trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Akrasia, hyperbolic discounting, and picoeconomics
by Paul Crowley — 2009-03-29T18:26:11.914Z

Akrasia is the tendency to act against your own long-term interests, and is a problem doubtless only too familiar to us all. In his book "Breakdown of Will", psychologist George C Ainslie sets out a theory of how akrasia arises and why we do the things we do to fight it. His extraordinary proposal takes insights given us by economics into how conflict is resolved and extends them to conflicts of different agencies within a single person, an approach he terms "picoeconomics". The foundation is a curious discovery from experiments on animals and people: the phenomenon of hyperbolic discounting.

We all instinctively assign a lower weight to a reward further in the future than one close at hand; this is "discounting the future". We don't just account for a slightly lower probability of recieving a more distant award, we value it at inherently less for being further away. It's been an active debate on overcomingbias.com whether such discounting can be rational at all. However, even if we allow that discounting can be rational, the way that we and other animals do it has a structure which is inherently irrational: the weighting we give to a future event is, roughly, inversely proportional to how far away it is. This is hyperbolic discounting, and it is an empirically very well confirmed result.

I say "inherently irrational" because it is inconsistent over time: the relative cost of a day's wait is considered differently whether that day's wait is near or far. Looking at a day a month from now, I'd sooner feel awake and alive in the morning than stay up all night reading comments on lesswrong.com. But when that evening comes, it's likely my preferences will reverse; the distance to the morning will be relatively greater, and so my happiness then will be discounted more strongly compared to my present enjoyment, and another groggy morning will await me. To my horror, my future self has different interests to my present self, as surely as if I knew the day a murder pill would be forced upon me.

If I knew that a murder pill really would be forced upon me on a certain date, after which I would want nothing more than to kill as many people as possible as gruesomly as possible, I could not sit idly by waiting for that day to come; I would want to do something now to prevent future carnage, because it is not what the me of today desires. I might attempt to frame myself for a...
Bay area OB/LW meetup, today, Sunday, March 29, at 5pm
by AnnaSalamon — 2009-03-29T12:10:52.862Z

Eliezer and Michael Vassar will be there, as will many other exciting LW-ers. Robin Gane-McCalla will be leading us in some rationality-related games. More information here.

Whether or not you can come today, you may want to sign up on our meet-up page, if you're local.
Ask LW: What questions to test in our rationality questionnaire?
by AnnaSalamon — 2009-03-29T12:03:50.210Z

We’ve had quite a bit of discussion around LW, and OB, on the questions:

Is there a robust trait, “rationality”, that predicts accurate belief-formation in humans?

If so, how can we measure it? And what kinds of training might help?

Also, does “rationality” in the above sense help people achieve other goals, such as income, happiness, personal growth, positive relationships, or world-saving?

Rationalists that we are, it’s time to put our experiments where our mouths are. So here’s my plan:

Step 1: Assemble a set of questions that might possibly help us understand: (a) how rational people are; (b) where they got that rationality from; and (c) what effects their rationality has on their lives. Include any questions that might help in the formulation of useful conjectures. After collecting the data, look for correlations, spaghetti-at-the-wall style. Try factor analysis.

Step 2 [Perhaps after iterating the quick-and-dirty Step 1 correlational approach a bit, to develop better candidate metrics]: Run some more careful experimental tests of various sorts, both with a “rationality training group” that meets for extended periods of time, and, if LW is willing, with shorter training experiments with randomized LW subgroups. Try to build an atmosphere and knowledge base on LW where more people go out and do useful experiments.
I have an initial questionnaire draft below, although I skipped the answer-choices for brevity. Please post your suggestions for informative questions include and/or to drop. As good suggestions come in, I’ll edit the questionnaire draft to include them. It would be nice if the questionnaire we actually use draws on the combined background of the LW community.
Please also post hypotheses for what kinds of correlations you expect to see and/or to not see, when the questionnaire is actually run. If you note your hypotheses now, before the data comes in, we’ll know we should increase our credence in your theory instead of just accusing you of hindsight bias.
Once we have a good questionnaire draft, I’ll put the questionnaire on the web and call for LW readers to fill out the questionnaire. I’ll also try to get people to fill out the questionnaire from some non-LW groups, e.g. Sta...
Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-29T10:49:08.001Z

It is a non-so-hidden agenda of this site, Less Wrong, that there are many causes which benefit from the spread of rationality—because it takes a little more rationality than usual to see their case, as a supporter, or even just a supportive bystander. Not just the obvious causes like atheism, but things like marijuana legalization—where you could wish that people were a bit more self-aware about their motives and the nature of signaling, and a bit more moved by inconvenient cold facts. The Institute Which May Not Be Named was merely an unusually extreme case of this, wherein it got to the point that after years of bogging down I threw up my hands and explicitly recursed on the job of creating rationalists.

But of course, not all the rationalists I create will be interested in my own project—and that's fine. You can't capture all the value you create, and trying can have poor side effects.

If the supporters of other causes are enlightened enough to think similarly...

Then all the causes which benefit from spreading rationality, can, perhaps, have something in the way of standardized material to which to point their supporters—a common task, centralized to save effort—and think of themselves as spreading a little rationality on the side. They won't capture all the value they create. And that's fine. They'll capture some of the value others create. Atheism has very little to do directly with marijuana legalization, but if both atheists and anti-Prohibitionists are willing to step back a bit and say a bit about the general, abstract principle of confronting a discomforting truth that interferes with a fine righteous tirade, then both atheism and marijuana legalization pick up some of the benefit from both efforts.

But this requires—I know I'm repeating myself here, but it's important—that you be willing not to capture all the value you create. It requires that, in the course of talking about rationality, you maintain an ability to temporarily shut up about your own cause even though it is the best cause ever. It requires that you don't regard those other causes, and they do not regard you, as competing for a limited supply of rationalists with a limited capacity for support; but, rather, creating more rationalists and increasing their capacity for support. You only...
Hygienic Anecdotes
by badger — 2009-03-29T05:46:07.838Z

Bayesians must condition their beliefs on all available evidence; it is not cheating to use less than ideal sources of information. However, this process also requires conditioning on the evidence for your evidence. Outside of academic journals, evidence is often difficult to trace back to the source and is dependent on our notoriously faulty memory. Given the consequences of low-fidelity copying, should rationalists trust evidence they can't remember the source of, even if they remember reading the primary source themselves? Should community members be expected to produce citations on demand?

This issue came to mind while trying to find a study I vaguely remembered about how the increased happiness of the religious could be explained by increased community involvement and while trying to factcheck PhilGoetz's now infamous anecdote about Steve Jobs. I started contemplating the standards for relaying highly relevant, but potentially wrong or distorted information.

Luckily factchecking is much easier in the age of the internet. Wikipedia serves as a universally accessible standard reference, and Google serves well for everything else. But sometimes my google-fu is not strong enough. So, I'll put this to the community: how should rationalists balance the tradeoff between neglecting evidence and propogating bad information?

Hygienic practices have been touched on before, but I haven't seen any consensus on this issue. Are the standards for what you personally condition on and what you share in discussion different? What needs a citation and what doesn't? Does anyone have recommendations for ways to better track the sources of evidence, i.e. reference management software?
The Zombie Preacher of Somerset
by Scott Alexander — 2009-03-28T22:29:34.968Z

Related to: Zombies? Zombies!, Zombie Responses, Zombies: The Movie, The Apologist and the Revolutionary

All disabling accidents are tragic, but some are especially bitter. The high school sports star paralyzed in a car crash. The beautiful actress horribly disfigured in a fire. The pious preacher who loses his soul during a highway robbery.
As far as I know, this last one only happened once, but once was enough. Simon Browne was an early eighteenth century pastor of a large Dissident church. The community loved him for his deep faith and his remarkable intelligence, and his career seemed assured.
One fateful night in 1723, he was travelling from his birthplace in Somerset to his congregation in London when a highway robber accosted the coach carrying him and his friend. With quick reflexes and the element of surprise, Browne and his friend were able to disarm the startled highway robber and throw him to the ground. Browne tried to pin him down while the friend went for help, but in the heat of the moment he used excessive force and choked the man to death. This horrified the poor preacher, who was normally the sort never to hurt a fly.
Whether it was the shock, the guilt, or some unnoticed injury taken in the fight, something strange began to happen to Simon Browne. In his own words, he gradually became:

...perfectly empty of all thought, reflection, conscience, and consideration, entirely destitute of the knowledge of God and Christ, unable to look backward or forward, or inward or outward, having no conviction of sin or duty, no capacity of reviewing his conduct, and, in a word, without any principles of religion or even of reason, and without the common sentiments or affections of human nature, insensible even to the good things of life, incapable of tasting any present enjoyments, or expecting future ones...all body, without so much as the remembrance of the ruins of that mind I was once a tenant in...and the thinking being that was in me is, by a consumption continual, now wholly perished and come to nothing.

Simon Browne had become a p-zombie.

Needless to say, Browne's friends and congregation didn't believe him. Browne seemed as much in possession of his wits as ever. His writing, mostly on abstruse theological topics and ecumenialism, if anything accelerated. According to a friend:

What was most extraordinary in his case was this; that, excepting the

...
When It's Not Right to be Rational
by Annoyance — 2009-03-28T16:15:15.367Z

By now I expect most of us have acknowledged the importance of being rational. But as vital as it is to know what principles generally work, it can be even more important to know the exceptions.

As a process of constant self-evaluation and -modification, rationality is capable of adopting new techniques and methodologies even if we don't know how they work. An 'irrational' action can be rational if we recognize that it functions. So in an ultimate sense, there are no exceptions to rationality's usefulness.

In a more proximate sense, though, does it have limits? Are there ever times when it's better *not* to explicitly understand your reasons for acting, when it's better *not* to actively correlate and integrate all your knowledge?

I can think one such case: It's often better not to look down.

People who don't spend a lot of time living precariously at the edge of long drops don't develop methods of coping. When they're unexpectedly forced to such heights, they often look down. Looking down, subcortical instincts are activated that cause them to freeze and panic, overriding their conscious intentions. This tends to prevent them from accomplishing whatever goals brought them to that location, and in situations where balance is required for safety, the panic instinct can even cause them to fall.

If you don't look down, you may know intellectually that you're above a great height, but at some level your emotions and instincts aren't as triggered. You don't *appreciate* the height on a subconscious level, and so while you may know you're in danger and be appropriately nervous, your conscious intentions aren't overridden. You don't freeze. You can keep your conscious understanding compartmentalized, not bringing to mind information which you possess but don't wish to be aware of.

The general principle seems to be that it is useful to avoid fully integrated awareness of relevant data if acknowledging that data dissolves your ability to regulate your emotions and instincts. If they run amok, your reason will be unseated. Careful application of doublethink, and avoiding confronting emotionally-charged facts that aren't absolutely necessary to respond appropriately to the situation, is probably the best course of action.

If you expect that you're going to be dealing with heights in the future, you ...
Church vs. Taskforce
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-28T09:23:25.560Z

I am generally suspicious of envying crazy groups or trying to blindly copycat the rhythm of religion—what I called "hymns to the nonexistence of God", replying, "A good 'atheistic hymn' is simply a song about anything worth singing about that doesn't happen to be religious."

But religion does fill certain holes in people's minds, some of which are even worth filling. If you eliminate religion, you have to be aware of what gaps are left behind.

If you suddenly deleted religion from the world, the largest gap left would not be anything of ideals or morals; it would be the church, the community. Among those who now stay religious without quite really believing in God—how many are just sticking to it from wanting to stay with their neighbors at the church, and their family and friends? How many would convert to atheism, if all those others deconverted, and that were the price of staying in the community and keeping its respect? I would guess... probably quite a lot.

In truth... this is probably something I don't understand all that well, myself. "Brownies and babysitting" were the first two things that came to mind. Do churches lend helping hands in emergencies? Or just a shoulder to cry on? How strong is a church community? It probably depends on the church, and in any case, that's not the correct question. One should start by considering what a hunter-gatherer band gives its people, and ask what's missing in modern life—if a modern First World church fills only some of that, then by all means let us try to do better.

So without copycatting religion—without assuming that we must gather every Sunday morning in a building with stained-glass windows while the children dress up in formal clothes and listen to someone sing—let's consider how to fill the emotional gap, after religion stops being an option.

To help break the mold to start with—the straitjacket of cached thoughts on how to do this sort of thing—consider that some modern offices may also fill the same role as a church. By which I mean that some people are fortunate to receive community from their workplaces: friendly coworkers who bake brownies for the office, whose teenagers can be safely hired for babysitting, and maybe even help in times of catastrophe...? But certainly not everyone is lucky ...
Defense Against The Dark Arts: Case Study #1
by Scott Alexander — 2009-03-28T02:31:18.306Z

Related to: The Power of Positivist Thinking, On Seeking a Shortening of the Way, Crowley on Religious Experience

Annoyance wants us to stop talking about fancy techniques and get back to basics. I disagree with the philosophy behind his statement, but the principle is sound. In many areas of life - I'm thinking mostly of sports, but not for lack of alternatives - mastery of the basics beats poorly-grounded fancy techniques every time.
One basic of rationality is paying close attention to an argument. Dissecting it to avoid rhetorical tricks, hidden fallacies, and other Dark Arts. I've been working on this for years, and I still fall short on a regular basis.
Medical educators have started emphasizing case studies in their curricula. Instead of studying arcane principles of disease, student doctors cooperate to analyze a particular patient in detail, ennumerate the principles needed to diagnose her illness, and pay special attention to any errors the patients' doctors made during the treatment. The cases may be rare tropical infections, but they're more often the same everyday diseases common in the general population, forcing the student doctors to always keep the basics in mind. We could do with a tradition of case studies in rationality, though we'd need safeguards to prevent degeneration into political discussion.
Case studies in medicine are most interesting when all the student doctors disagree with each other. To that end, I've chosen as the first case a statement that received sixteen upvotes on Less Wrong, maybe the highest I've ever seen for a comment. I don't mean to insult or embarass everyone who liked it. I liked it too. My cursor was already hovering above the "Vote Up" button by the time I starting having second thoughts. But it deserves dissection, and its popularity gives me a ready response when someone says this material is too basic for 'master rationalists' like ourselves:

In his youth, Steve Jobs went to India to be enlightened. After seeing that the nation claiming to be the source of this great spiritual knowledge was full of hunger, ignorance, squalor, poverty, prejudice, and disease, he came back and said that the East should look to the West for enlightenment.

This anecdote is short, witty, flattering, and utterly opaque to reason. It bears all the hallmarks of the Dark Arts.

I admit I am not a disinterested party here. The sta...
The Hidden Origins of Ideas
by cleonid — 2009-03-28T02:27:57.531Z

It is well known that people tend to inherit their world view toghether with their genes. Buddhists are born to the Buddhists, Muslims are born to the Muslims and Republicans are born to the Republicans. While rejecting Predestination, a XVI century catholic could be fairly certain that, unlike hell-bound pagans in the Amazonian forests, most of his descendants would also be catholics.

Naturally independent minds can occasionally break with the tradition. A catholic, finding the Pope’s stance on Predestination inconsistent with the Scriptures, might turn to Protestantism. Hence, the invention of the printing press that made Bibles widely available may have been the root cause of the Reformation. Similarly, the spread of literacy to the lower classes may have eroded the influence of the church and popularized the secular ideologies, such as Marxism.

But could it be that when we break with the traditional mode of thinking, we are driven not by superior intellects or newly acquired knowledge, but rather by something we are not even aware of? Let’s take as an example the spread of seemingly unrelated ideologies of Protestantism and Marxism.

From left to right: The european countries painted blue are those with Germanic majority, those with large numbers of protestants (>45% of all believers), and those where communists electoral vote failed to rise above 10% within the last 60 years.

While the maps are not identical, there seems to be a strong correlation between peoples’ ethnic origins, their religious histories and the openness to the communist ideas. Of course, correlation does not imply causation. However, strong correlation between our views and those of people with a similar background, may suggest that factors other than logic are responsible for them. Unless, as in my case, a similar background means smarter/ more virtuous/ more rational/ getting secret revelations from Omega/… (circle the right answer).
Altruist Coordination -- Central Station
by MBlume — 2009-03-27T22:24:58.196Z

Related to: Can Humanism Match Religion's Output?

I thought it would be helpful for us to have a central space to pool information about various organizations to which we might give our money and/or time. Honestly, a wiki would be ideal, but it seems this should do nicely.

Comment to this post with the name of an organization, and a direct link to where we can donate to them. Provide a summary of the group's goals, and their plans for reaching them. If you can link to outside confirmation of the group's efficiency and effectiveness, please do so.

Respond to these comments adding information about the named group, whether to criticize or praise it.

Hopefully with the voting system, we should be able to collect the most relevent information we have available reasonably quickly.

If you choose to contribute to a group, respond to that group's comment with a dollar amount, so that we can all see how much we have raised for each organization.

Feel free to replace "dollar amount" with "dollar amount/month" in the above, if you wish to make such a commitment. Please do not do this unless you are (>95%) confident that said commitment will last at least a year.

If possible, mention this page, or this site, while donating.