trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Conversation Halters
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2010-02-20T15:00:34.487Z

Related to: Logical Rudeness, Semantic Stopsigns

While working on my book, I found in passing that I'd developed a list of what I started out calling "stonewalls", but have since decided to refer to as "conversation halters". These tactics of argument are distinguished by their being attempts to cut off the flow of debate - which is rarely the wisest way to think, and should certainly rate an alarm bell.

Here's my assembled list, on which I shall expand shortly:

Appeal to permanent unknowability;

Appeal to humility;

Appeal to egalitarianism;

Appeal to common guilt;

Appeal to inner privacy;

Appeal to personal freedom;

Appeal to arbitrariness;

Appeal to inescapable assumptions.

Appeal to unquestionable authority;

Appeal to absolute certainty.

Now all of these might seem like dodgy moves, some dodgier than others. But they become dodgier still when you take a step back, feel the flow of debate, observe the cognitive traffic signals, and view these as attempts to cut off the flow of further debate.

Hopefully, most of these are obvious, but to define terms:

Appeal to permanent unknowability - something along the lines of "Why did God allow smallpox? Well, no one can know the mind of God." Or, "There's no way to distinguish among interpretations of quantum mechanics, so we'll never know." Arguments like these can be refuted easily enough by anyone who knows the rules for reasoning under uncertainty and how they imply a correct probability estimate given a state of knowledge... but of course you'll probably have to explain the rules to the other, and the reason they appealed to unknowability is probably to cut off further discussion.

Appeal to humility - much the same as above, but said with a different emphasis: "How can we know?", where of course the speaker doesn't much want to know, and so the real meaning is "How can you know?" Of course one may gather entangled evidence in most such cases, and Occam's Razor or extrapolation from already-known facts takes care of the other cases. But you're not likely to get a chance to explain it, because by continuing to speak, you are committing the sin of pride.

Appeal to egalitarianism - something along the lines of "No one's opinion is better than anyone else's." Now if you keep talking you're committing an offense against tribal equality.

Appeal to common guilt - "e...
Doers or doings?
by KatjaGrace — 2010-02-20T07:48:01.000Z

A girl recently invited me to a public lecture she was running with Helen Caldicott, the famous anti-nuclear advocate. Except the girl couldn’t remember the bit after ‘famous’. When I asked her, she narrowed it down to something big picture related to the environment. Helen’s achievements were obviously secondary, if not twenty-secondary, in motivating her to organize the event. Though the fact she was famous for whatever those things were was important.

I’ve done a few courses in science journalism. The main task there is to make science interesting and intelligible for people. The easiest way to do this is to cut down on the dry bit about how reality works, and fill it up with stories about people instead. Who are the scientists? Where they are from? What sorts of people are they? What’s it like to be a research subject? Does the research support the left or the right or people who want to subsidize sheep or not immunize their children? If there’s an unsettled issue, present it as a dispute between scientists, not as abstract disagreeing evidence.

It’s hard to find popular science books that aren’t at least half full of anecdotes or biographies of scientists. Everybody knows that Einstein invented the theory of relativity, but hardly anyone knows what that’s about exactly, or tries to.

Looking through a newspaper, most of the stories are about people. Policy isn’t discussed so much as politics. Recessions are reported with tales of particular people who can’t pay their employees this year.

Philosophy is largely about philosophers from what I can gather.

One might conclude that most people are more interested in people than in whatever it is the people are doing. What people do is mainly interesting for what it says about those doing it.

But this isn’t true, there are some topics where people are happy to read about the topic more than the people. The weather and technology for instance. Nobody knows who invented most things they know intimately. It looks from this small list like people are more interested in doings which immediately affect them, and doers the rest of the time. I don’t read most topics though, and it’s a small sample. What other topics are people more interested in than they are in those who do them?

Going on that tentative theory, this blog is probably way ...
Study: Making decisions makes you tired
by bgrah449 — 2010-02-19T20:27:47.777Z

Related to: Willpower Hax #487: Execute by Default, The Physiology of Willpower

Making your own decisions makes you procrastinate more and quit sooner than when you're following orders:

Key quote:

Making choices led to reduced self-control (i.e., less physical stamina, reduced persistence in the face of failure, more procrastination, and less quality and quantity of arithmetic calculations). A field study then found that reduced self-control was predicted by shoppers' self-reported degree of previous active decision making. Further studies suggested that choosing is more depleting than merely deliberating and forming preferences about options and more depleting than implementing choices made by someone else and that anticipating the choice task as enjoyable can reduce the depleting effect for the first choices but not for many choices.
Med Patient Social Networks Are Better Scientific Institutions
by Liron — 2010-02-19T08:11:21.500Z

When you're suffering from a life-changing illness, where do you find information about its likely progression? How do you decide among treatment options?

You don't want to rely on studies in medical journals because their conclusion-drawing methodologies are haphazard. You'll be better off getting your prognosis and treatment decisions from a social networking site: PatientsLikeMe.com.

PatientsLikeMe.com lets patients with similar illnesses compare symptoms, treatments and outcomes. As Jamie Heywood at TEDMED 2009 explains, this represents an enormous leap forward in the scope and methodology of clinical trials. I highly recommend his excellent talk, and I will paraphrase part of it below.

Here is a report in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) about Lithium, which is a drug used to treat Bipolar disorder that a group in Italy found slowed ALS down in 16 patients. When PNAS published this, 10% of the patients in our system started taking Lithium, based on 16 patients' data in a bad publication.
This one patient, Humberto, said, "Can you help us answer these kinds of treatment questions? I don't want to wait for the next trial; I want to know now!"
So we launched some tools to help patients track their medical data like blood levels, symptoms, side effects... and share it.
People said, "You can't run a clinical trial like this. You don't have blinding, you don't have data, it doesn't follow the scientific method -- you can't do it."
So we said, OK, we can't do a clinical trial? Let's do something even harder. Let's use all this data to say whether Lithium is going to work on Humberto.
We took all the patients like Humberto and brought their data together, bringing their histories into it, lining up their timelines along meaningful points, and integrating everything we know about the patient -- full information about the entire course of their disease. And we saw that this orange line, that's what's going to happen to Humberto.

And in fact he took Lithium, and he went down the line. This works almost all the time -- it's scary.

So we couldn't run a clinical trial, but we could see whether Lithium was going to work for Humberto.
Here's the mean decline curve for the most dedicated Lithium patients we had, the ones who stuck with it for at least a year because they believed it was working. And even for this hard core sample, we still have N = 4

...
Explicit Optimization of Global Strategy (Fixing a Bug in UDT1)
by Wei Dai — 2010-02-19T01:30:44.399Z

When describing UDT1 solutions to various sample problems, I've often talked about UDT1 finding the function S* that would optimize its preferences over the world program P, and then return what S* would return, given its input. But in my original description of UDT1, I never explicitly mentioned optimizing S as a whole, but instead specified UDT1 as, upon receiving input X, finding the optimal output Y* for that input, by considering the logical consequences of choosing various possible outputs. I have been implicitly assuming that the former (optimization of the global strategy) would somehow fall out of the latter (optimization of the local action) without having to be explicitly specified, due to how UDT1 takes into account logical correlations between different instances of itself. But recently I found an apparent counter-example to this assumption.

(I think this "bug" also exists in TDT, but I don't understand it well enough to make a definite claim. Perhaps Eliezer or someone else can tell me if TDT correctly solves the sample problem given here.)

Here is the problem. Suppose Omega appears and tells you that you have just been copied, and each copy has been assigned a different number, either 1 or 2. Your number happens to be 1. You can choose between option A or option B. If the two copies choose different options without talking to each other, then each gets $10, otherwise they get $0.

Consider what happens in the original formulation of UDT1. Upon receiving the input "1", it can choose "A" or "B" as output. What is the logical implication of S(1)="A" on the computation S(2)? It's not clear whether S(1)="A" implies S(2)="A" or S(2)="B", but actually neither can be the right answer.

Suppose S(1)="A" implies S(2)="A". Then by symmetry S(1)="B" implies S(2)="B", so both copies choose the same option, and get $0, which is clearly not right.

Now instead suppose S(1)="A" implies S(2)="B". Then by symmetry S(1)="B" implies S(2)="A", so UDT1 is indifferent between "A" and "B" as output, since both have the logical consequence that it gets $10. So it might as well choose "A". But the other copy, upon receiving input "2", would go though this same reasoning, and also output "A".

The fix is straightforward in the case where every agent already has the same source code and preferences. UDT1.1, upon receiving input X, would put that input aside and first iterate throu...
Things You Can't Countersignal
by Alicorn — 2010-02-19T00:18:05.339Z

Countersignaling can backfire if your audience doesn't have enough information about you to start with. For some traits, it's especially dangerous, because you're likely to do it for traits you don't have the credibility to countersignal at all based on a misunderstanding of your relation to the general population.

Countersignaling is "showing off by not showing off" - you understate, avoid drawing attention to, or otherwise downplay your communications of and about some valuable trait you have, because a) you are sure you won't be mistaken for someone with very poor characteristics in that area, and b) signaling could make you look like a merely medium-grade specimen. (Actual medium-grade specimens have to signal to distinguish themselves from low-quality ones.) For instance, if you are so obviously high-status that no one could possibly miss it, it may be both unnecessary and counterproductive to signal status, because this would let others conflate you with mid-status people. So you can show up in a t-shirt and jeans instead of formal wear. If you are so obviously brilliant that no one could possibly think you're some crackpot who wandered in off the street, you can afford to rave a little, while people who have to prove their smarts will find it expedient to keep calm and measured in their communication.

In homogeneous communities, or in any situation where you are well-known, countersignaling is effective. Your traits exceeding some minimum threshold is assumed where everyone's traits so exceed, and so failing to signal is unlikely to give anyone the impression that you have somehow managed to be the only person in the room who is deficient. If you're personally acquainted with the people around whom you attempt countersignaling, your previous signals (or other evidence to the effect that you are awesome) will already have accumulated. It's not necessary to further prove yourself. In other words, if your audience's prior for you being medium-or-good is high enough, then your not signaling is evidence in favor of good over medium; if their prior for your being medium-or-low is too high, then your not signaling is instead evidence in favor of low over medium.

But there are some things you can't effectively countersignal.

Or rather, there are some things that you can't effectively countersignal to some peop...
Open Thread: February 2010, part 2
by CronoDAS — 2010-02-16T08:29:56.690Z

The Open Thread posted at the beginning of the month has gotten really, really big, so I've gone ahead and made another one. Post your new discussions here!

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
Friendly AI at the NYC Future Salon
by Jasen — 2010-02-16T02:57:47.014Z

For those in the New York City area: I will be giving a talk on Friendly AI at the NYC Future Salon this Saturday, the 20th of February, at 3:00pm. We'll be gathering in the back room of Stone Creek Bar, located at 140 E. 27th Street in Manhattan.

At the moment, 29 people have RSVPed "Yes" and 10 "maybe," with 21 spots left. If you're interested in comming, please RSVP through the Future Salon's meetup group, as space is limited.

Those of you familiar with the existing FAI literature probably won't hear anything new, but we have the venue for over 3 hours and my talk should only take 20 to 30 minutes, so there should be plenty of time for stimulating discussion. Be sure to bring your toughest questions! This would also be a good opportunity for those who haven't made any of the local LW/OB meetups (we have a meetup group now!) to meet other aspiring rationalists in the NYC area.

I look forward to seeing some new faces.
Hayekian Prediction Markets?
by David_J_Balan — 2010-02-15T23:50:36.541Z

I think I basically get the idea behind prediction markets. People take their money seriously, so the opinions of people who are confident enough to bet real money on those opinions deserve to be taken seriously as well. That kid on the schoolyard who was always saying "wanna bet?" might have been annoying but he also had a point: your willingness or unwillingness to bet does say something about how seriously your opinions ought to be taken. Furthermore, there are serious problems with the main alternative prediction method, which consists of asking experts what they think is going to happen. Almost nobody ever keeps track of whose predictions turned out to be right and then listens to those people more. Some predictions involve events that are so rare or so far in the future that there's no way for an expert to accumulate a track record at all. Some issues give experts incentives to be impressively wrong rather than boringly right. And so on. These are all good points, and they make enough sense to me to convince me that prediction markets deserve to be taken seriously and tested empirically. If they reliably produce better predictions than the alternatives, then they deserve to win the day.*
But there is a particular claim that is made about prediction markets that I am skeptical of. It starts with the well-known idea, usually associated with Friedrich on Hayek, that a major virtue of free markets is that there is all kinds of useful information spread out in local chunks throughout the economy, which individuals can usefully exploit but a central planner never could, which is reflected in market prices, and which in turn cause resources to be allocated efficiently. It then goes on to argue that prediction markets have a similar virtue. As an example, suppose there's a prediction market for a national election, and you happen to know that Candidate X is more popular in your little town than most people think. There's no way that some faraway expert could have known this or incorporated it into his or her prediction in any way, but it gives you an incentive to bet on Candidate X, which causes your local information to be reflected in the prediction market price. Lots and lots of people doing the same thing will cause lots and lots of such little local pieces of information, which couldn't have been obtained any other way, to also be reflected in the market ...
Boo lights: groupthink edition
by Morendil — 2010-02-15T18:29:56.968Z

In conversations on LessWrong you may be surprised (in fact, dismayed) to find an apparent majority of the community agreeing with each other, and disagreeing with some view you hold dear. You may be tempted to call "groupthink". Whenever that happens, please hold yourself to at least as high an epistemic standard as the people who are participating in the community, and substantiate your accusation of groupthink with actual evidence and analysis.

"Groupthink" can be an instance of applause lights, terms or explanations used not so much for their semantic content as for the warm fuzzies they are intended to trigger in your audience. Or... since "groupthink" isn't so much intended to generate applause for you, but to generate disapproval of those who disagree with you, we might coin the phrase "boo lights".

At any rate, you may be cheaply establishing (in your own eyes and the eyes of people "on your side") your status as a skeptic, without actually doing any critical thinking or even basic due diligence. Are you sure you that's what you want?

(N.B. links in this post either point to examples, or to more complete definitions of the concepts referenced; they are intended as supplementary material and this post stands on its own, you can ignore the links on a first read-through.)

Apparent consensus is not sufficient grounds for suspecting groupthink, because the "groupthink" explanatory scheme leads to further predictions than the mere appearance of consensus. For instance, groupthink results in "selection bias in collecting information" (from the Wikipedia entry). If the community has shown diligence in seeking contrary information, and yet has not rallied to your favored point of view, your accusations of groupthink are unjustified.

Disapproval of your contributions (in the form of downvoting) is not sufficient grounds for suspecting groupthink. Communities establish mechanisms of defence against disruption, in a legitimate response to a context of discourse where disruption is an ever present threat, the flip side of open participation. The voting/karma system is the current mechanism, probably flawed and probably better than nothing. Downvotes signal "we would like to see fewer comments like this one". The appropriate thing to do if you receive downvotes and you're neither a troll nor a crackpot is to simply seek feedback: ask what's wrong. Complaining only make...
Two probabilities
by rwallace — 2010-02-15T14:18:11.036Z

Consider the following statements:
1. The result of this coin flip is heads.
2. There is life on Mars.
3. The millionth digit of pi is odd.
What is the probability of each statement?
A frequentist might say, "P1 = 0.5. P2 is either epsilon or 1-epsilon, we don't know which. P3 is either 0 or 1, we don't know which."
A Bayesian might reply, "P1 = P2 = P3 = 0.5. By the way, there's no such thing as a probability of exactly 0 or 1."
Which is right? As with many such long-unresolved debates, the problem is that two different concepts are being labeled with the word 'probability'. Let's separate them and replace P with:
F = the fraction of possible worlds in which a statement is true. F can be exactly 0 or 1.
B = the Bayesian probability that a statement is true. B cannot be exactly 0 or 1.
Clearly there must be a relationship between the two concepts, or the confusion wouldn't have arisen in the first place, and there is: apart from both obeying various laws of probability, in the case where we know F but don't know which world we are in, B = F. That's what's going on in case 1. In the other cases, we know F != 0.5, but our ignorance of its actual value makes it reasonable to assign B = 0.5.
When does the difference matter?
Suppose I offer to bet my $200 the millionth digit of pi is odd, versus your $100 that it's even. With B3 = 0.5, that looks like a good bet from your viewpoint. But you also know F3 = either 0 or 1. You can also infer that I wouldn't have offered that bet unless I knew F3 = 1, from which inference you are likely to update your B3 to more than 2/3, and decline.
On a larger scale, suppose we search Mars thoroughly enough to be confident there is no life there. Now we know F2 = epsilon. Our Bayesian estimate of the probability of life on Europa will also decline toward 0.
Once we understand F and B are different functions, there is no contradiction.
Demands for Particular Proof: Appendices
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2010-02-15T07:58:57.574Z

Appendices to: You're Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof

(The main article was getting long, so I decided to move the appendices to a separate article which wouldn't be promoted, thus minimizing the size of the article landing in a promoted-article-only-reader's feed.)

A. The absence of unobtainable proof is not even weak evidence of absence.

The wise will already know that absence of evidence actually is evidence of absence; and they may ask, "Since a time-lapse video record of apes evolving into humans would, in fact, be strong evidence in favor of the theory of evolution, is it not mandated by the laws of probability theory that the absence of this videotape constitute some degree of evidence against the theory of evolution?"

(Before you reject that proposition out of hand for containing the substring "evidence against the theory of evolution", bear in mind that grownups understand that evidence accumulates. You don't get to pick out just one piece of evidence and ignore all the rest; true hypotheses can easily generate a minority of weak pieces of evidence against themselves; conceding one point of evidence does not mean conceding the debate; and people who try to act as if it does are nitwits. Also there are probably no creationists reading this blog.)

The laws of probability theory do mandate that if P(H|E) > P(H), then P(H|~E) < P(H). So - even if absence of proof is by no means proof of absence, and even if we reject the philosophy that absence of a particular proof means you get to discard all the other arguments about evidence and priors - must we not at least concede that absence of proof is necessarily evidence of absence, even though it may be very weak evidence?

Actually, in cases like creationism, not even that much follows. Suppose we had a time camera - a device that lets us look into the distant past and see historical events with our own eyes. Let the proposition "we have a time camera" be labeled Camera. Then we would either be able to videotape the evolution of humans from apes; let the presence of this video record be labeled Video, and its absence ~Video. Let Evolution stand for the hypothesis that evolution is true. And let True and False stand for the epistemic states "Pretty much likely to be true" and "Pretty much likely to be false", respectively.

Then,...