trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
What hardcore singularity believers should consider doing
by James_Miller — 2010-10-27T20:26:04.499Z

Leading singularity proponent Ray Kurzweil co-authored a book titled Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. A singularity believer who thinks that if he makes it to the singularity he has an excelling chance of living forever, or at least for thousands of years, should be willing to sacrifice much for a slightly higher chance of living long enough to make it to the singularity. This is why I think singularity believers make up a vastly disproportionate percentage of members of cryonics organizations.

According to a new scientific article there is a medical procedure that might be able to greatly extend some peoples’ lives. Although we don’t have a huge amount of data one small study showed that several hundred people on average lived 14 years longer than those that didn’t get the procedure.

Singularity proponents should be extremely interested in the procedure. Indeed, a way of testing whether members of the SIAI such as Eliezer really and truly believe in the singularity is whether they at least seriously consider having the procedure.

The procedure is discussed at the end of this article.
Play paranoid debating at home!
by eugman — 2010-10-27T16:34:57.188Z

I was reading the wiki article on Paranoid debating and I noticed that there was no good source of facts for the game. I suggest anyone interested in it check out a party game called Wits and Wagers. It's an interesting game where everyone is given a trivia question with a numerical answer. Everyone writes down their guess, then bets on the answers, with the more extreme answers paying out better. It's a cool game and a good source of numerical trivia.
HELP:  Do I have a chance at becoming intelligent?
by johnbgone — 2010-10-26T21:41:37.807Z

If this post is inappropriate, I apologize.

I stumbled upon this site after reading "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality". The story so far has really moved me on multiple levels and sent me here in a quest to learn more about rationality as a philosophy/way of thinking about the world. I have read Ayn Rands published works and loved the stories and most of the message. The characters always seemed like titans that were far and above me, but now, I've seen a character that is a bit more approachable.

I've started to go through the "Map and Territory" section of the "Core Sequences" and this whole project and community makes me ecstatic. I'm currently working my way through the Bayes's Theorem article with some success. The more I read, the more I realize I may have a problem.

I'm pretty dumb.

Is higher level reasoning "use it or lose it" ? I like learning new things and love reading but any new ideas require a ton of thought and re-reading. I think I have enough interest to keep plugging away at it, but I'm not sure I'm going at things the right way. Is there a "Kid's Table" for lesswrong.com?

For "Priors": I'm 28 years old, white male, married, no children, poor economic upbringing, solid emotional upbringing, currently lower to middle class, high school diploma, US Navy, currently a civilian electronics technician, raised Baptist currently Agnostic/Atheist (recently).

I guess that's it. Thanks!

--John
Ethics of Jury nullification and TDT?
by Psy-Kosh — 2010-10-26T21:01:23.563Z

I've been sort of banging my head on this issue (I have jury duty next week (first time)).

The obvious possibility is what if I get put on a drug use case? The obvious injustices of the anti-drug laws are well known, and I know of the concept of nullification, but I'm bouncing back and forth as to its validity.

Some of my thoughts on this:

Thought 1: Just decide if they did it or didn't do it.

Thought 2: But can I ethically bring myself to declare guilty (and thus result in potential serious punishment) someone that really didn't actually do anything wrong? ie, to support a seriously unjust law?

Thought 3: (and here's where TDT style issues come in) On the other hand, the algorithm "if jury member, don't convict if I don't like a particular law" seems to be in general a potentially really really bad algorithm. (ie, one obvious failure mode for that algorithm would be homophobic juries that refuse to convict on hate crimes against gays)

Thought 4: Generally, those sorts of people tend to not be serious rationalists. Reasoning as if I can expect correlations among our decision algorithms seems questionable.

Thought 5: Really? Really? If I wanted to start making excuses like that, I could probably whenever I feel like construct a reference class for which I am the sole member. Thought 4 style reasoning seems itself to potentially be shaky.

So, basically I'm smart enough to have the above sequence of thoughts, but not smart enough to actually resolve it. What is a rationalist to do? (In other words, any help with untangling my thoughts on this so that I can figure out if I should go by the rule of "nullify if appropriate" or "nullification is bad, period, even if the law in question is hateful" would be greatly appreciated.)
Teachers vs. Tutors
by  — 2010-10-26T16:59:48.669Z

It's an anecdotal commonplace that rich parents in places like Manhattan are willing to shell out a colossal amount for their children's tutors. Most recently I heard about a math PhD student at an elite university who's getting $500 an hour to tutor high school kids.

Now this makes me wonder: why do tutors get paid so much, but not teachers? Why isn't there a private school somewhere, full of elite superstar teachers, getting paid colossal sums? Why isn't there someone trying to lure young people into being very well-paid schoolteachers instead of professors or hedge fund managers? If some parents have the extra resources to spend on their children's education, why is that money going to tutors rather than schools?

Some hypotheses that came to mind:

1. One-on-one tutoring really is the form of learning that gives you the most bang for your buck; the marginal dollar is best spent on getting a better tutor because tutoring is more effective than school.

2. The marginal dollar is best spent on getting a better tutor because tutors are independent contractors. Switching your kid's school is a big change for the kid, and a discrete jump in price, but getting a new tutor at slightly more cost is easy.

3. Something about the rules of teacher's unions prevents a few "superstar teachers" from being paid colossal sums.

4. The sort of person who becomes a $500-an-hour tutor usually has a background in something other than education, and isn't credentialed to be a schoolteacher, and perhaps doesn't want to teach full time. You could get him to tutor, if you paid well, but you couldn't get him to be a full-time teacher without an expenditure beyond the means of even the wealthiest parents.

5. Parents are using tutors to improve their children's grades, not their education. Putting that same money into the kid's school wouldn't improve the kid's grades relative to his classmates'.

Any other ideas?
Pathological utilitometer thought experiment
by Rain — 2010-10-26T15:13:06.100Z

I've been doing thought experiments involving a utilitometer: a device capable of measuring the utility of the universe, including sums-over-time and counterfactuals (what-if extrapolations), for any given utility function, even generic statements such as, "what I value." Things this model ignores: nonutilitarianism, complexity, contradictions, unknowability of true utility functions, inability to simulate and measure counterfactual universes, etc.

Unfortunately, I believe I've run into a pathological mindset from thinking about this utilitometer. Given the abilities of the device, you'd want to input your utility function and then take a sum-over-time from the beginning to the end of the universe and start checking counterfactuals ("I buy a new car", "I donate all my money to nonprofits", "I move to California", etc) to see if the total goes up or down.

It seems quite obvious that the sum at the end of the universe is the measure that makes the most sense, and I can't see any reason for taking a measure at the end of an action as is done in all typical discussions of utility. Here's an example: "The expected utility from moving to California is negative due to the high cost of living and the fact that I would not have a job." But a sum over all time might show that it was positive utility because I meet someone, or do something, or learn something that improves the rest of my life, and without the utilitometer, I would have missed all of those add-on effects. The device allows me to fill in all of the unknown details and unintended consequences.

Where this thinking becomes a problem is when I realize I have no such device, but desperately want one, so I can incorporate the unknown and the unintended, and know what path I should be taking to maximize my life, rather than having the short, narrow view of the future I do now. In essence, it places higher utility on 'being good at calculating expected utility' than almost any other actions I could take. If I could just build a true utilitometer that measures everything, then the expected utility would be enormous! ("push button to improve universe"). And even incremental steps along the way could have amazing payoffs.

Given that a utilitometer as described is impossible, thinking about it has still altered my values to place steps toward creating it above other, seemingly more realistic options (buying a new c

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Self-empathy as a source of "willpower"
by Academian — 2010-10-26T14:20:11.565Z

tl:dr; Dynamic consistency is a better term for "willpower" because its meaning is robust to changes in how we think constistent behavior actually manages to happen. One can boost consistency by fostering interactions between mutually inconsistent sub-agents to help them better empathize with each other.

Despite the common use of the term, I don't think of my "willpower" as an expendable resource, and mostly it just doesn't feel like one. Let's imagine Bob, who is somewhat overweight, likes to eat cake, and wants to lose weight to be more generically attractive and healthy. Bob often plans not to eat cake, but changes his mind, and then regrets it, and then decides he should indulge himself sometimes, and then decides that's just an excuse-meme, etc. Economists and veteran LessWrong readers know this oscillation between value systems is called dynamic inconsistency (q.v. Wikipedia). We can think of Bob as oscillating between being two different idealized agents living in the same body: a WorthIt agent, and a NotWorthIt agent.

The feeling of NotWorthIt-Bob's (in)ability to control WorthIt-Bob is likely to be called "(lack of) willpower", at least by NotWorthIt-Bob, and maybe even by WorthIt-Bob. But I find the framing and langauge of "willpower" fairly unhelpful. Instead, I think NotWorthIt-Bob and WorthIt-Bob just aren't communicating well enough. They try to ignore each other's relevance, but if they could both be present at the same time and actually talk about it, like two people in a healthy relationship, maybe they'd figure something out. I'm talking about self-empathy here, which is opposite to self-sympathy: relating to emotions of yours that you are not immediately feeling. Haven't you noticed you're better at convincing people to change their minds when you actually empathize with their position during the conversation? The same applies to convincing yourself.

Don't ask "Do I have willpower?", but "Am I a dynamically consistent team?"

The task of keeping your various mental impulses working together coherently is called executive functioning. To deal with an "always eat cake" impulse, some may be lucky enough to win by simply reciting "cake isn't really that tasty anyway". A more potent technique is to practice visualizing the cake making you instantaneously grotesque and extremely ill, creating a psychological flinch-away reflex — a behavioral t...
If you don't know the name of the game, just tell me what I mean to you
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2010-10-26T13:43:57.762Z

Following: Let's split the Cake

tl;dr: Both the Nash Bargaining solution (NBS), and the Kalai-Smorodinsky Bargaining Solution (KSBS), though acceptable for one-off games that are fully known in advance, are strictly inferior for independent repeated games, or when there exists uncertainty as to which game will be played.

Let play a bargaining game, you and I. We can end up with you getting €1 and me getting €3, both of us getting €2, or you getting €3 and me getting €1. If we fail to agree, neither of us gets anything.

Oh, and did I forget to mention that another option was for you to get an aircraft carrier and me to get nothing?

Think of that shiny new aircraft carrier, loaded full with jets, pilots, weapons and sailors; think of all the things you could do with it, all the fun you could have. Places to bomb or city harbours to cruise majestically into, with the locals gaping in awe at the sleek powerful lines of your very own ship.

Then forget all about it, because Kalai-Smorodinsky says you can't have it. The Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solution to this game is 1/2 of a chance of getting that ship for you, and 1/2 of a chance of getting €3 for me (the Nash Bargaining Solution is better, but still not the best, as we'll see later). This might be fair; after all, unless you have some way of remunerating me for letting you have it, why should I take a dive for you?

But now imagine we are about to start the game, and we don't know the full rules yet. We know about the €'s involved, that's all fine, we know there will be an offer of an aircraft carrier; but we don't know who is going to get the offer. If we wanted to decide on our bargaining theory in advance, what would we do?

Obviously not use the KSBS; it gives 1/4 of an aircraft carrier to each player. One excellent solution is simple: whoever has the option of the aircraft carrier... gets it. This gives us both an expected gain of 1/2 aircraft carrier before the game begins, superior to the other approaches.

Let formalise this uncertainty over possible games. A great game (GG) is a situation where we are about to play one of games gj, each with probability pj. My utility function is U1, yours is U2. Once we choose a bargaining equilibrium which results in outcomes oj with utilities (aj,bj) for each game, then our expected utility gain is (Σpj aj, Σpj bj)=Σpj(...
HELP: How do minimum wage laws harm people?
by Kingreaper — 2010-10-26T11:09:10.853Z

The concept of minimum wage is one I'm rather attached to. I have dozens of arguments for why it helps people, improves the world, etc. etc. I suspect this view is shared by most of this community, although I haven't seen any discussion of it.

I don't have much understanding of the harms that minimum wages cause; and at what level of minimum wage those harms become relevant (ie. a minimum wage that would not be a living wage even working 24 hours a day is unlikely to have any of the same problems that a minimum wage sufficient to buy an aircraft carrier an hour would have)

So what are the harms that such laws cause?
Should people require a mandatory license for parenting?
by XiXiDu — 2010-10-26T08:47:36.128Z

Sir, Could I See Your Breeding License?

Why [...] are we so cavalier about who we let have and raise them? As technology enables more people to reproduce, environmental pressures make each new life a bigger burden, and our understanding of child psychology improves, it’ll become more and more evident that just because a person can have kids doesn’t mean they should have kids. My guess is that, decades down the road, future generations will require a license to reproduce and start a family. That sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

Most important is that children don't have to grow up under horrible circumstances inflicted on them by the inability of their parents. You always have to weigh the freedom of some against any negative infliction it could have on others. In this case a bit less freedom would guarantee a lot less distress.

It is reasonable. I don't see how we can ask for species-appropriate animal husbandry regarding animals like chimps but not children. You have to have a drivers license for good reasons too. So why is everyone allowed to rule over helpless human beings for years without having to prove their ability to do so in a way that guarantees the well-being of their protégé?

Such discussions always remind me about something important. Children should not be assigned with any religion. There should be a certain age where they can decide what religion they want to follow, if any. This doesn't mean that religious people shouldn't be able to have children but that they shouldn't be able to force their children into a certain framework either. Parents should be forced to allow their children to take part in a educational framework based on contemporary ethics and knowledge. I don't even have a problem with lessons in religion in school as it is part of human nature. But it shall not be focused on any truth value or a certain religion but an overview and comparison with non-religious ethics and truth-seeking.
Luminosity (Twilight fanfic) Part 2 Discussion Thread
by JenniferRM — 2010-10-25T23:07:49.960Z

This is Part 2 of the discussion of Alicorn's Twilight fanfic Luminosity.

LATE BREAKING EDIT: Part 3 exists now, so new comment threads should be started there rather than here.

In the vein of the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion threads this is the place to discuss anything relating to Alicorn's Twilight fanfic Luminosity. The fanfic is also archived on Alicorn's own website.

Here is Part 1 of the discussion. Previous discussion is hidden so deeply within the first Methods of Rationality thread that it's difficult to find even if you already know it exists.

Similar to how Eliezer's fanfic popularizes material from his sequences Alicorn is using the insights from her Luminosity sequence.

The fic is really really good but there is a twist part way through that makes the fic even more worth reading than it already was, but that makes it hard to talk about because to even ask if someone is twist-aware with any specific hints is difficult. The twist is in the latter half of the story. If you are certainly not post-twist and want to save the surprise, then you should stop reading here and fall back to Part 1 discussion or to the fic itself.

If you think you're pretty sure you are post-twist and are safe to read the rest of this, try reading this rot13'ed hint and see if what you've read matches this high level description of the twist...

Rqjneq unf qvfpbirerq gur frperg gung Vfnoryyn jnf xrrcvat sebz uvz "sbe uvf bja tbbq" bhg bs srne bs Neb ernqvat Rqjneq'f zvaq. Va gur nsgrezngu, fbzrguvat unf punatrq nobhg gurve eryngvbafuvc gung znl unir pnhfrq lbh gb pel sbe n juvyr, naq juvpu znlor urycf gb rzbgvbanyyl qevir ubzr gur pbzovarq zrffntr bs YJ'f negvpyrf nobhg "fbzrguvat gb cebgrpg" naq "ernfba nf n zrzrgvp vzzhar qvfbeqre" naq gur jnl gurl pna fvzhygnarbhfyl nccyl gb crbcyr jub unir abguvat zber va gur jbeyq guna fbzr fvatyr crefba jub gurl ybir.

If the answer to the hint is obvious, then just to be sure that there is not a double illusion of transparency at work, here is the cutoff point spelled out explicitly:

Gur phgbss cbvag sbe cbfgvat urer vf gung lbh unir ernq hc gb puncgre svsgl svir (va gur snasvpgvba irefvba) be puncgre gjragl rvtug ba Nyvpbea'f jrofvgr jurer Rqjneq jnf cebonoyl vapvarengrq, Vfnoryyn fheivirf na nggrzcgrq vapvarengvba, naq fur unf gb ortha gb jbex bhg jung gb qb jvg...
Activation Costs
by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) — 2010-10-25T21:30:58.150Z

Enter Wikipedia:

In chemistry, activation energy is a term introduced in 1889 by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, that is defined as the energy that must be overcome in order for a chemical reaction to occur.

In this article, I propose that:

Every action you take has an activation cost (perhaps zero)

These costs vary from person to person

These costs can change over time

Activation costs explain a lot of akrasia

After proposing that, I'd like to explore:

Factors that increase activation costs

Factors that decrease activation costs

Every action a person takes has an activation cost. The activation cost of a consistent, deeply embedded habit is zero. It happens almost automatically. The activation cost for most people in the United States to exercising is fairly high, and most people are inconsistent about exercising. However, there are people who - every single day - begin by putting their running shoes on and running. Their activation cost to running is effectively zero.

These costs vary from person to person. In the daily running example above, the activation cost to the runner is low. The runner simply starts running in the morning. For most people, it's higher for a variety of reasons we'll get to in a moment. The running example is fairly obvious, but you'll also see phenomenon like a neat person saying to a sloppy one, "Why don't you clean your desk? ... just f'ing do it, man." Assuming the messy person indeed wants to have a clean desk, then it's likely the messy person has a higher activation cost to cleaning his desk. (He could also have less energy/willpower)

These costs can change over time. If the every-morning-runner suffers from a prolonged illness or injury and ceases to run, restarting the program might have a much higher activation cost for a variety of reasons we'll cover in a moment.

Finally, I'd like to propose that activation costs explain a lot of akrasia and procrastination. Akrasia is defined as "acting against one's better judgment." I think it's possible that an action a person wishes to take has higher activation costs than they have available energy for activation at the moment. There is emerging literature on limited willpower and "ego depletion," here's Wikipedia on the topic:

Ego depletion refers to the idea that self-control or willpower is an exhaustible resource that can be used up. When that energy is

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A suggestion on how to get people to read the Sequences
by AdeleneDawner — 2010-10-25T19:21:31.987Z

I just encountered Archive Binge, a website that makes custom RSS feeds of certain webcomics' archives, presenting a few comics per day so that people can easily catch up to those comics' current strips without overloading themselves.

I strongly suspect that a similar tool would be useful for the Sequences. It might be good to have a few extra features, like the ability to only see posts with a certain tag, but even just a basic feed that presented one or two of them a week would be useful.

It might be even more useful to, rather than allowing each person to make their own feed, have a single feed that cycles through everything and then restarts, to encourage new conversations about those articles between people who are reading the sequences at the same time. If the resulting cycle is too long, we could also have a second or third feed offset from the main one, so that no one has to wait more than a few months to subscribe to a feed that's starting at the beginning.