trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The order of learning things (general to specific vs. specific to general)
by InquilineKea — 2011-01-08T21:19:16.706Z

Does order matter? To many of us, it does. The speed of learning something can be drastically affected by the order by which you learn them, and since we all have limited time, the time we spend learning is quite relevant to our concerns.

This post is merely a collection of thoughts (I hope some people will find them useful as a framework for developing their own hypotheses). I'd just like to hear your responses to my thoughts.

==

There are two fundamental ways of learning

(a) general to specific

(b) specific to general (e.g. case studies)

Scientific hypotheses (general) are motivated by experiments (specific). With data, one can hypothesize a trend and see the general hypotheses

One can also try this process mathematically, as specific results can motivate a hypothesis of the general structure, which can then be proved.

Which way is faster? It depends on person. It might be plausible that learning styles are “bunk” and that smarter students are more efficient through learning of type (a), but it’s also quite plausible that this is not true (for one thing, learning is dependent on both intelligence and motivation/interest, and the motivation/interest component can make type b learning more efficient even for geniuses). I, for one, learn best through the “specific to general” method. As such, I believe that I learn math best when it’s motivated by physical phenomena (in other words, learning math “along the way of doing science”) than when pursuing math first and then learning science (which is what I did, which didn’t work as well as I hoped, especially since it killed my motivation). As I’m quite familiar with the climate trends of specific localities, I also learn the generalities of climate best through case studies.

And then after learning the applications of this math field, one is more motivated to learn the specifics of the math behind the math, and one even has more physical intuition through this learning route. It actually means something when one learns through the second route.

It is also true, however, that route (b) can be taken too far, as is evident in the “discovery-based” math curricula, which generally produce poor results. When one is self-motivated, route (b) can be especially rewarding, but the selection of case studies is important, as an improper selection of case stu...
How do you use the phrase "free will"?
by  — 2011-01-08T20:44:15.190Z

I first wanted to write out a short paragraph about free will as it is used by most people, being just plain wrong. The universe is in a very real sense deterministic after all, even if God does play dice. I think most people would agree that a dice, regardless it its fair or not, does not have free will simply because its unpredictable.

But I quickly admonished myself since I realized very few if any LW posters need reminding of this on a theoretical level. And certainly the majority of LWers who use the phrase don't use it in the same sense its understood by most people. But despite this theoretical understanding I've noticed that I often slip up unless I pay attention since, gosh it sure does feel like I have free will and this it seems is my default mode of thinking, I also noticed some other posters slipping up on this.

I especially recall a recent commenter discussing whether some criminals should be denied cryogenic suspension contrasting "mental illness" to "free will". That irked me slightly since mental illness is, like all illness, defined as what people in a society decide is unintegratable into it (a secondary but common feature is that it is a state that is nearly universally determined by those who are in it as undesirable, understandably this is less often true for "mental illness" than "physical illness")!

So even if one uses or defines free will as a "properly functioning brain" or "proper socialization" it would still be just so much better if he had said "only those with criminal behavirours that are very damaging to others and which we think will be unfixable even in the distant future shouldn't be suspended because we don't have unlimited resources and its better to focus on those the future is more likely to help first".

My questions are:

1. The OP title:How do you use the phrase "free will"?

2. Is "Free will is an illusion" a rationalism enhancing meme?

3. If you disagree with 2. why "lie" to people by arguing using a word in a way they will almost certainly misunderstand? Do you think more people intuitively share the proper meaning of the phrase than I have assumed?
My mother is now in cryostasis
by turchin — 2011-01-08T20:27:17.361Z

I hope this post will help to those who think about cryonics.

My mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer on 1 Jules 2010.

It was on terminal stage and she died 24 September 2010.

Before, in March she publically said that she is against cryonics on the party at her home.

But several weeks after she learned about cancer I asked her again. I told her that only her brain will be cryonised. But head and body will be buried by Christian ritual.

To my surprise she agreed. She said that she do it because she knows that it is important to me, and also she thought that “studying her brain will help science”.

I ask her to write special will about funeral in free form. The exact text of needed will I got from Cryorus, the only available cryonic company in Moscow.

After it I go to Cryorus and signed two contracts for me and for her.

We reach agreement that I will make payment in the moment of cryopreservation.

She was prominent scientist in the field of art history http://bit.ly/gsa5mq - wiki

So we need to keep the fact or cryopreservation in secret, and I ask the readers of this text not to mention about it in Russian.

23 September she was in hospital and her condition was unstable, but even though the call from hospital in 1.50 AM was unexpected. She died from heart failure. She was fully consciences until last day and didn’t have much pain.

I already have instructed stuff in the hospital that they should call me immediately if she dies, and should put cold wet blanket on her head.

But Russian laws are not well for cryonist: you can’t get full accesses to the body until all documents are prepared in the office of state agency – which is opened only in day time!

I took a car and rush to the hospital together with Danila Medvedev, head of Cryorus and russian transhumanist. We took the body to the cold room with near zero (C) temperature in morgue, put on it wet blankets, and leave until morning.

The next day I have to do a trick – to cryopreserved my mother and ensure that nobody of her friends will know about it.

This is the main important point of story, because here is the difference about what I expected I will feel, and what actually I felt.

I felt that they could stop me somehow, if they learn that cryopreservation is in progress, because they think that it is against Christian laws, it is mutilation of her body and is ag...
generalized n-categories?
by ThomasR — 2011-01-08T19:09:43.341Z

This looks like an interesting, but a bit strange, old story. A bit similar to parts of an earlier posted essay by Gromov. However that may be, the Princeton IAS invited the author and so I'd like to know about how his concepts are intended to become implemented and applied: http://vbm-ehr.pagesperso-orange.fr/ChEh/articles/Baas%20paper.pdf
Being your own censor
by  — 2011-01-08T19:05:33.809Z

Are there any occasions when it's a good idea to avoid exposing yourself to a certain piece of information? As rationalists, we probably do a lot less of this than the average person (because we're curious about reality and we don't mind having our preconceptions destroyed by new knowledge) but is all self-exposure to information safe?

Possible reasons, from least to most controversial.

1. Exposing yourself to information that's distracting; the act of reading the information is not the current best use of your time (TvTropes.)

2. Exposing yourself to information that puts you or others in direct danger because you know too much (illegally reading classified gov't secrets; personally investigating a crime)

3. Exposing yourself to information that's likely to cause dangerous psychological damage (graphic depiction of rape if you're a rape survivor; writing that romanticizes suicide if you're depressive; pro-anorexia blogs)

4. Exposing yourself to information that violates someone's privacy or rights (reading a secret diary; going through someone's mail)

5. Exposing yourself to information that might alter your character in a way you don't currently want (the argument that repeatedly seeing violence in video or photographic form makes us less compassionate)

6. Exposing yourself to "escapist" media that make the real world seem less appealing by comparison, and thus make you less happy (porn; some science fiction and fantasy; romance; lifestyles of the rich and famous. A variant: plot spoilers, which can also ruin future enjoyment.)

7. Exposing yourself to persuasive arguments that might make you do things you currently consider morally wrong (Mein Kampf, serial killers' manifestoes)

8. Exposing yourself to content that might persuade you to do things you don't currently want to do (advertising, watching the Food Network if you're dieting/fasting; the sirens' song, if you're Odysseus)

9. Exposing yourself to effective, emotionally manipulative arguments for things you're currently confident are false (possibly religious apologetics)

10. Exposing yourself to "cynical" true information that lowers your utility/motivation/happiness in everyday life (public choice theory, if you're a civil servant; accounts of unsuccessful and dissatisfied grad students/law students, if you're a student)

11. Exposing yourself to conte...
Kasparov interview 
by ThomasR — 2011-01-08T18:59:33.071Z

with Peter Thiel on technology progress etc.:
http://videos.arte.tv/de/videos/durch_die_nacht_mit_-3619996.html
I am just looking it, sounds interesting. That real innovations reduced to arrive at homeopathic dosis fits my perceptions. I would even guess stronger variants.
6502 simulated - mind uploading for microprocessors
by humpolec — 2011-01-08T18:03:10.340Z

Possibly offtopic, but a neat project with interesting analogy to mind uploading:

Some people managed to scan, using a microscope, a MOS 6502 microprocessor (Apple II, C64, NES), and simulate it at the level of single transistors. This neatly circumvented all the problems with inaccurate emulation, unknown opcodes etc., and even allowed them to run actual Atari 2600 games without having to know anything about 6502's inner workings.

Presentation slides about the project are here.
I
by PhilGoetz — 2011-01-08T17:51:30.499Z

I wrote this story at Michigan State during Clarion 1997, and it was published in the Sept/Oct 1998 issue of Odyssey. It has many faults and anachronisms that still bother me. I'd like to say that this is because my understanding of artificial intelligence and the singularity has progressed so much since then; but it has not. Many anachronisms and implausibilities are compromises between wanting to be accurate, and wanting to communicate.

At least I can claim the distinction of having published the story with the shortest title in the English language - measured horizontally.

I

I was the last person, and this is how he died.

I had always had a body. The stress of motors pushed to their limit, the clang of fingers on metal, the uncertainty of effects, the uncompromising everpresence of physical laws -- these were important to I, an honest grounding for the rest of I's experience to build on.

I kept his body in a rented stall on the fifth physical level down from the surface, a low-ceilinged, crudely-built level used mostly for material transport and repair access for the computing levels above and below. I thought of it as blue-collar.

The stall was in a back corner of a storage niche that extended three meters back from an alley. Two walls were strong sheets of fused silicate. The other two were fabric curtains I had put up for privacy. The niche was built to store one heavy cargo roller, and had no internal dividers. The stall enclosed about one square meter of floor space -- just enough for I to roll in and pull the curtains behind him.

To the back wall I had stuck a color image permanently etched on paper media. Not virtually; it was an actual, physical object. The picture never changed. It showed humans walking through the streets of one of their cities. Their upper torsos resembled I, but below were bipedal. Versatile, but inefficient. Sometimes, when the lights of passing traffic shone through the curtains, I did nothing but look at this picture for seconds at a time.

I ordered his activities around the solar day, out of habit. He entered a state of inaction at the start of every day, in which he contemplated his experiences of the previous day, giving the data a chance to be correlated and integrated with other data. If he did not, no one else would. He compared this state to the sleep of the biologicals.

But we are starting badly. This enu...
The Trickle-Down Effect of Good Communities
by lukeprog — 2011-01-08T15:58:41.487Z

We don't know who came up with the ancient Indian idea of karma or why they did so, but one of its social functions is to motivate people to behave better. If people really believe that they will suffer for their evil actions and prosper for their good actions due to a law of nature, this probably motivates them to do more good and less evil.

Less Wrong, of course, has a karma system. You gain karma points if you write something that people value, and you lose karma points if you write something that people think is inappropriate. At low levels, gaining karma points gives you new posting privileges. At high levels, karma points indicate something like your status in the community.

Recently I noticed that I post better comments on Less Wrong than I usually do on my own site. I think this is partly due to Less Wrong's karma system. When I draft a comment or a post for Less Wrong, I'm more likely to (1) talk to others charitably and with respect and (2) go out of my way to provide useful links and context than I when I draft a comment for my own site!

And now I find myself motivated to bring a stronger emphasis on those qualities to the writing on my own site. So the Less Wrong karma system is having a trickle-down effect into other areas of my life.

Which got me thinking... it might be helpful to have a karma system in "real life," beyond the pages of Less Wrong (or reddit). Maybe something like Facebook karma. People could anonymously add and subtract points on people's Facebook profiles according to whether or not that person acted like a douche in daily life. This could be done by a smartphone app, and plugged into Facebook via an opt-in Facebook app that users could voluntarily choose to add to their profiles.
Link: "When Science Goes Psychic"
by Tesseract — 2011-01-08T09:00:30.761Z

A major psychology journal is planning to publish a study that claims to present strong evidence for precognition. Naturally, this immediately stirred up a firestorm. There are a lot of scientific-process and philosophy-of-science issues involved, including replicability, peer review, Bayesian statistics, and degrees of scrutiny. The Flying Spaghetti Monster makes a guest appearance.

Original New York Times article on the study here.

And the Times asked a number of academics (including Douglas Hofstadter) to comment on the controversy. The discussion is here.

I, for one, defy the data.
Rationalist Clue
by Mass_Driver — 2011-01-08T08:21:55.266Z

(not by Parker Bros., or, for that matter, Waddingtons)

A response to: 3 Levels of Rationality Verification

Related to: Diplomacy as a Game Theory Laboratory

It's a classic who-dun-it…only instead of using an all-or-nothing process of elimination driven by dice rolls and lucky guesses, players must piece together Bayesian clues while strategically dividing their time between gathering evidence, performing experiments, and interrogating their fellow players!

ROOMS:
Hematology Lab -- bring a blood sample over here, and you can find out one bit of information about the serotype…is it A or O? B or O? + or - ? The microscope knows. Don't know how to use a microscope? Try reading up on it in the Library.
Autopsy Table -- bring a body part over here, and you can take an educated guess as to what kind of weapon caused the murder wounds. (Flip over 1 of 10 cards, 4 of which show the correct murder weapon and 6 of which are randomly distributed among the other five weapons.) The error in guesses doesn't correlate across body parts, so if you personally examine enough of them, or if you can persuade your fellow dinner-guests to bust out all the body parts at the same time, you should be able to get the right answer.
Lie Detector -- bring a fellow player over here, and you can ask him/her a yes-or-no question and get some evidence as to whether it was answered honestly. Have the answerer roll a D10, add a secret constant unique to his/her character, multiply the sum by the truth value of his/her statement (1 for true, 2 for false), and then look up the number on a chart that returns the value "stress" or "no-stress." It's up to the interrogator to figure out the correlation (if any) between stress and lying for each player! How do you get the other player into the Lie Detector room in the first place? Good question! When you figure it out, let me know…I have a paper I'd like you to co-author with me on the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Plus the usual collection of Kitchens, Billiards Rooms, Parlours, and so forth. One room is inaccurately labeled.
PIECES OF EVIDENCE:
If you spend your turn searching a room, you might find…
Blood stains -- most of them are either from the murderer or the victim, but some are not. You can take a sample so as to carry it with you to the Hematology Lab.
Body parts -- all of them belong to Mr. Boddy, and all the parts are nice a...
A Bayesian Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus
by lukeprog — 2011-01-08T05:05:31.891Z

I think LWers may be intrigued...

Tim McGrew, author of this excellent annotated bibliography on Bayesian reasoning, recently co-authored with his wife Lydia a Bayesian defense of the resurrection of Jesus. I interviewed Lydia for my podcast, here. Atheist Richard Carrier has leveled some objections to their article, but his objections are weak.

Have at it.
Why do some kinds of work not feel like work?
by Wei Dai — 2011-01-08T01:28:06.001Z

A topic often discussed here is how to avoid akrasia/procrastination in order to get on with work. I suggest another possible "workaround" for akrasia is to find work that doesn't feel like work. From personal experience, I know this is possible, because many of my efforts did not feel like work, in the sense that my motivation on those projects was so high that procrastination simply wasn't a factor at all. (I remember, for example, designing parts of my open-source cryptography library every day while walking to and from class, and then coding as soon as I got back to my apartment, or later, thinking about multiverses and anthropic reasoning in much of my spare time.)

Why do some kinds of work feel like work, while others don't? (Is there any existing literature on this topic? I tried some searches, but don't really know what keywords to use, so I'll just generalize a bit from my own experience, and open the question for discussion.) Among the projects that I've done, the ones that didn't feel like work seem to have the following in common:

It was in a field that I found interesting and exciting. (What determines this seems to be another interesting mystery.)

There was no payment or other form of obligation to complete it.

There were no negative consequences for failure, other than time spent.

It fit my idealized self-image (e.g., cypherpunk or amateur philosopher).

There was an implicit prospect of status reward if successful.

I hadn't done it for so long that I started to get bored.

Unfortunately I don't have enough data to conclude which of these factors were necessary or sufficient, or their relative weights in contributing to the "not work-like" feeling. Do others have similar, or perhaps different, experiences?
Problem Solving via Polya
by  — 2011-01-08T00:30:28.496Z

Related to: Tips and Tricks for Answering Hard Questions

In How To Solve It Polya describes methods and heuristics intended to facilitate the solution of math problems. These are mostly conveyed in the form of self-questions that are aimed at inducing useful mental procedures, and subsequently developing awesome problem solving dispositions. Ultimately we should work from these dispositions directly. Polya advises us to use the questions only when progress is blocked; at other times our thoughts should flow naturally from our dispositions. I expect that his methods are useful outside of mathematics, and thought they might be of interest to people here.

Below is the summary given at the start of How To Solve It (with the exception of a few added notes). He breaks the problem solving process into four steps, with each step having a set of self-questions and heuristics. I've bolded parts that I thought were particularly useful. This is not meant to be an alternative to reading the book; I expect that reading his illustrative examples is somewhat important. But more important is working with these questions on problems in order to develop your own dispositions.

Understanding the problem

You have to understand the problem.

What is the unknown?

What are the data?

What is the condition?

Is it possible to satisfy the condition?

Is the condition sufficient to determine the unknown?

Or is it insufficient?

Or redundant?

Or contradictory?

Find a way to visualize the problem.

Introduce suitable notation.

Good notation should be unambiguous, pregnant, easy to remember, and easy to recognize.

Good notation should avoid harmful second meanings and take advantage of useful second meanings.

The order and connection of signs should suggest the order and connection of things.

Separate the various parts of the condition. Can you write them down?

Devising a plan

Find the connection between the data and the unknown. You may need to consider auxiliary problems. You should eventually obtain a plan of the solution.

Have you seen the problem before?

Have you seen it in another form?

Do you know a related problem?

Do you know a theorem that could be useful?

Look at the unknown! And try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknown.

Here is a problem related to yours and solved before. Could you use it?

Could you use its result?

Could yo

...