trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Help Me Plan My Education?
by EchoingHorror — 2010-12-25T09:57:01.365Z

I'm planning independent studies and choosing a concentration for my bachelor's degree, so I'm looking for shiny things on which I can base the next year and a half of my life. I get to do all independent studies for the 3 semesters worth of credits remaining, and I'm pretty happy about that. So it shall be, that the wheel of akrasia shall turn, and what was once procrastination shall be productive. And things that were productive but got in the way of unnecessary coursework shall be double productive, maybe triple.

I'm looking for good ideas or texts to base classes around. I feel like there was recently a relevant discussion on texts, but couldn't find it (and feel like an idiot posting a help-the-noob related article after failing to find recent ones. Links to them are appreciated). Are there others in the same spirit as these (old post)? What should I prioritize, given that Less Wrong has been my first external source of rationality?

Then there are other marginally less shiny, but still reflective subjects like economics, computer programming, any of the sciences that engineers would care about plus quantum mechanics, things most people reading this think matter. Awesomeology. My problem with this is prioritizing. I have about 12 classes worth of independent study to get through, minus any credits from equivalence tests I may take for commonly tested things. There's a right answer to the extent that filling in the blank of a "B.S. in Science, Mathematics, and Technology with a Concentration in ____" with something in particular matters, since 6 classes have to be directly related to the concentration, but I don't know how much that will actually ever matter. Horribleness would make a great concentration, but I don't want to rigorously quantify human suffering enough to do it just for that novelty. It also might help if my degree sounds real. Something about probability or statistics would be reasonable and Bayes would approve, but I want the name of my degree to pop, since I get to name it. Is that wrong? Am I overthinking this?

I might not be cool enough to pull off my best-sounding idea for a concentration, in Cybernetic Heuristics, but it has an elegant meaning worthy of study and googling it in quotes returns no results. By "best-sounding", I mean that people who don't know and can't be bothered to look the words up will think I...
Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others...
by Scott Alexander — 2010-12-24T21:26:10.519Z

This was originally posted as part of the efficient charity contest back in November. Thanks to Roko, multifoliaterose, Louie, jmmcd, jsalvatier, and others I forget for help, corrections, encouragement, and bothering me until I finally remembered to post this here.
Imagine you are setting out on a dangerous expedition through the Arctic on a limited budget. The grizzled old prospector at the general store shakes his head sadly: you can't afford everything you need; you'll just have to purchase the bare essentials and hope you get lucky. But what is essential? Should you buy the warmest parka, if it means you can't afford a sleeping bag? Should you bring an extra week's food, just in case, even if it means going without a rifle? Or can you buy the rifle, leave the food, and hunt for your dinner?
And how about the field guide to Arctic flowers? You like flowers, and you'd hate to feel like you're failing to appreciate the harsh yet delicate environment around you. And a digital camera, of course - if you make it back alive, you'll have to put the Arctic expedition pics up on Facebook. And a hand-crafted scarf with authentic Inuit tribal patterns woven from organic fibres! Wicked!
...but of course buying any of those items would be insane. The problem is what economists call opportunity costs: buying one thing costs money that could be used to buy others. A hand-crafted designer scarf might have some value in the Arctic, but it would cost so much it would prevent you from buying much more important things. And when your life is on the line, things like impressing your friends and buying organic pale in comparison. You have one goal - staying alive - and your only problem is how to distribute your resources to keep your chances as high as possible. These sorts of economics concepts are natural enough when faced with a journey through the freezing tundra.

But they are decidedly not natural when facing a decision about charitable giving. Most donors say they want to "help people". If that's true, they should try to distribute their resources to help people as much as possible. Most people don't. In the "Buy A Brushstroke" campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of £550,000 to keep the famous painting "Blue Rigi" in a UK museum. If they had given that £550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics...
Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others...
by Scott Alexander — 2010-12-24T20:16:49.138Z

This was originally posted as part of the efficient charity contest back in November. Thanks to Roko, multifoliaterose, Louie, jmmcd, jsalvatier, and others I forget for help, corrections, encouragement, and bothering me until I finally remembered to post this here.
Imagine you are setting out on a dangerous expedition through the Arctic on a limited budget. The grizzled old prospector at the general store shakes his head sadly: you can't afford everything you need; you'll just have to purchase the bare essentials and hope you get lucky. But what is essential? Should you buy the warmest parka, if it means you can't afford a sleeping bag? Should you bring an extra week's food, just in case, even if it means going without a rifle? Or can you buy the rifle, leave the food, and hunt for your dinner?
And how about the field guide to Arctic flowers? You like flowers, and you'd hate to feel like you're failing to appreciate the harsh yet delicate environment around you. And a digital camera, of course - if you make it back alive, you'll have to put the Arctic expedition pics up on Facebook. And a hand-crafted scarf with authentic Inuit tribal patterns woven from organic fibres! Wicked!
...but of course buying any of those items would be insane. The problem is what economists call opportunity costs: buying one thing costs money that could be used to buy others. A hand-crafted designer scarf might have some value in the Arctic, but it would cost so much it would prevent you from buying much more important things. And when your life is on the line, things like impressing your friends and buying organic pale in comparison. You have one goal - staying alive - and your only problem is how to distribute your resources to keep your chances as high as possible. These sorts of economics concepts are natural enough when faced with a journey through the freezing tundra.

But they are decidedly not natural when facing a decision about charitable giving. Most donors say they want to "help people". If that's true, they should try to distribute their resources to help people as much as possible. Most people don't. In the "Buy A Brushstroke" campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of £550,000 to keep the famous painting "Blue Rigi" in a UK museum. If they had given that £550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics...
The Fallacy of Dressing Like a Winner
by benelliott — 2010-12-24T15:22:10.364Z

Imagine you are a sprinter, and your one goal in life is to win the 100m sprint in the Olympics. Naturally, you watch the 100m sprint winners of the past in the hope that you can learn something from them, and it doesn't take you long to spot a pattern.

Every one of them can be seen wearing a gold medal around their neck. Not only is there a strong correlation, you then also examine the rules of the olympics and find that 100% of winners must wear a gold medal at some point, there is no way that someone could win and never wear a gold medal. So, naturally, you go out and buy a gold medal from a shop, put it around your neck and sit back, satisfied.

For another example, imagine that you are now in charge of running a large oil rig. Unfortunately, some of the drilling equipment is old and rusty, and every few hours a siren goes off alerting the divers that they need to go down again and repair the damage. This is clearly not an acceptable state of affairs, so you start looking for solutions.

You think back to a few months ago, before things got this bad, and you remember how the siren barely ever went off at all. In fact, from you knowledge of how the equipment works, the there were no problems, the siren couldn't go off. Clearly the solution the problem, is to unplug the siren.

(I would like to apologise in advance for my total ignorance of how oil rigs actually work, I just wanted an analogy)

Both these stories demonstrate a mistake which I call 'Dressing Like a Winner' (DLAW). The general form of the error is, person has goal of X, person observes that X reliably leads to Y, person attempts to achieve Y, then sits back, satisfied with their work. This mistake is so obviously wrong that it is pretty much non-existant in near mode, which is why the above stories seem utterly ridiculous. However, once we switch into the more abstract far mode, even the most ridiculous errors become dangerous. In the rest of this post I will point out three places where I think this error occurs.

Changing our minds

In a debate between two people, it is usually the case that whoever is right is unlikely to change their mind. This is not only an empirically observable correlation, but it's also intuitively obvious, would you change your mind if you were right?

At this point, our fallacys steps in with a simple conclus...
A Proposed Litany
by  — 2010-12-24T07:07:28.922Z

I was meditating on the word "disillusionment" the other day, and it stuck me as odd that it has such a negative connotation... doesn't being disillusioned mean that you see a truth that was previously hidden from you by a mirage of falsehood? The human-universal negative emotional response to finding out you were wrong seems counterproductive in the extreme, and I'm still working towards eliminating it from my mind. So I crafted this brief litany, and I think that with some help from the LW community it could become a useful tool for rationalists, much like the Litanies of Tarski and Gendlin. My "first draft" is:

"If you love truth, learn to love finding out you were wrong. If you hate illusion, learn to love disillusionment. If your emotions are not appropriate to your values, do something about it!"

What say you?
Michio Kaku to answer questions from a Reddit thread
by Document — 2010-12-24T05:26:31.495Z

Thread is here. I'm not sure if it's relevant to Less Wrong, but he did do a short segment on the Singularity Institute on Sci-Fi Science recently (the episode was "AI Uprising"). (They were represented by Ben Goertzel, answering hypothetical questions about robot maids. In the context of the episode, it was a brief dead end on the way to eventually presenting mind uploading (as presented by Max Tegmark) as the true solution to AI risk. But it seems to be a highly fluffy show to begin with, so I'm not taking it (as a SIAI supporter) personally.)
What is Cryptographically Possible
by paulfchristiano — 2010-12-24T04:58:37.892Z

Modern computational cryptography probes what is possible in our universe, and I think the results of this exploration may be interesting to people who wouldn't normally be exposed to it.

All of our algorithms will have a "security parameter" k. Our goal is to make it so that an honest participant in the algorithm needs to spend only about k time for each operation, while anyone trying to break the scheme needs to use a super-polynomial amount of time in k. These assumptions are specifically engineered such that they don't really depend on the type of computers being used.

When I say that a participant has a function in mind to evaluate, we are going to imagine that this function is described by its code in some programming language. It doesn't matter which language if you are willing to accept constant factor slowdowns; you can translate from any reasonable programming language into any other.

Now onto the results, stated very imprecisely and given roughly in increasing order of surprisingness. I have chosen a really random selection based on my own interests, so don't think this is an exhaustive list.

One-Way Function (OWF): A function is one-way if given x it is easy to compute f(x), but given f(x) it is hard to find either x or any other x' such that f(x') = f(x). For example, if I give you randomly chosen k-bit integers x, y, it is easy to compute their product x*y. But if I give you their product x*y, it is hard to recover x and y (or another pair of k-bit integers with the same product). We have many more explicit candidates for one-way functions, some of which are believed to be secure against quantum adversaries. Note that basically every other result here implies OWF, and OWF implies P != NP (so for the forseeable future we are going to have to make assumptions to do computational cryptography).

Pseudorandom Generator (PRG): Suppose I want to run a randomized algorithm that requires 1000000 bits of randomness, but I only have 1000 bits of randomness. A psuedorandom generator allows me to turn my 1000 bits of randomness into a 1000000 bits of psuedorandomness, and guarantees that any efficient randomized algorithm works just as often with a psuedorandom input as with a random input. More formally, a psuedorandom generator takes k random bits to k+1 psuedorandom bits in such a way that it is very difficult to distinguish its output from random. A PRG exis...
Vegetarianism
by Raemon — 2010-12-24T04:57:32.204Z

(Note: I wasn't quite sure whether this warranted a high level post or just a discussion. I haven't made a high level post yet, and wasn't entirely sure what the requirements are. For now I made it a discussion, but I'd like some feedback on that)

I've been somewhat surprised by the lack of many threads on Less Wrong dealing with vegetarianism, either for or against. Is there some near-universally accepted-but-unspoken philosophy here, or is it just not something people think of much? I was particularly taken aback by the Newtonmas invitation not even mentioning a vegetarian option. If a bunch of hyper-rationalists aren't even thinking about it, then either something is pretty wrong with my thinking or theirs.

I'm not going to go through all the arguments in detail here, but I'll list the basic ideas. If you've read "Diet for a Small Planet" or are otherwise aware of the specifics, and have counterarguments, feel free to object. If you haven't, I consider reading it (or something similar) a prerequisite for making a decision about whether you eat meat, just as reading the sequences is important to have meaningful discussion on this site.

The issues:

1. "It's cruel to animals." Factory farming is cruel on a massive scale, beyond what we find in nature. Even if animal suffering has only 1% the weight of a humans, there's enough multiplying going on that you can't just ignore it. I haven't precisely clarified my ethics in a way that avoids the Repugnant Conclusion (I've been vaguely describing myself as a "Preference Utilitarian" but I confess that I haven't fully explored the ramifications of it), but it seems to me that if you're not okay with breeding a subservient, less intelligent species of humans for slave labor and consumption, you shouldn't be okay with how we treat animals. I don't think intelligence gives humans any additional intrinsic value, and I don't think most humans use their intelligence to contribute to the universe on a scale meaningful enough to make a binary distinction between the instrumental value of the average human vs the average cow.

2. "It's bad for humans." The scale on which we eat meat is demonstrably unhealthy, wasteful and recent (arising in Western culture in the last hundred years). The way Westerners eat in general is unhealthy and meat is just a part of that, but it's a significant factor.

3. "It's bad for the environment...
Draft/wiki: Infinities and measuring infinite sets: A quick reference
by Sniffnoy — 2010-12-24T04:52:53.090Z

EDIT: This is now on the Wiki as "Quick reference guide to the infinite". Do what you want with it.

It seems whenever anything involving infinities or measuring infinite sets comes up it generates a lot of confusion. So I thought I would write a quick guide to both to

Address common confusions

Act as a useful reference (perhaps this should be a wiki article? This would benefit from others being able to edit it; there's no "community wiki mode" on LW, huh?)

Remind people that sometimes inventing a new sort of answer is necessary!

I am trying to keep this concise, in some cases substituting Wikipedia links for explanation, but I do want what I have written to be understandable enough and informative enough to answer the commonly occurring questions. Please let me know if you can detect a particular problem. I wrote this very quickly and expect it still needs quite a bit more work to be understandable to someone with very little math background.

I realize many people here are finitists of one stripe or another but this comes up often enough that this seems useful anyway. Apologies to any constructivists, but I am going to assume classical logic, because it's all I know, though I am pointing out explicitly any uses of choice. (For what this means and why anyone cares about this, see this comment.) Also as I intend this as a reference (is there *any* way we can make this editable?) some of this may be things that I do not actually know but merely have read.

Note that these are two separate topics, though they have a bit of overlap.

Primarily, though, my main intention is to put an end to the following, which I have seen here far too often:

Myth #0: All infinities are infinite cardinals, and cardinality is the main method used to measure size of sets.

The fact is that "infinite" is a general term meaning "larger (in some sense) than any natural number"; different systems of infinite numbers get used depending on what is appropriate in context. Furthermore, there are many other methods of measuring sizes of sets, which sacrifice universality for higher resolution; cardinality is a very coarse-grained measure.

Topic #1: Systems of infinities (for doing arithmetic with)

Cardinal numbers

First, a review of what they represent and how they work at the basic level, before we get to their arithmetic.

Cardinal numbers are used for measuring...
Study shows placebos can work even if you know it's a placebo
by ata — 2010-12-24T04:09:36.576Z

Placebo Effect Benefits Patients Even When They Knowingly Take a Fake Pill

This is a little bit disturbing. (A kind of belief in belief, perhaps? Like, "I know a placebo is where you take a fake pill but it makes you feel better anyway if you believe it's real medicine, so I'd better believe this is real medicine!")

Though it's too bad they (apparently) didn't have a third group who received a placebo that they didn't know was a placebo, to compare the effect size.

Edit: Here's the actual study. RolfAndreassen points out that its results may not actually be strong evidence for what is being claimed.
Vegetarianism
by Raemon — 2010-12-23T23:11:00.932Z

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px}

I've been somewhat surprised by the lack of m(any) threads on Less Wrong dealing with vegetarianism, either for or against. Is there some near-universally accepted-but-unspoken philosophy here, or is it just not something people think of much? I was particularly taken aback by the Newtonmas invitation not even mentioning a vegetarian option. If a bunch of hyper-rationalists aren't even thinking about it, then either something is pretty wrong with my thinking or theirs.

I'm not going to go through all the arguments in detail here, but I'll list the basic ideas. If you've read "Diet for a Small Planet" or are otherwise aware of the specifics, and have counterarguments, feel free to object. If you haven't, I consider reading it (or something similar) a prerequisite for making a decision about whether you eat meat, just as reading the sequences is important to have meaningful discussion on this site.

[b]The issues:[/b]

1. "It's cruel to animals." Factory farming is cruel on a massive scale, beyond what we find in nature. Even if animal suffering has only 1% the weight of a humans, there's enough multiplying going on that you can't just ignore it. I haven't precisely clarified my ethics in a way that avoids the Repugnant Conclusion (I've been vaguely describing myself as a "Preference Utilitarian" but I confess that I haven't fully explored the ramifications of it), but it seems to me that if you're not okay with breeding a subservient, less intelligent species of humans for slave labor and consumption, you shouldn't be okay with how we treat animals. I don't think intelligence gives humans any additional intrinsic value, and I don't think most humans use their intelligence to contribute to the universe on a scale meaningful enough to make a binary distinction between the instrumental value of the average human vs the average cow.

2. "It's bad for humans." The scale on which we eat meat is demonstrably unhealthy, wasteful and recent (arising in Western culture in the last hundred years). The way Westerners eat in general is unhealthy and meat is just a part of that, but it's a significant factor.

3. "It's bad for the environment (which is bad for both human and non-human animals)." Mas

...
Where is your moral thermostat?
by KatjaGrace — 2010-12-23T18:13:17.000Z

Old news: humans regard morality as though with a ‘moral thermostat‘.

…we propose a framework suggesting that moral (or immoral) behavior can result from an internal balancing of moral self-worth and the cost inherent in altruistic behavior. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to write a self-relevant story containing words referring to either positive or negative traits. Participants who wrote a story referring to the positive traits donated one fifth as much as those who wrote a story referring to the negative traits. In Experiment 2, we showed that this effect was due specifically to a change in the self-concept. In Experiment 3, we replicated these findings and extended them to cooperative behavior in environmental decision making. We suggest that affirming a moral identity leads people to feel licensed to act immorally. However, when moral identity is threatened, moral behavior is a means to regain some lost self-worth.

This doesn’t appear to always hold though. Most people oscillate happily around a normal level of virtue, eating more salad if they shouted at their child and so on, but some seem to throw consistent effort at particular moral issues, or make firm principles and stick to them.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of moral issues; obligatory and virtuous. Obligatory things include not killing people, wearing clothes in the right places, doing whatever specific duties to god/s you will be eternally tortured for neglecting. Virtuous issues make you feel good and affect your reputation. Doing favours, giving to charities, excercising, eating healthy food, buying environmentally friendly, getting up early, being tidy, offering to wash up, cycling to work. Outside of these two categories there are what I will call ‘practical issues’. These don’t feel related to virtue at all: how to transport a new sofa home, what time to have dinner tonight, which brand of internet to get.

‘Moral thermostat’ behaviour only applies to the virtuous moral behaviours. The obligatory ones and the practical ones demand exactly as much effort as they take, or you feel like putting in respectively. The people who pour effort into specific issues are mostly those who are persuaded that the issue is an obligatory one or a practical one. A clear example of those who push a moral issue into the territory of obl

...