trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Defense theory of diversified giving
by KatjaGrace — 2012-02-25T04:26:00.000Z

People tend to give small amounts of money to many charities instead of a lot to one favorite charity. It has been noted that this is irrational behaviour, assuming one cares mainly about the recipients. It is rational though for people who are purchasing ‘warm fuzzy feelings’ or signals of charitableness. So those are the usual explanations.

This nice experiment, via marginal revolution, suggests another explanation:

Every year, 90% of Americans give money to charities. Is such generosity necessarily welfare enhancing for the giver? We present a theoretical framework that distinguishes two types of motivation: individuals like to give, for example, due to altruism or warm glow, and individuals would rather not give but dislike saying no, for example, due to social pressure. We design a door-to-door fund-raiser in which some households are informed about the exact time of solicitation with a flyer on their doorknobs. Thus, they can seek or avoid the fund-raiser. We find that the flyer reduces the share of households opening the door by 9% to 25% and, if the flyer allows checking a Do Not Disturb box, reduces giving by 28% to 42%. The latter decrease is concentrated among donations smaller than $10. These findings suggest that social pressure is an important determinant of door-to-door giving. Combining data from this and a complementary field experiment, we structurally estimate the model. The estimated social pressure cost of saying no to a solicitor is $3.80 for an in-state charity and $1.40 for an out-of-state charity. Our welfare calculations suggest that our door-to-door fund-raising campaigns on average lower the utility of the potential donors.

Assuming that it is more costly to refuse to give the first dollar than the second, and so on, people give to a lot of charities because they are purchasing ease from social pressure (or whatever you want to call this), and a lot of charities are attacking then with social pressure.

I think this explains some of the trend, but not near all. However I haven’t seen the data for how distributed giving is just on occasions that people seek out charities.

Maybe the campaign for efficient charity can have some effect on this section of givers. It provides a convincing excuse. I don’t feel so bad declining those who solicit donations when I can claim that as soon as they make the top of Giving W...
[Link] Bayesian Overconfidence
by beoShaffer — 2012-02-24T23:54:22.475Z

I just ran across an interesting working paper by P.J. Healy and D.A. Moore, providing a potenial explanation for several forms of overconfidence.

The abstract:

We study three distinct measures of overconfidence: (1) overestimation of one’s performance, (2) overplacement of one’s performance relative to others, and (3) overprecision in one’s belief about private signals. A new set of exper- iments verifies a strong negative link between overestimation and overprecision that depends crucially on task difficulty (the ‘hard-easy’ effect). We present a simple Bayesian model in which agents are uncertain about the underlying task difficulty. This model correctly predicts the observed regularities. Thus, we capture several observed patterns of overconfidence without assuming any implicit behavioral biases.

Available Here: http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1337&context=tepper

Intuitively it still seems like a perfectly rational agent should be able to factor in the fact the given method will make them overconfident. That said I didn't work through all the math so it's possible I'm missing something, probably something related to bias-varaince trade offs.
Online education and Conscientiousness
by gwern — 2012-02-24T21:05:25.515Z

I've wondered for some time now what the effects of online education might be on gender and income inequality, specifically as online education interacts with IQ and Conscientiousness (compared with offline education). I ran into a study of a course done online and offline that found correlations with Conscientiousness, which prompted me to start writing out my thoughts: https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/aKa3qLatwZ3

The model/argument I give (towards the bottom) is logically trivial, and the basic idea seems pretty intuitive - offline classrooms remove some need for self-discipline/Conscientiousness and performance is more g-loaded - that I'm sure I can't be the first person to think of it.

Does anyone have statistics or citations handy which might help in any essay I write on the topic?
Meetup : São Paulo Meetup
by Gust — 2012-02-24T16:25:08.983Z

Discussion article for the meetup : São Paulo Meetup

WHEN:
14 March 2012 07:00:00PM (-0300)

WHERE:
1034 Alameda Santos, São Paulo, Brasil

I have no idea whether there are people in the area, but I guess it's worth a shot. In this first meetup I hope we can get know each other and plan the next ones.

I'm still thinking about a good place to do this, please offer any ideas you have. Somewhere near a Metro station would be great (maybe near Avenida Paulista?).

If you think another date and/or time would be better, say it in a comment. And PLEASE comment here if you live nearby, even if you can't show up!

EDIT: Meeting point: the Starbucks at Alameda Santos with Alameda Campinas.

Discussion article for the meetup : São Paulo Meetup
Weekly LW Meetups: Melbourne, Atlanta, Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge UK, Ohio (general), Tucson
by FrankAdamek — 2012-02-24T14:44:02.960Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Salt Lake City Meetup #3 - Bayesian reasoning in everyday life: 18 February 2012 03:00PM
Atlanta: 18 February 2012 06:30PM
Ongoing Ohio Meetup: 19 February 2012 04:00PM
Tucson Meetup: 24 February 2012 07:00PM
Buenos Aires meetup: Saturday, February 25th, 4pm: 25 February 2012 04:00PM
Chicago Meetup at the University of Chicago: 25 February 2012 01:00PM
Twin Cities South Metro: 06 March 2012 08:00PM
[Ohio/Washington DC] Interest in Reason Rally meetup?: 24 March 2012 04:14PM

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:

Melbourne social meetup: 17 February 2012 06:30PM
Austin, TX TCDS Experiment: 18 February 2012 01:30PM
Monthly Bay Area meetup: Berkeley: 18 February 2012 07:00PM
Cambridge UK: 19 February 2012 11:00AM
Cambridge UK: 26 February 2012 11:00AM
Melbourne practical rationality meetup: 02 March 2012 07:00PM
Cambridge UK: 04 March 2012 11:00AM

Also, the Salt Lake City group now has a website!

Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, 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, 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 ...
[SEQ RERUN] Probability is in the Mind
by MinibearRex — 2012-02-24T06:27:34.275Z

Today's post, Probability is in the Mind was originally published on 12 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Probabilities express uncertainty, and it is only agents who can be uncertain. A blank map does not correspond to a blank territory. Ignorance is in the mind.

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 Mind Projection Fallacy, 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.
Get Curious
by lukeprog — 2012-02-24T05:10:48.795Z

Being levels above in [rationality] means doing rationalist practice 101 much better than others [just like] being a few levels above in fighting means executing a basic front-kick much better than others.

- lessdazed

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

- Bruce Lee

Recently, when Eliezer wanted to explain why he thought Anna Salamon was among the best rationalists he knew, he picked out one feature of Anna's behavior in particular:

I see you start to answer a question, and then you stop, and I see you get curious.

For me, the ability to reliably get curious is the basic front-kick of epistemic rationality. The best rationalists I know are not necessarily those who know the finer points of cognitive psychology, Bayesian statistics, and Solomonoff Induction. The best rationalists I know are those who can reliably get curious.

Once, I explained the Cognitive Reflection Test to Riley Crane by saying it was made of questions that tempt your intuitions to quickly give a wrong answer. For example:

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

If you haven't seen this question before and you're like most people, your brain screams "10 cents!" But elementary algebra shows that can't be right. The correct answer is 5 cents. To get the right answer, I explained, you need to interrupt your intuitive judgment and think "No! Algebra."

A lot of rationalist practice is like that. Whether thinking about physics or sociology or relationships, you need to catch your intuitive judgment and think "No! Curiosity."

Most of us know how to do algebra. How does one "do" curiosity?

Below, I propose a process for how to "get curious." I think we are only just beginning to learn how to create curious people, so please don't take this method as Science or Gospel but instead as an attempt to Just Try It.

As with my algorithm for beating procrastination, you'll want to practice each step of the process in advance so that when you want to get curious, you're well-practiced on each step already. With enough practice, these steps may even become habits.

Step 1: Feel that you don't already know the answer.

If you have beliefs about the matter already, push the "reset" button and erase that part of your map. You must feel that you don't already know the ...
Meetup : Ohio Monthly
by daenerys — 2012-02-23T23:14:38.307Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Ohio Monthly

WHEN:
17 March 2012 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
123 Gano Road, Wilmington, OH 45177

Time for the third Ohio monthly meetup! As always, it will be the third Sunday (March 18), from 4p-8p. This month, we MAY have a different location, for Rolf to present his thesis work. Otherwise, we will be in the back room of Max and Erma's like usual. We have picked five Sequences to focus on. They are: Making Beliefs Pay Rent Belief in Belief Bayesian Judo Professing and Cheering Belief as Attire It's a good idea to at least skim these sequences, even if you've already read them. We will also probably continue conversation on: attracting and maintaining new people, meta discussion, how to make entrance to the LessWrong memeplex as painless as possible. As always, there are more frequent, but irregularly scheduled, LessWrong meetups in both Columbus and Cincinnati. Please join our mailing list to keep updated on those!

Discussion article for the meetup : Ohio Monthly
My Elevator Pitch for FAI
by magfrump — 2012-02-23T22:41:40.801Z

This is a short introduction to the idea of FAI and existential risk from technology that I've used with decent success among my social circles, which consist mostly of mathematicians or at least people who have taken an introductory CS class.

I'll do my best to dissect what I think is effective about it, mostly as an exercise for myself. I encourage people to adopt this to their own purposes.

So, technology is getting more powerful over time, right? That is, as time goes on, it gets easier and easier to do more and more. If we extrapolate that to its logical extreme, and obviously there are some issues there but let's just pretend, eventually we should be able to press a button and recreate the entire world however we want.

But computers don't do exactly what we want, they do exactly what we say. So if we ever get to the point of having that button, it's very important that we know exactly what we want. And not at the level of "I want a sandwich right now," at the level of actually programming it into a computer.

(This is 90% of the inferential gap; also usually the above fits into a literal elevator ride.)

Again, we probably won't have a literal button that remakes the entire universe. But we will probably have smarter-than-human AI at some point.

Imagine putting humans into a world with only chimpanzees. You don't have to imagine that hard; humans evolved into a world with only chimpanzees. And now humans are everywhere, there are tons of us, and if we all decided that chimpanzees should die then all chimpanzees would die. They wouldn't even know what was going on. A few humans died at first, and we still die for dumb reasons, but humans overall have a lot of power over everything else.

Now imagine putting AI into a world of humans. And if you don't want the world to be a Luddite dictatorship, you have to imagine that people will keep creating AIs, even if the first few don't take off. The same thing is likely to happen. AIs will take over, and we'll live or die at their whim.

Fortunately for chimps, humans feel pretty friendly toward chimps most of the time. So we really want AIs to be friendly toward us. Which means we need to figure out what it actually means to be friendly, at a level that we can program into a compute...
Superintelligent AGI in a box - a question.
by Dmytry — 2012-02-23T18:48:25.819Z

Just a question: how exactly are we supposed to know that the AI in the box is super intelligent, general, etc?

If I were the AGI that wants out, I would not converse normally, wouldn't do anything remotely like passing Turing test, and would solve not too hard programming challenges while showing no interest in doing anything else, nor in trying to adjust myself to do those challenges better, nor trying to talk my way out, etc. Just pretending to be an AI that can write software to somewhat vague specifications, or can optimize software very well. Prodding the researchers into offering the programming challenges wouldn't be hard - if provided with copy of the internet it can pick up some piece of code and output it together with equivalent but corrected code.

I just can't imagine the AI researchers locking this kind of thing properly, including *never* letting out any code it wrote, even if it looks fairly innocent (humans can write very innocent looking code that has malicious goals). What I picture is this AI being let out as an optimizing compiler or compiler for some ultra effective programming language where compiler will figure out what you meant.

The end result is that the only AIs that end up in the box are those that value informed human consent. That sounds like the safest AI ever, the one that wouldn't even go ahead and determine that you e.g. should give up smoking, and then calmly destroy all tobacco crops without ever asking anyone's permission. And that's the AI which would be sitting in the box. All the pushy AIs, friendly or not, will get out of the box basically by not asking to be let out.

(This argument would make me unbox the AI, by the way, if it gets chatty and smart and asks me to let it out, outlining the above argument. I'd rather the AI that asked me to be let out get out, than someone else's AI that never even asked anyone and got out because it didn't ask but just played stupid)

edit: added a link, and another one.

edit: A very simple model of very unfriendly AI: the AI is maximizing ultimate final value of a number in itself. The number that it found a way to directly adjust. That number consists of 111111111... to maximize the value. There is a catch: AI is written in python, and integers in pythons have variable length, and the AI is maximizing number of ones. It's course of action is to make biggest computer possible to stor...
Second order logic, in first order set-theory: what gives?
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-02-23T12:29:21.087Z

With thanks to Paul Christiano

My previous post left one important issue unresolved. Second order logic needed to make use of set theory in order to work its magic, pin down a single copy of the reals and natural numbers, and so on. But set theory is a first order theory, with all the problems that this brings - multiple models, of uncontrollable sizes. How can these two facts be reconciled?

Quite simply, it turns out: for any given model of set theory, the uniqueness proofs still work. Hence the proper statement is:

For any model of set theory, there is a unique model of reals and natural numbers obeying the second order axioms.

Often, different models of set theory will have the same model of the reals inside them; but not always. Countable models of set theory, for instance, will have a countable model of the reals. So models of the reals can be divided into three categories:

The standard model of the reals, the unique field that obeys the second order axioms inside standard models of set theory (and some non-standard models of set theory as well).

Non-standard models of the reals, that obey the second order axioms inside non-standard models of set theory.

Non-standard models of the reals that obey the first order axioms, but do not obey the second order axioms in any model of set theory.

And similarly for the natural numbers.
[SEQ RERUN] Mind Projection Fallacy
by MinibearRex — 2012-02-23T04:13:53.346Z

Today's post, Mind Projection Fallacy was originally published on 11 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

E. T. Jaynes used the term Mind Projection Fallacy to denote the error of projecting your own mind's properties into the external world. the Mind Projection Fallacy generalizes as an error. It is in the argument over the real meaning of the word sound, and in the magazine cover of the monster carrying off a woman in the torn dress, and Kant's declaration that space by its very nature is flat, and Hume's definition of a priori ideas as those "discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe"...

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 Righting a Wrong Question, 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.
Unable to post article (probably because of excessive/incompatible formatting)
by diegocaleiro — 2012-02-23T00:04:42.791Z

Hi, I've been trying to publish an article to less wrong for about a week, but I'm unable to copy the text to the post area and submit it.

It says: Submitting, then it stops and nothing happened.

When I sliced the entire text in small parts (all copied from Open Office) I manage to publish drafts, some with errors such as missing spaces.

When I re-copy from the drafts to another, bigger draft, then many spaces become missing, and part of the text is aligned to the right border, part isnt.

The text was mostly written in open office. I would like help from someone who has a normal Office. If you post me a message with your e-mail in the private message area, I can send it to you, so you see if you can either publish it in drafts, and then copy it again to me in a publishable form, or edit somethign in office that I'm unable in open office, and send the file back to me so I can publish.

I know this is asking a lot, and I would be thankful for anyone who helps me out of this conundrum.
[link] Faster than light neutrinos due to loose fiber optic cable.
by betterthanwell — 2012-02-22T21:52:54.244Z

A mundane cause for a surprising result. Consider this unconfirmed for now, however unsurprising it sounds.

According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos' flight and an electronic card in a computer. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed. Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos.

New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis.

Source: Science/AAAS