into account both the probability that A caused X (found, roughly, by multiplying the frequency of A with the chance that A causes X) and the probability that anything else caused X. (For a thorough mathematical treatment of Bayes' theorem, see Eliezer's Intuitive Explanation.)
There should be nothing surprising about that, of course. Suppose you're outside, and you see a person running. They might be running for the ...
The Last Days of the Singularity Challenge
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2010-02-26T03:46:27.287Z

From Michael Anissimov on the Singularity Institute blog:

Thanks to generous contributions by our donors, we are only $11,840 away from fulfilling our $100,000 goal for the 2010 Singularity Research Challenge. For every dollar you contribute to SIAI, another dollar is contributed by our matching donors, who have pledged to match all contributions made before February 28th up to $100,000. That means that this Sunday is your final chance to donate for maximum impact.

Funds from the challenge campaign will be used to support all SIAI activities: our core staff, the Singularity Summit, the Visiting Fellows program, and more. Donors can earmark their funds for specific grant proposals, many of which are targeted towards academic paper-writing, or just contribute to our general fund

[Continue reading at the Singularity Institute blog.]
"Outside View!" as Conversation-Halter
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2010-02-24T05:53:34.133Z

Followup to: The Outside View's Domain, Conversation Halters
Reply to: Reference class of the unclassreferenceable

In "conversation halters", I pointed out a number of arguments which are particularly pernicious, not just because of their inherent flaws, but because they attempt to chop off further debate - an "argument stops here!" traffic sign, with some implicit penalty (at least in the mind of the speaker) for trying to continue further.

This is not the right traffic signal to send, unless the state of knowledge is such as to make an actual halt a good idea. Maybe if you've got a replicable, replicated series of experiments that squarely target the issue and settle it with strong significance and large effect sizes (or great power and null effects), you could say, "Now we know." Or if the other is blatantly privileging the hypothesis - starting with something improbable, and offering no positive evidence to believe it - then it may be time to throw up hands and walk away. (Privileging the hypothesis is the state people tend to be driven to, when they start with a bad idea and then witness the defeat of all the positive arguments they thought they had.) Or you could simply run out of time, but then you just say, "I'm out of time", not "here the gathering of arguments should end."

But there's also another justification for ending argument-gathering that has recently seen some advocacy on Less Wrong.

An experimental group of subjects were asked to describe highly specific plans for their Christmas shopping: Where, when, and how. On average, this group expected to finish shopping more than a week before Christmas. Another group was simply asked when they expected to finish their Christmas shopping, with an average response of 4 days. Both groups finished an average of 3 days before Christmas. Similarly, Japanese students who expected to finish their essays 10 days before deadline, actually finished 1 day before deadline; and when asked when they had previously completed similar tasks, replied, "1 day before deadline." (See this post.)

Those and similar experiments seem to show us a class of cases where you can do better by asking a certain specific question and then halting: Namely, the students could have produced better estimates by asking themselves "When did I finish last time?" and ...
Fictitious sentiments
by KatjaGrace — 2010-02-23T18:46:28.000Z

Music often fills me with the feeling that I care about certain things. Idealistic songs make me feel like I will go out and support some cause or another. Romantic songs make me feel that I would do just about anything for someone. Other songs make me feel passionately motivated to go and do amazing things. Some songs probably even make me feel patriotic, though I only infer that from the completely unfamiliar feeling that sometimes accompanies them.

The plausibility of these feelings is really diminished by the music though. If I really cared so much about some cause or person, I would go and pursue the cause or do whatever the person wanted me to, not lie around on my bed relishing the emotional high of feeling like I wanted to. The same goes for movies. The fact that you are sitting there cheering on the good guy, not out in the world doing something good, shows that you don’t really support his principles. Unless the movie is about some guy who gallantly cheers on worthy characters in movies.
Dignity
by KatjaGrace — 2010-02-22T17:16:02.000Z

Dignity is apparently big in parts of ethics, particularly as a reason to stop others doing anything ‘unnatural’ regarding their bodies, such as selling their organs, modifying themselves or reproducing in unusual ways. Dignity apparently belongs to you except that you aren’t allowed to sell it or renounce it. Nobody who finds it important seems keen to give it a precise meaning. So I wondered if there was some definition floating around that would sensibly warrant the claims that dignity is important and is imperiled by futuristic behaviours.

These are the ones I came across variations on often:

The state or quality of being worthy of respect

An innate moral worthiness, often considered specific to homo sapiens.

Being respected by other people is sure handy, but so are all the other things we trade off against one another at our own whims. Money is great too for instance, but it’s no sin to diminish your wealth. Plus plenty of things people already do make other people respect them less, without anyone thinking there’s some ethical case for banning them. Where are the papers condemning being employed as a cleaner, making jokes that aren’t very funny, or drunkenly revealing your embarrassing desires? The mere act of failing to become well read and stylishly dressed is an affront to your personal dignity.

This may seem silly; surely when people argue about dignity in ethics they are talking about the other, higher definition – the innate worthiness that humans have, not some concrete fact about how others treat you. Apparently not though. When people discuss organ donation for instance, there is no increased likelihood of ceasing to be human and losing whatever dollop of inherent worth that comes with it during the operation just because cash was exchanged. Just plain old risk that people will think ill of you if you sell yourself.

The second definition, if it innately applies to humans without consideration for their characteristics, is presumably harder to lose. It’s also impossible to use. How you are treated by people is determined by what those people think of you. You can have as much immeasurable innate worthiness as you like; you will still be spat on if people disagree with reality, which they probably will with no faculties for perceiving innate moral values. Reality doesn’t offer any perks to being...
Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych
by Alicorn — 2010-02-22T01:53:07.125Z

Daniel Dennett has advanced the opinion that the evolutionary purpose of the cuteness response in humans is to make us respond positively to babies. This does seem plausible. Babies are pretty cute, after all. It's a tempting explanation.

Here is one of the cutest baby pictures I found on a Google search.

And this is a bunny.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the bunny is about 75,119 times cuter than the baby.

Now, bunnies are not evolutionarily important for humans to like and want to nurture. In fact, bunnies are edible. By rights, my evolutionary response to the bunny should be "mmm, needs a sprig of rosemary and thirty minutes on a spit". But instead, that bunny - and not the baby or any other baby I've seen - strikes the epicenter of my cuteness response, and being more baby-like along any dimension would not improve the bunny. It would not look better bald. It would not be improved with little round humanlike ears. It would not be more precious with thumbs, easier to love if it had no tail, more adorable if it were enlarged to weigh about seven pounds.

If "awwww" is a response designed to make me love human babies and everything else that makes me go "awwww" is a mere side effect of that engineered reaction, it is drastically misaimed. Other responses for which we have similar evolutionary psychology explanations don't seem badly targeted in this way. If they miss their supposed objects at all, at least it's not in most people. (Furries, for instance, exist, but they're not a common variation on human sexual interest - the most generally applicable superstimuli for sexiness look like at-least-superficially healthy, mature humans with prominent human sexual characteristics.) We've invested enough energy into transforming our food landscape that we can happily eat virtual poison, but that's a departure from the ancestral environment - bunnies? All natural, every whisker.1

It is embarrassingly easy to come up with evolutionary psychology stories to explain little segments of data and have it sound good to a surface understanding of how evolution works. Why are babies cute? They have to be, so we'll take care of them. And then someone with a slightly better cause and effect understanding turns it right-side-up, as Dennett has, and then it sounds really clever. ...
Woo!
by BenAlbahari — 2010-02-21T08:19:58.587Z

[MAJOR UPDATE: I have changed "Woo" to "Pitch" everywhere on the website and on this post due to extensive feedback from everyone. Thanks!]

I'm adding rhetorical-device/common-argument/argument-fallacy tags to the expert quotes on TakeOnIt and calling them "pitches".

The list of pitches so far is here.

Arguments have common patterns. The most notorious of these are rhetorical devices and argument fallacies. While these techniques are obviously not new and are published on several sites on the internet, they are woefully under appreciated by most people. I contend that this is partly because:

Argument fallacies and rhetorical devices can be too general. Most of their real-world usage occurs in a larger number of specialized forms. These specialized forms are often unlabeled yet are intuitively recognized and prey on our cognitive biases. It takes a lot of cognitive energy to consciously connect the general form(s) to the specialized form.

The sites about argument fallacies and rhetorical devices are not integrated with debate sites. A google for argument fallacies will give you pages with stagnant lists of fallacies where each one has perhaps a couple of historical or hypothetical applications of the fallacy. Why can't I see every debate where some expert or influential person used that fallacy, and why can't I see every fallacy used in a debate?

To solve these problems, I'm introducing the concept of a "pitch". Any quote from an expert or influential person on TakeOnIt can now be tagged with a pitch. A pitch is a label for a commonly used argument or strategy to persuade. You can think of pitches as the "tv tropes of argumentation". Here's some examples:

"The Consensus Pitch"
"The Patriot Pitch"
"The Convert Pitch"

Pitches encompass both argument fallacies and rhetorical devices. However, they allow for greater specialization. For example, there is the "The Evil Corporation Pitch". On a more minor note, I personally think the names should be simple and ideally guessable from the name alone (e.g. maybe it's just me, but "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" feels like it has some Web 2.0 marketing issues).

Eliezer's "Conversation Halters" and Robin Hanson's "Contrarian Excuses" are good candidates for pitches. (My impression is the "halters" and "excuses" listed are perhaps too specialized for pitches, but in any case at mini...
Case study: abuse of frequentist statistics
by Cyan — 2010-02-21T06:35:24.216Z

Recently, a colleague was reviewing an article whose key justification rested on some statistics that seemed dodgy to him, so he came to me for advice. (I guess my boss, the resident statistician, was out of his office.) Now, I'm no expert in frequentist statistics. My formal schooling in frequentist statistics comes from my undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum -- I wouldn't rely on it for consulting. But I've been working for someone who is essentially a frequentist for a year and a half, so I've had some hands-on experience. My boss hired me on the strength of my experience with Bayesian statistics, which I taught myself in grad school, and one thing reading the Bayesian literature voraciously will equip you for is critiquing frequentist statistics. So I felt competent enough to take a look.1

The article compared an old, trusted experimental method with the authors' new method; the authors sought to show that the new method gave the same results on average as the trusted method. They performed three replicates using the trusted method and three replicates using the new method; each replicate generated a real-valued data point. They did this in nine different conditions, and for each condition, they did a statistical hypothesis test. (I'm going to lean heavily on Wikipedia for explanations of the jargon terms I'm using, so this post is actually a lot longer than it appears on the page. If you don't feel like following along, the punch line is three paragraphs down, last sentence.)

The authors used what's called a Mann-Whitney U test, which, in simplified terms, aims to determine if two sets of data come from different distributions. The essential thing to know about this test is that it doesn't depend on the actual data except insofar as those data determine the ranks of the data points when the two data sets are combined. That is, it throws away most of the data, in the sense that data sets that generate the same ranking are equivalent under the test. The rationale for doing this is that it makes the test "non-parametric" -- you don't need to assume a particular form for the probability density when all you look at are the ranks.

The output of a statistical hypothesis test is a p-value; one pre-establishes a threshold for statistical significance, and if the th...
Akrasia Tactics Review
by orthonormal — 2010-02-21T04:25:49.130Z

I recently had occasion to review some of the akrasia tricks I've found on Less Wrong, and it occurred to me that there's probably quite a lot of others who've tried them as well. Perhaps it's a good idea to organize the experiences of a couple dozen procrastinating rationalists?

Therefore, I'll aggregate any such data you provide in the comments, according to the following scheme:

Note which trick you've tried. If it's something that's not yet on the list below, please provide a link and I'll add it; if there's not a link for it anywhere, you can describe it in your comment and I'll link that.

Give your experience with it a score from -10 to +10 (0 if it didn't change the status quo, 10 if it ended your akrasia problems forever with no side effects, negative scores if it actually made your life worse, -10 if it nearly killed you); if you don't do so, I'll suggest a score for you based on what else you say.

Describe your experience with it, including any significant side effects.

Every so often, I'll combine all the data back into the main post, listing average scores, sample size and common effects for each technique. Ready?

Here's the list of specific akrasia tactics I've found around LW (and also in outside links from here); again, if I'm missing one, let me know and I'll add it. Special thanks to Vladimir Golovin for the Share Your Anti-Akrasia Tricks post.

Without further ado, here are the results so far as I've recorded them, with average score, number of reviews, standard deviation and recurring comments.

3 or More Reviews:

Collaboration with Others: Average +7.7 (3 reviews) (SD 0.6)

No Multitasking: Average +6.0 (3 reviews) (SD 2.0); note variants

P.J. Eby's Motivation Trilogy: Average +5.8 (6 reviews) (SD 3.3)

Monoidealism: Average +8.0 (3 reviews) (SD 2.0)

"Just Do It": Average +4 (2 reviews) (SD 4.2)

Irresistible Instant Motivation: +3 (1 review)

Getting Things Done: Average +4.9 (7 reviews) (SD 2.6)

Regular Exercise: Average +4.4 (5 reviews) (SD 2.3)

Cripple your Internet: Average +4.2 (11 reviews) (SD 3.0)

LeechBlock: Average +5.4 (5 reviews) (SD 2.9); basically everyone who's tried has found it helpful.

PageAddict: +3 (1 review)

Freedom (Mac)

Melatonin: Average +4.0 (5 reviews) (SD 5.4); works well for some, others feel groggy the next day; might help to vary the dosage

Execute by Default: Average +3.7 (7 reviews) (SD 2.4); ...