trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Complexity: inherent, created, and hidden
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2011-09-14T14:33:40.456Z

Related to: inferential distance, fun theory sequence.

“The arrow of human history…points towards larger quantities of non-zero-sumness. As history progresses, human beings find themselves playing non-zero-sum games with more and more other human beings. Interdependence expands, and social complexity grows in scope and depth.” (Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.)

What does it mean for a human society to be more complex? Where does new information come from, and where in the system is it stored? What does it mean for everyday people to live in a simple versus a complex society?

There are certain kinds of complexity that are inherent in the environment: that existed before there were human societies at all, and would go on existing without those societies. Even the simplest human society needs to be able to adapt to these factors in order to survive. For example: climate and weather are necessary features of the planet, and humans still spend huge amounts of resources dealing with changing seasons, droughts, and the extremes of heat and cold. Certain plants grow in certain types of soil, and different animals have different migratory patterns. Even the most basic hunter-gatherer groups needed to store and pass on knowledge of these patterns.

But even early human societies had a lot more than the minimum amount of knowledge required to live in a particular environment. Cultural complexity, in the form of traditions, conventions, rituals, and social roles, added to technological complexity, in the form of tools designed for particular purposes. Living in an agricultural society with division of labour and various different social roles required children to learn more than if they had been born to a small hunter-gatherer band. And although everyone in a village might have the same knowledge about the world, it was (probably) no longer possible for all the procedural skills taught and passed on in a given group to be mastered by a single person. (Imagine learning all the skills to be a farmer, carpenter, metalworker, weaver, baker, potter, and probably a half-dozen other things.)

This would have been the real beginning of Robert Wright’s interdependence and non-zero-sum interactions. No individual could possess all of the knowledge/complexity of their society, but every individual would benefit from its existence, at the ...
Rules of productivity (mostly links)
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-09-14T09:31:59.459Z

Rules of productivity-- summarizes research showing that overtime is destructive (except possibly in short bursts with time allowed for recovery), small undistracted teams do best, etc. Perhaps the most interesting detail for rationality is the idea that tired people can't judge how much their work has deteriorated.

Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency. The title pretty much covers it. A review which covers many points, but doesn't include the book's emphasis on rational deadlines.
New prisoner's dilemma and chicken tournament
by benelliott — 2011-09-14T08:00:18.385Z

EDIT: As I recieved fewer than 8 entries for both tournaments, I will not be running them. My apologies to those who did enter.

After the success of prase's Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma tournament, a number of people expressed interest in some variations on the initial tournament, including one with a reputation system from one match to the next. I've been trying to teach myself to program over the past few months, so I thought I'd have a go at implementing it.

As well as the vanilla p.d. competition, I thought I'd run a second tournament based on the game of chicken, which is similar to p.d. but reverses the last two pay-offs, making it better (at least in the short term) to co-operate with a defector. This obviously creates a greater potential for bully strategies (although you can also bully in p.d.), so I thought it might have some interesting consequences with a reputation system.

Exact rules are as follows:

Anybody who wants may enter up to one strategy in each competition (you needn't enter the same strategy in both). You may also enter only one contest if you don't want to enter both. Strategies should be entered by private message to me, and should have names. I will accept duplicates.

Strategies should be described in English, I may need to ask for clarification. A strategy should be able to tell me whether your program co-operates or defects in any situation, and should be computable.

There will be two tournaments, Prisoner's Dilemma and Chicken. Each tournament will divide up into matches, and each match into rounds.

In a round each strategy chooses which to co-operate or defect. The pay-offs for Prisoner's Dilemma are the same as the previous tournament, 4 each if both co-operate, 1 each if both defect otherwise 7 for the defector and 0 for the co-operator. In Chicken the mutual defection pay-off is replaced with a 7 point penalty, the other pay-offs are unchanged.

In order to make its decision, each strategy is allowed to know the entire history of this match, as well as any prior matches which included either it or its opponent. It does not have access to any other matches, to its opponents identity or to its opponents source code.

Each match has its length determined by an exponential distribution with each round having a 1% chance of being the last. At the end of the tournament, scores will be adjusted to make up for some programs playing more

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Rationality tip: Predict your comment karma
by Will_Newsome — 2011-09-14T05:07:41.361Z

For the last few months I've taken up the habit of explicitly predicting how much karma I'll get for each of my contributions on LW. I picked up the habit of doing so for Main posts back in the Visiting Fellows program, but I've found that doing it for comments is way more informative.

It forces you to build decent models of your audience and their social psychology, the game theoretic details of each particular situation, how information cascades should be expected to work, your overall memetic environment, etc. It also forces you to be reflective and to expand on your gut feeling of "people will upvote this a lot" or "people will downvote this a little bit"; it forces you to think through more specifically why you expect that, and how your contributions should be expected to shape the minds of your audience on average.

It also makes it easier to notice confusion. When one of my comments gets downvoted to -6 when I expected -3 then I know some part of my model is wrong; or, as is often the case, it will get voted back up to -3 within a few hours.

Having powerful intuitive models of social psychology is important for navigating disagreement. It helps you realize when people are agreeing or disagreeing for reasons they don't want to state explicitly, why they would find certain lines of argument more or less compelling, why they would feel justified in supporting or criticizing certain social norms, what underlying tensions they feel that cause them to respond in a certain way, etc, which is important for getting the maximum amount of evidence from your interactions. All the information in the world won't help you if you can't interpret it correctly.

Doing it well also makes you look cool. When I write from a social psychological perspective I get significantly more karma. And I can help people express things that they don't find easy to explicitly express, which is infinitely more important than karma. When you're taking into account not only people's words but the generators of people's words you get an automatic reflectivity bonus. Obviously, looking at their actual words is a prerequisite and is also an extremely important habit of sane communication.

Most importantly, gaining explicit knowledge of everyday social psychology is like explicitly understanding a huge portion of the world that you already knew. This is often a really fun experience.

There are a lot...
[SEQ RERUN] Recommended Rationalist Reading
by MinibearRex — 2011-09-14T04:13:38.607Z

Today's post, Recommended Rationalist Reading was originally published on 01 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Book recommendations by Eliezer and readers.

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 Rationalization, 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.
Public advisory: Borna virus and mental disease
by Will_Newsome — 2011-09-14T04:11:48.136Z

One of the causes of schizophrenia might be the Borna disease virus. There are probably other communicable viruses that contribute to schizophrenia, seeing as how craziness is an attractor in mindspace and what not. This may or may not be a good reason to change some of your habits, but I figured I'd at least clue people in on a possible danger. I think there may be an abnormally high number of people around here that value their minds more than their lives.

Most people shouldn't worry about it, but those who are already at high risk might want to look further? It's unclear to me what the value of information is here.

Information on the subject is sort of difficult to come by. There's not much of it. The few papers I've read were interesting but many were many decades old. This paper acts as a decent intro to Borna-specific stuff: http://cmr.asm.org/cgi/content/full/16/3/534?view=long&pmid=12857781 . Priors are hard to get.

This is half-supposed to be a set-up to a joke about the "Borna rule" of dating crazy people but I can't think of a good punch-line.
[HELP] Critique My Personal Statement
by RobertLumley — 2011-09-14T01:30:48.410Z

It's not exactly related to LessWrong, but I would love you all's input in my personal statement. I'll be applying to medical school in a few weeks and would appreciate any feedback you all have on my personal statement. It's a very rough draft, so any thoughts are welcome. I'm probably about 125 words short of the maximum right now (The maximum is actually 5300 characters, and I'm around 4000)

Some part of me has always wanted to be a doctor. Sure, when I was six, that was said with the same youthful naivety with which so many children say it. Over the years, that drive has waxed and waned, but I never entirely let go of it. As I grew up, I became more and more interested in the sciences, but I enjoyed everything; I couldn’t narrow it down to just one field. In college, I looked for research opportunities everywhere I could. I tremendously enjoyed working in both of the labs in which I worked, but while cogently I understood that the research I was working on was an important part of medicine, I wanted a more direct connection to the patients I was helping. Ultimately, I know that I want to work in a job where I have an empathic connection to the work I’m doing. I’ve always empathized well, and I enjoy any chance I have to help someone.

I never truly realized on a personal level how powerful such a connection is until last fall, when doctors discovered a pilocytic astrocytoma in my now-girlfriend’s spine. Meredith’s tumor stretched over nine vertebrae, and she was facing life-threatening spinal surgery, as well as dealing with the physical symptoms of the tumor. As I helped her cope with the stress and fear of the operation, I had the horrific realization that people actually have to go through what she was facing. Of course, I understood this on a logical level – X people are diagnosed with disease Y over given period of time Z – but I never realized until then what that could mean for them on a personal level. I couldn’t stand the thought of anyone dealing with the emotional and physical pain that she was going through, and I knew I wanted to help other people avoid tha

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[HELP] Critique My Personal Statement
by RobertLumley — 2011-09-14T01:29:32.894Z

It's not exactly related to LessWrong, but I would love you all's input in my personal statement. I'll be applying to medical school in a few weeks and would appreciate any feedback you all have on my personal statement. It's a very rough draft, so any thoughts are welcome. I'm probably about 125 words short of the maximum right now (The maximum is actually 5300 characters, and I'm around 4000)

Some part of me has always wanted to be a doctor. Sure, when I was six, that was said with the same youthful naivety with which so many children say it. Over the years, that drive has waxed and waned, but I never entirely let go of it. As I grew up, I became more and more interested in the sciences, but I enjoyed everything; I couldn’t narrow it down to just one field. In college, I looked for research opportunities everywhere I could. I tremendously enjoyed working in both of the labs in which I worked, but while cogently I understood that the research I was working on was an important part of medicine, I wanted a more direct connection to the patients I was helping. Ultimately, I know that I want to work in a job where I have an empathic connection to the work I’m doing. I’ve always empathized well, and I enjoy any chance I have to help someone.

I never truly realized on a personal level how powerful such a connection is until last fall, when doctors discovered a pilocytic astrocytoma in my now-girlfriend’s spine. Meredith’s tumor stretched over nine vertebrae, and she was facing life-threatening spinal surgery, as well as dealing with the physical symptoms of the tumor. As I helped her cope with the stress and fear of the operation, I had the horrific realization that people actually have to go through what she was facing. Of course, I understood this on a logical level – X people are diagnosed with disease Y over given period of time Z – but I never realized until then what that could mean for them on a personal level. I couldn’t stand the thought of anyone dealing with the emotional and physical pain that she was going through, and I knew I wanted to help other people avoid tha

...
'An objective defense of Bayesianism'
by lukeprog — 2011-09-13T22:04:19.115Z

Recently, Hans Leitgeb and Richard Pettigrew have published a novel defense of Bayesianism:

An Objective Defense of Bayesianism I: Measuring Inaccuracy

One of the fundamental problems of epistemology is to say when the evidence in an agent’s possession justiﬁes the beliefs she holds. In this paper and its sequel, we defend the Bayesian solution to this problem by appealing to the following fundamental norm:

Accuracy: An epistemic agent ought to minimize the inaccuracy of her partial beliefs.

In this paper, we make this norm mathematically precise in various ways. We describe three epistemic dilemmas that an agent might face if she attempts to follow Accuracy, and we show that the only inaccuracy measures that do not give rise to such dilemmas are the quadratic inaccuracy measures. In the sequel, we derive the main tenets of Bayesianism from the relevant mathematical versions of Accuracy to which this characterization of the legitimate inaccuracy measures gives rise, but we also show that unless the requirement of Rigidity is imposed from the start, Jeﬀrey conditionalization has to be replaced by a diﬀerent method of update in order for Accuracy to be satisﬁed.

An Objective Defense of Bayesianism II: The Consequences of Minimizing Inaccuracy

In this article and its prequel, we derive Bayesianism from the following norm: Accuracy—an agent ought to minimize the inaccuracy of her partial beliefs. In the prequel, we make the norm mathematically precise; in this article, we derive its consequences. We show that the two core tenets of Bayesianism follow from Accuracy, while the characteristic claim of Objective Bayesianism follows from Accuracy together with an extra assumption. Finally, we show that Jeffrey Conditionalization violates Accuracy unless Rigidity is assumed, and we describe the alternative updating rule that Accuracy mandates in the absence of Rigidity.

Richard Pettigrew has also written an excellent introduction to probability.
'Decision-theoretic paradoxes as voting paradoxes'
by lukeprog — 2011-09-13T21:56:12.415Z

Briggs (2010) may be of interest to LWers. Opening:

It is a platitude among decision theorists that agents should choose their actions so as to maximize expected value. But exactly how to define expected value is contentious. Evidential decision theory (henceforth EDT), causal decision theory (henceforth CDT), and a theory proposed by Ralph Wedgwood that I will call benchmark theory (BT) all advise agents to maximize different types of expected value. Consequently, their verdicts sometimes conflict. In certain famous cases of conflict — medical Newcomb problems — CDT and BT seem to get things right, while EDT seems to get things wrong. In other cases of conflict, including some recent examples suggested by Egan 2007, EDT and BT seem to get things right, while CDT seems to get things wrong. In still other cases, EDT and CDT seem to get things right, while BT gets things wrong.

It’s no accident, I claim, that all three decision theories are subject to counterexamples. Decision rules can be reinterpreted as voting rules, where the voters are the agent’s possible future selves. The problematic examples have the structure of voting paradoxes. Just as voting paradoxes show that no voting rule can do everything we want, decision-theoretic paradoxes show that no decision rule can do everything we want. Luckily, the so-called “tickle defense” establishes that EDT, CDT, and BT will do everything we want in a wide range of situations. Most decision situations, I argue, are analogues of voting situations in which the voters unanimously adopt the same set of preferences. In such situations, all plausible voting rules and all plausible decision rules agree.
When work is privilege of the rich?
by  — 2011-09-13T20:02:20.438Z

An acquaintance sent me a PM with a link to two interesting entries on the Halfsigma blog.

The future when people will play WoW for a living.

...

"As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.

We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.

This sort of work isn't so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another -- all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff."

The blogger comments this:

He makes it sound a lot better than it is. Most people lack the IQ to “write books” or “educate and inspire one another.” Of course, even the low IQ can solve problems, but the only problems they can solve seem trivial and ridiculously easy to those of higher IQs.

Anyway, there’s already slave labor in China making virtual gold playing World of Warcraft. So it’s not too much of a leap of imagination to think that one day, the U.S. government will pay its citizens to do pointless virtual activities (but which, through clever programming, seem meaningful to the participants).

Also, it’s humorous to note that the current mode of thinking is that poor people have to work and rich people live a life of leisure. But in the future, it’s likely that working at real jobs will be a luxury for the rich, and the masses will play computer games for a living.

Jobs and status:

anonmouse writes:

"The "masses" mostly waste away in cubicles doing makework. The elite do things like install mosquito nets in sunny third world locales"

I assume that anonmouse is referring to activities like the Peace Corps in which young people from well-off families do work in third world countries that would be considered menial low-wage low-status work if done in the United States.

This demonstrates two points.

(1) If people are convinced tha

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[SEQ RERUN] Rationalization
by MinibearRex — 2011-09-13T03:47:53.463Z

Today's post, Rationalization was originally published on 30 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Rationality works forward from evidence to conclusions. Rationalization tries in vain to work backward from favourable conclusions to the evidence. But you cannot rationalize what is not already rational. It is as if "lying" were called "truthization".

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 What Evidence Filtered Evidence?, 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.