trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Cryonic Revival Mutual Assistance Pact?
by DataPacRat — 2012-09-29T10:21:45.153Z

The odds of a successful cryonic revival may me one in several thousand, or five percent, or ninety percent; the error bars on the various sub-parts of the question are very broad.

But if those assumptions work out, and if at least some people placed in suspension in the near future will be successfully revived in the far future...

... then are there any useful arrangements which can be made now, which have little-to-no present cost (beyond the cryonic arrangements themselves)?

For example, if someone were to make an announcement along the lines of, "If anyone makes a promise to try to assist in my cryonic revival, and to assist me in getting myself established thereafter; then I promise to try to assist those people with their cryonic revivals, and assisting them, ahead of anyone who hasn't made such a promise.", then what downsides would there be to having made it? Would making it create any perverse incentives, which could be avoided? Do the potential benefits, especially the benefit of a potential increase in the odds of being revived, outweigh the potential costs?

Would it be better to make promises to specific people while one is alive, instead of making an open-ended promise? That is, I might try to convince EYudkowsky to make a mutual-assistance agreement with me personally, in hopes that one of us will one day be able to help the other; or I might make the agreement so broad that people can make their promise to help me even after I'm dead.

How large would the benefits be of unilaterally promising to help someone else, without even asking for a reciprocal promise? Or, put another way, how big would the costs be if I were to simply announce that, if it's ever in my power, I'll try to assist in EYudkowsky's revival?

Does anyone care to try figuring out the Prisoner's-Dilemma-like aspects of this, such as the probability that someone in such a pact would renege on their end of it, and how the terms could be adjusted to minimize the benefits and maximize the costs of such anti-social behavior?
[SEQ RERUN] Ethical Injunctions
by MinibearRex — 2012-09-29T04:06:24.018Z

Today's post, Ethical Injunctions was originally published on 20 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A look at the peculiar properties of decision theories that include rules about not doing certain things, even when they seem like the right thing to do.

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 Ethical Inhibitions, 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.
Meetup : Zendo in the West Loop
by Nic_Smith — 2012-09-29T01:07:29.100Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Zendo in the West Loop

WHEN:
12 October 2012 06:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
545 W. Madison Street, Chicago

Let's have a game of Zendo near the train stations on Friday; we'll be meeting at the Potbelly Sandwich Shop at Presidential Towers, directly across the intersection from Ogilvie. Be sure to check out the Meetup page for this event and let us know if you'll be there: http://www.meetup.com/Less-Wrong-Chicago/events/83939402/

Discussion article for the meetup : Zendo in the West Loop
[LINK] Law Goes Meta
by TimS — 2012-09-28T19:11:19.414Z

Some legal background:

In the United States, there are several courts of appeals, called Circuit Courts. They can disagree about legal points - this is called a circuit split. One of the purposes of the Supreme Court is to resolve circuit splits.

Sometimes, laws are ruled to be ambiguous. If so, the relevant agency regulations interpreting the law are determinative, unless the regulations are an obviously stupid interpretation. This is called Chevron deference.

One would think that disagreement between Circuits about the meaning of a law would be legally relevant evidence about whether the law was ambiguous. Instead, there appears to be a circuit split on the meaning of circuit splits.

More available here, for the amusement of those on this site who like to think meta. Also a bit of a lesson on the limits of meta-style analysis in solving actual problems.
Yale Creates First Self-Aware Robot?
by JQuinton — 2012-09-28T17:43:27.803Z

Apparently a PhD candidate at the Social Robotics Lab at Yale created a self-aware robot:

In the mirror test, developed by Gordon Gallup in 1970, a mirror is placed in an animal’s enclosure, allowing the animal to acclimatize to it. At first, the animal will behave socially with the mirror, assuming its reflection to be another animal, but eventually most animals recognize the image to be their own reflections. After this, researchers remove the mirror, sedate the animal and place an ink dot on its frontal region, and then replace the mirror. If the animal inspects the ink dot on itself, it is said to have self-awareness, because it recognized the change in its physical appearance.

[...]

To adapt the traditional mirror test to a robot subject, computer science Ph.D. candidate Justin Hart said he would run a program that would have Nico, a robot that looks less like R2D2 and more like a jumble of wires with eyes and a smile, learn a three-dimensional model of its body and coloring. He would then change an aspect of the robot’s physical appearance and have Nico, by looking at a reflective surface, “identify where [his body] is different.”

What do Less Wrongians think? Is this "cheating" traditional concepts of self-awareness, or is self-awareness "self-awareness" regardless of the path taken to get there?
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Berlin, Portland, Urbana-Champaign IL, Vienna
by FrankAdamek — 2012-09-28T15:03:41.993Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on September 21st, and has now been moved to discussion. The more recent summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Urbana-Champaign, IL: 22 September 2012 02:00PM
Berlin Meetup: 28 September 2012 07:30PM
Vienna meetup: 28 September 2012 07:00PM
Moscow: applied rationality and web resources: 29 September 2012 04:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Portland Oregon: 22 September 2012 12:00PM
Austin, TX: 22 September 2018 01:30PM
Cambridge (MA) first-Sundays meetup: 07 October 2012 02:00PM
Cambridge (MA) third-Sundays Meetup: 21 October 2012 02:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here, or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know!

Want to he...
[SEQ RERUN] Ethical Inhibitions
by MinibearRex — 2012-09-28T06:06:01.347Z

Today's post, Ethical Inhibitions was originally published on 19 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Humans may have a sense of ethical inhibition because various ancestors, who didn't follow ethical norms when they thought they could get away with it, nevertheless got caught.

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 Protected From Myself, 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.
Confabulation Bias
by EricHerboso — 2012-09-28T01:27:19.040Z

(Edit: Gwern points out in the comments that there is previous discussion on this study at New study on choice blindness in moral positions.)

Earlier this month, a group of Swedish scientists published a study that describes a new type of bias that I haven't seen listed in any of the sequences or on the wiki. Their methodology:

We created a self-transforming paper survey of moral opinions, covering both foundational principles, and current dilemmas hotly debated in the media. This survey used a magic trick to expose participants to a reversal of their previously stated attitudes, allowing us to record whether they were prepared to endorse and argue for the opposite view of what they had stated only moments ago.

In other words, people were surveyed on their beliefs and were immediately asked to defend them after finishing the survey. Despite having just written down how they felt, 69% did not even notice that at least one of their answers were surreptitiously changed. Amazingly, a majority of people actually "argued unequivocally for the opposite of their original attitude".

Perhaps this type of effect is already discussed here on LessWrong, but, if so, I have not yet run across any such discussion. (It is not on the LessWrong wiki nor the other wiki, for example.) This appears to be some kind of confabulation bias, where invented positions thrust upon people result in confabulated reasons for believing them.

Some people might object to my calling this a bias. (After all, the experimenters themselves did not use that word.) But I'm trying to refer less to the trick involved in the experiment and more toward the bias this experiment shows that we have toward our own views. This is a fine distinction to make, but I feel it is important for us to recognize.

When I say we prefer our own opinions, this is obvious on its face. Of course we think our own positions are correct; they're the result of our previously reasoned thought. We have reason to believe they are correct. But this study shows that our preference for our own views goes even further than this. We actually are biased toward our own positions to such a degree that we will actually verbally defend them even when we were tricked into thinking we held those positions. This is what I mean when I call it confabulation bias.

Of particular interest to the LessWrong community is the...
EY "Politics is the Mind Killer" sighting at Washington Examiner and Reason.com
by buybuydandavis — 2012-09-27T19:48:04.828Z

Original at Washington Examiner

http://washingtonexaminer.com/down-with-politics/article/2508882#.UGSscI0iYZm

...

Politics makes us worse because "politics is the mindkiller," as intelligence theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it. "Evolutionary psychology produces strange echoes in time," he writes, "as adaptations continue to execute long after they cease to maximize fitness." We gorge ourselves sick on sugar and fat, and we indulge our tribal hard-wiring by picking a political "team" and denouncing the "enemy."

But our atavistic Red/Blue tribalism plays to the interests of "individual politicians in getting you to identify with them instead of judging them," Yudkowsky writes.

...

Examiner Columnist Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of "The Cult of the Presidency."

Repost at Reason.com

http://reason.com/archive/2012/09/25/why-politics-are-bad-for-us
Probability of Cryonic Success?
by DataPacRat — 2012-09-27T19:08:22.194Z

While browsing some of the websites on cryonics, I've come across this page, a spreadsheet which performs a quick analysis of the odds of a successful cryonic revival. It allows a user to enter their estimates of various events happening in a given period, such as the failure of the cryonics facility due to various causes, when revival technology will be developed, and so forth. (There's also a more advanced calculator here, which I'm not going to worry about at the moment.)

What are your best estimates of the relevant factors?

(Or, in case it might save a step: my own current age is 35, and my current estimate of my mean time of death across all my futures is when I'm 78. Given that, what is your best estimate of the probability that I'll be successfully revived from cryonic suspension?)
From First Principles
by  — 2012-09-27T19:04:14.872Z

Related: Truly a Part of You, What Data Generated That Thought

Some Case Studies

The other day my friend was learning to solder and he asked an experienced hacker for advice. The hacker told him that because heat rises, you should apply the soldering iron underneath the work to maximize heat transfer. Seems reasonable, logically inescapable, even. When I heard of this, I thought through to why heat rises and when, and saw that it was not so. I don't remember the conversation, but the punchline is that hot things become less dense, and less dense things float, and if you're not in a fluid, hot fluids can't float. In the case of soldering, the primary mode of heat transfer is conduction through the liquid metal, so to maximize heat transfer, get the tip wet before you stick it in, and don't worry about position.

This is a case of surface reasoning failing because the heuristic (heat rises) was not truly a part of my friend or the random hacker. I want to focus on the actual 5-second skill of going back To First Principles that catches those failures.

Here's another; watch for the 5 second cues and responses: A few years ago, I was building a robot submarine for a school project. We were in the initial concept design phase, wondering what it should look like. My friend Peter said, "It should be wide, because stability is important". I noticed the heuristic "low and wide is stable" and thought to myself "Where does that come from? When is it valid?". In the case of catamarans or sports cars, wide is stable because it increases the lever arm between restoring force (gravity) and support point (wheel or hull), and low makes the tipping point harder to reach. Under water, there is no tipping point, and things are better modeled as hanging from their center of volume. In other words, underwater, the stability criteria is vertical separation, instead of horizontal separation. (More precisely, you can model the submarine as a damped pendulum, and notice that you want to tune the parameters for approximately critical damping). We went back to First Principles and figured out what actually mattered, then went on to build an awesome robot.

Let's review what happened. We noticed a heuristic or bit of qualitative knowledge (wide is stable), and asked "Why? When? How much?", which led us to the quantitative answer, which told us much more precisely exactly what matters (critic...
[Link] Social Desirability Bias vs. Intelligence Research
by  — 2012-09-27T14:35:11.395Z

From EconLog by Bryan Caplan.

When lies sound better than truth, people tend to lie. That's Social Desirability Bias for you. Take the truth, "Half the population is below the 50th percentile of intelligence." It's unequivocally true - and sounds awful. Nice people don't call others stupid - even privately.
The 2000 American National Election Study elegantly confirms this claim. One of the interviewers' tasks was to rate respondents' "apparent intelligence." Possible answers (reverse coded by me for clarity):
0= Very Low
1= Fairly Low
2= Average
3= Fairly High
4= Very High
Objectively measured intelligence famously fits a bell curve. Subjectively assessed intelligence does not. At all. Check out the ANES distribution.

The ANES is supposed to be a representative national sample. Yet according to interviewers, only 6.1% of respondents are "below average"! The median respondent is "fairly high." Over 20% are "very high." Social Desirability Bias - interviewers' reluctance to impugn anyone's intelligence - practically has to be the explanation.
You could just call this as an amusing curiosity and move on. But wait. Stare at the ANES results for a minute. Savor the data. Question: Are you starting to see the true face of widespread hostility to intelligence research? I sure think I do.
Suppose intelligence research were impeccable. How would psychologically normal humans react? Probably just as they do in the ANES: With denial. How can stupidity be a major cause of personal failure and social ills? Only if the world is full of stupid people. What kind of a person believes the world is full of stupid people? "A realist"? No! A jerk. A big meanie.
My point is not that intelligence research is impeccable. My point, rather, is that hostility to intelligence research is all out of proportion to its flaws - and Social Desirability Bias is the best explanation. Intelligence research tells the world what it doesn't want to hear. It says what people aren't supposed to say. On reflection, the amazing thing isn't that intelligence research has failed to vanquish its angry critics. The amazing thing is that the angry critics have failed to vanquish intelligence research. Everything we've l

...
[SEQ RERUN] Protected From Myself
by MinibearRex — 2012-09-27T06:01:11.175Z

Today's post, Protected From Myself was originally published on 19 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Ethics can protect you from your own mistakes, especially when your mistakes are about really fundamental things.

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 Dark Side Epistemology, 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.
Could evolution have selected for moral realism?
by John_Maxwell — 2012-09-27T04:25:52.580Z

I was surprised to see the high number of moral realists on Less Wrong, so I thought I would bring up a (probably unoriginal) point that occurred to me a while ago.

Let's say that all your thoughts either seem factual or fictional. Memories seem factual, stories seem fictional. Dreams seem factual, daydreams seem fictional (though they might seem factual if you're a compulsive fantasizer). Although the things that seem factual match up reasonably well to the things that actually are factional, this isn't the case axiomatically. If deviating from this pattern is adaptive, evolution will select for it. This could result in situations like: the rule that pieces move diagonally in checkers seems fictional, while the rule that you can't kill people seems factual, even though they're both just conventions. (Yes, the rule that you can't kill people is a very good convention, and it makes sense to have heavy default punishments for breaking it. But I don't think it's different in kind from the rule that you must move diagonally in checkers.)

I'm not an expert, but it definitely seems as though this could actually be the case. Humans are fairly conformist social animals, and it seems plausible that evolution would've selected for taking the rules seriously, even if it meant using the fact-processing system for things that were really just conventions.

Another spin on this: We could see philosophy as the discipline of measuring, collating, and making internally consistent our intuitions on various philosophical issues. Katja Grace has suggested that the measurement of philosophical intuitions may be corrupted by the desire to signal on the part of the philosophy enthusiasts. Could evolutionary pressure be an additional source of corruption? Taking this idea even further, what do our intuitions amount to at all aside from a composite of evolved and encultured notions? If we're talking about a question of fact, one can overcome evolution/enculturation by improving one's model of the world, performing experiments, etc. (I was encultured to believe in God by my parents. God didn't drop proverbial bowling balls from the sky when I prayed for them, so I eventually noticed the contradiction in my model and deconverted. It wasn't trivial--there was a high degree of enculturation to overcome...
Meetup : Washington DC: Choice Blindness
by rocurley — 2012-09-27T02:30:11.465Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: Choice Blindness

WHEN:
30 September 2012 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We'll spend some time discussing the recent findings on choice blindness, then revert to general conversation.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC: Choice Blindness