trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[SEQ RERUN] Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2011-05-12T16:42:12.745Z

Today's post, Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization, was originally published on 16 March 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

As a side effect of evolution, super-stimuli exist, and as a result of economics, are getting and should continue to get worse.

(alternate summary:)

At least 3 people have died by playing online games non-stop. How is it that a game is so enticing that after 57 straight hours playing, a person would rather spend the next hour playing the game over sleeping or eating? A candy bar is superstimulus, it corresponds overwhelmingly well to the EEA healthy food characteristics of sugar and fat. If people enjoy these things, the market will respond to provide as much of it as possible, even if other considerations make it undesirable.

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 Blue or Green on Regulation?, 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.
The elephant in the room, AMA
by calcsam — 2011-05-12T14:59:41.657Z

Hello fellow Less Wrongians!

Given your comments on my organizing communities series, I get the feeling that many of you are wondering why:

a returned Mormon missionary would even come to Less Wrong in the first place.

why I find religion plausible at all

why I would identify with Mormonism in particular (several people have used the word 'cult')

I'm happy to hold discussions about any of these questions or related ones. However, I haven't responded to many comments on the main series of posts because:

they could eat up each thread

the threads aren't supposed to be about Mormonism. They're supposed to be about about making a movement work effectively. But being a missionary is where I got my experience.

I wanted to created this thread as a center for questions you might have about my faith. This is not an attempt to preach -- I would be perfectly happy not having a discussion purely about religion at all. But since there seem to be many comments, well, fire away.

Some basic facts: I am a student at Stanford. I am 22. I converted to Mormonism when I was 19. I used to be atheist/agnostic. I am very much a believer, not just in it for the social perks.

Well, as it is written, AMA (= Ask Me Anything)

(Thanks Kevin for the suggestion.)

Edit: Wow, there are a lot of comments. This has been a helpful chance to clarify my thinking. I hope you have learned something useful -- perhaps using the question is 'Is there anything surprising here that he said?'.

Edit 2: Here are some answers to repeated questions. Again, this really helped me distill and clarify myself and I've enjoyed the discussion.

Why do you believe? It's a combination of

"wow, this seems to be a really functional community in producing good people."

"wow, these doctrines are really amazing."[1]

personal spiritual experiences (experiences-which-I-interpret as spiritual if you prefer) and other positive experiences from doing church things, like emotional growth from going on a mission.

I would estimate that before this all happened, my odds ratio was about 2000:1, and now it's about 1:10. I would ballpark the odds ratios of each of the above 3 events as ~12.5:1, ~25:1, and ~62.5:1. (I was considering likelihood but didn't think in that precise of terms at the time, so any concretization is open to charges of ex post facto. And these are still ballparks.)

There are lots of arguments against Morm...
You'll die if you do that
by sixes_and_sevens — 2011-05-12T10:27:09.829Z

"They told me that if I ever turned this flashlight on, I would die! They told me that about everything! I mean, I don't even know why they bothered giving me this stuff if they didn't want me to use it."

-- Wheatley, Portal 2

Today I received some shoes in the post, which included a couple of packets of silica gel. I don't think I have ever seen a packet of silica gel that didn't have "DO NOT EAT" printed on it, and it's always bemused me. It doesn't look edible, or smell appetising, and isn't even especially harmful to ingest in most circumstances. Chances are that if I ever did want to eat silica gel, I'd probably have a damn good reason, and a lifetime of being told to not eat it is an obstacle to that.

This has started me thinking about all the other things we internalise as serious hazards contrary to reality. As a child, I was told that picking my nose and eating it would have some sort of cumulative toxic effect. This was obviously a lie manufactured by my parents (or maybe their parents) to get me to stop doing it, but a couple of decades later I felt positively scandalised when I read about an Austrian pathologist who claimed the practise was beneficial to the immune system. (Although this is mentioned in the delightful Wikipedia page on nose-picking, the reference links are dead, so I'd actually treat this assertion with caution, but feel free to munch away on your own dried nasal mucus anyway).

Although nose-picking and eating the packaging that shoes come in are pretty trivial examples, I do wonder how many of these prohibitive false dire consequences I'm still labouring under, invisibly making my life more difficult. I also wonder how many full-grown adults still don't accept sweets from strangers.

Do you have any examples of an authority figure, or a prevailing piece of cultural conditioning, giving warnings of dire outcomes you later discovered to be false, misleading or based on an agenda you were naive to at the time?
Designing Rationalist Projects
by calcsam — 2011-05-12T03:38:21.206Z

Related to: Lessons from Latter-day Saints, Building Rationalist Communities overview, Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don't Implement Themselves

My thesis:

It doesn’t matter what ideas are conveyed on Less Wrong, or in LW meetings -- the subset that matters is what group members resolved to do. Discussion of these 'resolves', and people's experience doing them, is useful in creating an expectation that people level up their skills.

Intelligent discussion of ideas is always refreshing. But translating that into action is more difficult.

Our learned reflexes are deep. They need to be overridden. How? Practice.

One woman I taught in India, we’ll call her Girija, was 35 years old, extremely intelligent and really wanted to change her life but had incredibly low levels of self-confidence. Every time we met Girija, we’d have a really sharp discussion, followed by her pouring her heart out to us. It was the same every time, and though we enjoyed the visits, and the food she would feed us, she never seemed to be getting anywhere.

If she really wanted to fundamentally change her life, our weekly meetings weren’t enough. (Similarly, weekly meetups are a good start, but if you really want to be learning rationality you should be practicing every day.)

We felt that if Girija spent some time every day with her 9 year old daughter and live-in boyfriend, reading the scriptures together, they would be happier. We explained this to her frequently, and she said she would start -- but she never did it.

One week, through cleverly calling Girija and chatting for 10 minutes every day, we got her to do it. After the week was over, we asked her how it went.

“You know, it was really good,” she said. “Sandeep and I have been getting along a lot better this week because we did that.”

It was like a light had turned on in her head. Because we followed up, she did it, and was far more motivated to do more things afterwards.[1]

Let me give two simple examples of goal, project, and follow-up.[2]

GOAL: To become better at noticing logical fallacies as they are being uttered

PROJECT: A certain Less Wrong group could watch a designated hour of C-SPAN -- or a soap opera, or a TV show -- and try to note down all the fallacies.

FOLLOW-UP: Discuss this on a designated thread. Afterwards, compile the arguments and link to the file,

...
Personal Benefits from Rationality
by Celer — 2011-05-12T01:08:20.020Z

I saw this and realised something:

"Hey, wait, where have I seen other people talk about specific benefits from Rationality?"

And then I realised I hadn't. I look around the site some. Nothing there.

This is a place to fix that. The idea of this page is to post specific things that you personally have found helpful, that you learned from your studies of Bayescraft. This way we can find some that seem to work for a large number of people, so that when new people start to become interested in Rationality we can "make it rain" so that they see the benefits that come with being less wrong.

For commenters:

If someone posted something already that also worked for you, mention that. If every tactic is apparently used by only a single person, then it is harder for us as a community to figure out what we should recommend to tyros.

List of N Things:

Understanding that my high school history class has more to do with real science than does my Chemistry class let me understand how I should be approaching the problem. History lets you look at what happened and say "Why did this happen" when you view it the right way.

Reading up on cognitive neuroscience taught me that I could use the placebo affect on myself. I have missed one day of school due to illness in my life.

Learning to not propose solutions for a minimum of five minutes, by the clock, has honestly been the most effective thing I have yet learned for personal application at Less Wrong.

May we all share many useful things, for our own benefit and as a place to point tyros towards.
Econ/Game theory question
by Psychohistorian — 2011-05-11T20:17:02.677Z

This puzzled me. I'm pretty sure it's one of those unsolvable questions, but I'd want to know if it's not.

Two members of the species Homo Economus, A and B, live next to each other. A wants to buy an easement (a right to cross B's property, without which he cannot bring anything onto his lot) from B so that he can develop his property. B, under the law, has an absolute right to exclude A, meaning that nothing happens unless B agrees to it. The cost to B of granting this easement is $10 - it's over a fairly remote part of his land and he's not using it for anything else. A values the easement at $500,000, because he's got a sweet spot to build his dream house, if only he could construction equipment and whatnot to it. A and B know each others costs and values. They are "rational" and purely self-interested and bargaining costs zero. What's the outcome? I'm guessing it's "Between $5 and $500k," or "There is no deal unless one can credibly commit to being irrational." But I'm really not sure.

This could be asked as "In a bilateral monopoly situation where the seller's reservation price is $5 and the buyer's is $500,000, what is the predicted outcome?" But I figured the concrete example might make it more concrete.

Now that I've written this, I'm tempted to develop a "True price fallacy" and its implications for utilitarian measurement. But that's a separate matter entirely.
Satisfying preferences by creating them
by KatjaGrace — 2011-05-11T19:25:01.000Z

Sarkology points out that the intuition against it being a good thing to create new lives may be this:

…You are supposed to help people by satisfying their (already fixed and existent) preferences. Not by modifying those preferences to meet reality. Or God forbid, invent those preference ex nihilo.

Could this intuition be correct?

Suppose someone else invents a preference somehow. Lets say they enjoy an evening with a loved one in the presence of the scent of roses, and thus begin a lifelong fondness for that smell. Can you help the person by satisfying this new preference?

If not, you could never help anyone. All preferences are created somehow. So let’s take the usual view that you can help by satisfying preferences others have invented.

What about the person who created the preference? Did he do right or wrong in creating it?

If he did neither right nor wrong, then I could also do neither right or wrong by creating a preference. Then could I do good by fulfilling it? I can’t see why it should matter whether these two acts are done by different people or the same one. If I can do good this way, then why can’t I do good by doing both of these things at once, creating a preference in a situation which also causes it to be fulfilled? If I can do good that way, then the above intuition is wrong.

It could be incorrect to fulfil preferences ‘by’ creating them if creating them is a bad enough act to make up for the good got by fulfilling them. Which would entail that the world would be a better place had many satisfied and happy people not been born, and that having babies is generally a very bad thing to do. I think these things are far more unintuitive than the above intuition being wrong. What do you think?

Image by ღLitle fleaღ via Flickr
Rationality Quotes: May 2011
by Oscar_Cunningham — 2011-05-11T12:02:37.204Z

I always have a quotation for everything—it saves original thinking.

-Dorothy L. Sayers

This is the monthly quotes thread. Share and Enjoy.

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
SRS advice
by Dr_Manhattan — 2011-05-10T20:49:15.839Z

I have made some significant progress in organizing myself with org-mode (basically a really well thought out emacs outliner) - consider this a plug :).

Now I think I am ready to bite the bullet and automate another part of my mental apparatus, memorization. I'd like to hear other people's experiences with SRS - spaced repetition - (negative, too), what software they use, what do they use it for, how much time they spend. I expect these to vary, so stating your reasons is worth an extra upvote (and thanks ahead)

ETA: When do you decide something is worth memorizing vs. putting it into a searchable database?
"I know I'm biased, but..."
by  — 2011-05-10T20:03:28.999Z

Inspired by: The 5-Second Level, Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People

"I know I'm biased, but..." and its equivalents seem to be relatively common in casual conversation--I've encountered the phrase in classroom discussions, on Internet message boards, and in political arguments. In most cases, "I know I'm biased, but..." is used as a way of feigning humility and deflecting criticism by preemptively responding to accusations of bias. That is, the speaker acknowledges that their argument may be flawed in order to deny their opponent the opportunity point out particular biases. It's a way of signaling to the audience, "Yes, there are errors in this line of reasoning, but I already know that, so you can't accuse me of being biased."

But as we all know by now, it's not enough to just acknowledge biases--you have to actually correct the error before you can move on. Admitting that your argument is based on bias does not absolve you of your error, and it doesn't make your argument any truer.

Therefore, "I know I'm biased, but" is a cached thought that we would be better off without. But how can we get rid of it? Tabooing the phrase "I know I'm biased, but..." is not enough, since your brain will probably end up substituting something similar, such as "I may be wrong, but..." instead of making the appropriate correction. Instead, it is necessary to force your brain to consciously think about the bias instead of instinctively rationalizing the biased argument. This is a skill that takes place on the 5-second level: you have to stop your train of thought mid-sentence and think about the situation more clearly. The following should serve as an anti-pattern for when you notice yourself thinking, "I know I'm biased, but...":

1) Stop. I'm not ready to proceed. If there's a bias in my argument, bulldozing over it is never the correct solution. I need to just cut myself off in mid-sentence and think about this.

2) Identify the bias. What is this bias that my brain is trying to cover up? Does it have a name? Where have I read about it before? What heuristic am I using that is causing the problem? Do I have any emotional attachment to this argument that might cloud my judgment? How would I feel if this argument was wrong? Where is my information coming from? Did I do a thorough job researching this argument?

3) Think about potential solutions. What heuristic should I be using inst...
[SEQ RERUN] Blue or Green on Regulation?
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2011-05-10T18:31:46.512Z

Today's post, Blue or Green on Regulation?, was originally published on 15 March 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Both sides are often right in describing the terrible things that will happen if we take the other side's advice; the universe is "unfair", terrible things are going to happen regardless of what we do, and it's our job to trade off for the least bad outcome.

(alternate summary:)

In a rationalist community, it should not be necessary to talk in the usual circumlocutions when talking about empirical predictions. We should know that people think of arguments as soldiers and recognize the behavior in our selves. When you think about all the truth values around you come to see that much of what the Greens said about the downside of the Blue policy was true - that, left to the mercy of the free market, many people would be crushed by powers far beyond their understanding, nor would they deserve it. And imagine that most of what the Blues said about the downside of the Green policy was also true - that regulators were fallible humans with poor incentives, whacking on delicately balanced forces with a sledgehammer.

(alternate summary:)

Burch's law isn't a soldier-argument for regulation; estimating the appropriate level of regulation in each particular case is a superior third option.

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 The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality, 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.
[Link] The Myth of the Three Laws of Robotics
by Morendil — 2011-05-10T17:44:38.597Z

At SingularityHub. Promising title; disappointing content. Author proceeds by pure perceptual analogy with the Asimovian Three Laws alluded to; argues that the mere possibility of self-modification renders AI uncontrollable - without considering the possibility of fixed points in the goal computation. ("Do you really think it can be constrained?" - i.e. argument from limited imagination.)
SL4 META: list closure 2 month followup
by gwern — 2011-05-10T15:46:39.135Z

This is probably of interest only to the old-timers here. (Ironically, as a cross-post, this is almost by definition spam for LW, since anyone really interested in the topic would already be subscribed to SL4 and would have seen the emails.)

In 13 March, I finally got around to a long outstanding bit of cleanup: suggesting that the equally long defunct SL4 list be formally closed, things tidied up, and the lights turned out. The suggestion met with a mixed (and muted) reception.

Last night I followed up with a second email comparing SL4 activity to activity on Extropy-chat, LW, OB, and MoR; it won't surprise anyone trying to drink from the firehose here that LW is approximately 3 orders of magnitude more active than SL4 is.
What sort of algorithm enjoys music?
by Manfred — 2011-05-10T14:42:47.493Z

Aesthetics is confusing me a bit right now. You might also ask the question "why?" with painting or architecture, for example. I am singling out music because I got to thinking about it via how we understand music.

Neurological problems can separately disable pitch/melody recognition, rhythm recognition and emotional reaction to music, and people can lose all of these without losing speech and speech processing. This is odd. Liking music is then some messy neurological process with its own special pathways. And it's probably not all that complicated, from a brain standpoint, just fuzzy and parallel.

What do we know? We know that we don't generally like contextless musical objects, but instead enjoy relationships between musical objects, especially with some rhythm. And yet we enjoy music "in the moment," (a musical object in the context of the last few measures) without having to listen to a whole piece. We tend to ascribe emotion to music (particularly the stress patterns, which seems vaguely connected to speech), and people can express themselves through music. Music can differ from culture to culture, but we usually like discrete, repeating scales and rhythms that partially repeat.

One proposal is that we form a vague (consistent with many possibilities) model of what the musician is likely to do next, and enjoy it when the model feels accurate. The emotional content also suggests that "musical grammar" model, where different elements of the music communicate things to us and what we enjoy is deciphering the communication and experiencing the communicated emotions. I'd enjoy it if people had more suggestions and possible experiments. Going more abstract, should these proposals generalize well to other sorts of aesthetics, or should we assume that since it's probably all different neurons we shouldn't try too hard? If so, why do we feel like we enjoy aesthetic pursuits in similar ways?