trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Teaching Suggestions?
by falenas108 — 2011-08-02T17:21:43.082Z

I am going to do Splash! Fall 2011 at the University of Chicago, where I chose a subject to teach kids. I'm teaching a 1 hour class on the basics on rationality, and I am outlining the topics I want to cover.

Right now, I'm planning on teaching map and territory, reductionism, a basic introduction to biases, and what having a belief should mean (paying rent).

What other ideas would be useful to teach high school students? And does anyone have suggestions on interesting ways to teach these concepts?

Edit: All comments say four is too many topics, I will focus on map and territory and beliefs paying rent.
Meetup : Research Triangle Less Wrong Meetup
by curiousepic — 2011-08-02T16:22:01.096Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Research Triangle Less Wrong Meetup

WHEN:
06 August 2011 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
1406 East Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-2883

In the meeting room of Caribou Coffee. Note this is not the one near UNC campus, but near the intersection of Franklin and Estes. Let's welcome some new and returning members, discuss progress on our goals and recent LW topics, and mourn Alicorn's relocation! Let's also discuss discussion: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/6m4/having_useful_conversations/

Discussion article for the meetup : Research Triangle Less Wrong Meetup
A WordCloud Visual of LW Main
by r_claypool — 2011-08-02T05:24:32.685Z

I created this word cloud based on http://lesswrong.com/promoted/.rss.

The words "Rational" and "Rationality" might trigger negative stereotypes for some people, but this image is positive and inspiring. I'm glad to see we are promoting top level posts on these issues and thought you would be too.
[SEQ RERUN] Semantic Stopsigns
by MinibearRex — 2011-08-02T05:02:13.533Z

Today's post, Semantic Stopsigns was originally published on 24 August 2007. A summary:

There are certain words and phrases that act as "stopsigns" to thinking. They aren't actually explanations, or help to resolve the actual issue at hand, but they act as a marker saying "don't ask any questions."

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 Fake Causality, 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.
Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach
by The Dao of Bayes — 2011-08-01T21:04:39.875Z

I've run in to the argument that cryonics beats VillageReach on a simple "shut up and multiply" level, by assuming an infinity vs finite tradeoff. Having read the Fun Theory sequences, it struck me that this wasn't a reasonable assumption, so I sat down, re-read a few relevant posts, shut up, and multiplied.

In Continuous Improvement, Eliezer ballparks a good fun-theory life as having a maximum length of around 28,000 years. In Robin Hanson's Cryonics Probability Breakdown, he assigns cryonics a conjoint probability of about 6%. 28,000 * 0.06 gives us a net return of 1,680 expected years.

Full body suspension from the Cryonics Institute currently costs $28,000.

VillageReach, according to GiveWell, can save an infant's life for less than $1,000.

For the price of Cryonics, we thus save 28 lives. 1680 expected years, divided by 28, puts the break-even point at an average lifespan of 60 years for those infants saved. A quick peak at Wikipedia suggests that the average African life is under 60 years for the majority of the continent, although there are some important nuances to really get a full picture.

Obviously, these are rough numbers, and I doubt many people base their decisions solely on "years lived". I do find it rather interesting that cryonics is currently about on par with one of the most effective charities in the world on that metric, however :)
Meetup : Helsinki meetup Fri 5.8 18:00-
by Bongo — 2011-08-01T19:16:35.974Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki meetup Fri 5.8 18:00-

WHEN:
05 August 2011 06:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Yliopistonkatu 5, Helsinki, Finland

Third Helsinki meetup. Venue is Café Picnic at Yliopistonkatu 5. Time is 18:00 onwards. ~5 confirmed attendees at the time of posting.

Join the LW Helsinki mailing list for updates on Helsinki meetups.

Discussion article for the meetup : Helsinki meetup Fri 5.8 18:00-
Book of Mormon Discussion
by Arandur — 2011-08-01T18:25:50.438Z

In this comment thread, I gave the following idea, on the topic of a method by which one might judge the Book of Mormon from a rationalist perspective:

Why not make this an online thing? Day-by-day, or perhaps week-by-week, post (somewhere, not necessarily on Less Wrong, so as not to clutter the site; though perhaps Less Wrong would actually be the ideal locale, due to familiarity, extant population, etc?) a chapter of the Book of Mormon and allow discussion of it, separately from the rest of the Book, using terms common to Rationalists.

I would appreciate feedback on this idea, for an admittedly selfish reason: I am trying to instigate in myself a Crisis of Faith. So, here are the questions I pose to you:

Would it be a Good Idea to subject the Book of Mormon, chapter by chapter, to a group rationalist judgement?

Would it be a Good Idea, given the above, to ask Less Wrong to host this discussion? On the one end, we want the maximum number of rationalists to input the maximum number of times, so we should host our discussion near the nexus of rationalist gathering. On the other end, if this discussion is judged to be frivolous and wasteful by the majority of active posters on Less Wrong, then we don't want to detract from the true meaning of the site.

Remember: This is a good chance to examine the best arguments of those who believe that the sky is green. If the sky is green, then you should want to believe that the sky is green, too!
[SEQ RERUN] Fake Causality
by MinibearRex — 2011-08-01T15:04:32.167Z

Today's post, Fake Causality was originally published on 23 August 2007. A summary:

It is very easy for a human being to think that a theory predicts a phenomenon, when in fact is was fitted to a phenomenon. Properly designed reasoning systems (GAIs) would be able to avoid this mistake with our knowledge of probability theory, but humans have to write down a prediction in advance in order to ensure that our reasoning about causality is correct.

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 Science as Attire, 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.
Ethical dilemmas for paperclip maximizers
by CronoDAS — 2011-08-01T05:31:42.327Z

(Why? Because it's fun.)

1) Do paperclip maximizers care about paperclip mass, paperclip count, or both? More concretely, if you have a large, finite amount of metal, you can make it into N paperclips or N+1 smaller paperclips. If all that matters is paperclip mass, then it doesn't matter what size the paperclips are, as long as they can still hold paper. If all that matters is paperclip count, then, all else being equal, it seems better to prefer smaller paperclips.

2) It's not hard to understand how to maximize the number of paperclips in space, but how about in time? Once it's made, does it matter how long a paperclip continues to exist? Is it better to have one paperclip that lasts for 10,000 years and is then destroyed, or 10,000 paperclips that are all destroyed after 1 year? Do discount rates apply to paperclip maximization? In other words, is it better to make a paperclip now than it is to make it ten years from now?

3) Some paperclip maximizers claim want to maximize paperclip <i>production</i>. This is not the same as maximizing paperclip count. Given a fixed amount of metal, a paperclip count maximizer would make the maximum number of paperclips possible, and then stop. A paperclip production maximizer that didn't care about paperclip count would find it useful to recycle existing paperclips, melting them down so that new ones could be made. Which approach is better?

4) More generally, are there any conditions under which the paperclip-maximizing thing to do involves destroying existing paperclips? It's easy to imagine scenarios in which destroying some paperclips causes there to be more paperclips in the future. (For example, one could melt down existing paperclips and use the metal to make smaller ones.)
Teaching Introspection
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2011-08-01T01:10:34.491Z

As Yvain pointed out in his recent post The Limits of Introspection, humans are not naturally good at inferring our cognitive processes. We resort to guessing with plausible-sounding stories about ourselves, and we aren’t very accurate.

I was reminded of this recently while teaching a swimming lesson. (You'll understand later why this reminded me.) A recurring problem that I’ve noticed with both children and adults is that it isn’t obvious to them what their bodies are doing. Feet go in strange directions, hands fail to lift above the water, and they literally can’t describe what it feels like. It’s pretty much impossible for a novice swimmer to watch the instructor demonstrate front crawl and then imitate it perfectly–muscular control isn’t that perfect. That’s why there are swimming instructors: because it’s very, very hard to learn swimming (or dance, or soccer, or a martial art) by reading a book, even if that book has illustrated diagrams. Two friends reading the book together and watching each other’s attempts in the pool would probably do better, but that’s still a case, metaphorically, of the blind leading the blind. Most sports have instructors and coaches who are, relatively speaking, experts. (I competed at the regional level in swimming for something like five years and trained five to seven times a week the whole time, which pretty much qualifies me to teach eight-year-olds. An Olympic coach would need a much higher level of mastery.)

The most basic thing a coach provides that the two friends practicing together don’t have is relevant feedback. I watch a young swimmer demonstrating her front crawl, and I can immediately chunk my observations into “what’s done properly” and “what’s done wrong” and translate the latter category into “things to change.” And the easiest way to learn perfect front crawl isn’t to do it over and over again with tiny changes, but to practice exaggerated and simplified “drills” that teach particular fragments of muscle memory. Faced with a given stroke problem, I can look over a list of about eight different front crawl drills to find the one best suited for fixing it. To place some objective measure on the improvements, I can time my swimmers or count their strokes per length The coache...
Why no uniform weightings for ensemble universes?
by Will_Newsome — 2011-07-31T22:05:20.199Z

Every now and then I see a claim that if there were a uniform weighting of mathematical structures in a Tegmark-like 'verse---whatever that would mean even if we ignore the decision theoretic aspects which really can't be ignored but whatever---that would imply we should expect to find ourselves as Boltzmann mind-computations, or in other words thingies with just enough consciousness to be conscious of nonsensical chaos for a brief instant before dissolving back into nothingness. We don't seem to be experiencing nonsensical chaos, therefore the argument concludes that a uniform weighting is inadequate and an Occamian weighting over structures is necessary, leading to something like UDASSA or eventually giving up and sweeping the remaining confusion into a decision theoretic framework like UDT. (Bringing the dreaded "anthropics" into it is probably a red herring like always; we can just talk directly about patterns and groups of structures or correlated structures given some weighting, and presume human minds are structures or groups of structures much like other structures or groups of structures given that weighting.)

I've seen people who seem very certain of the Boltzmann-inducing properties of uniform weightings for various reasons that I am skeptical of, and others who seemed uncertain of this for reason that sound at least superficially reasonable. Has anyone thought about this enough to give slightly more than just an intuitive appeal? I wouldn't be surprised if everyone has left such 'probabilistic' cosmological reasoning for the richer soils of decision theoretically inspired speculation, and if everyone else never ventured into the realms of such madness in the first place.

(Bringing in something, anything, from the foundations of set theory, e.g. the set theoretic multiverse, might be one way to start, but e.g. "most natural numbers look pretty random and we can use something like Goedel numbering for arbitrary mathematical structures" doesn't seem to say much to me by itself, considering that all of those numbers have rich local context that in their region is very predictable and non-random, if you get my metaphor. Or to stretch the metaphor even further, even if 62534772 doesn't "causally" follow 31256 they might still be correlated in the style of Dust Theory, and what meta-level tools are we going to use to talk about the r...
When programs have to work-- lessons from NASA
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-07-31T15:22:51.959Z

They Write the Right Stuff is about software which "never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors."

The programmers work from 8 to 5, with occasional late nights. They wear dressy clothes, not flashy or grungy. I assume there's a dress code, but I have no idea whether conventional clothes are actually an important part of the process. I'm sure that working reasonable numbers of hours is crucial, though I also wonder whether those hours need to be standard office hours.

"And the culture is equally intolerant of creativity, the individual coding flourishes and styles that are the signature of the all-night software world. "People ask, doesn't this process stifle creativity? You have to do exactly what the manual says, and you've got someone looking over your shoulder," says Keller. "The answer is, yes, the process does stifle creativity." " I have no idea what's in the manual, or if there can be a manual for something as new as self-optimizing AI. I assume there could be a manual for some aspects.

What follows is main points quoted from the article:

The important thing is the process: The product is only as good as the plan for the product. About one-third of the process of writing software happens before anyone writes a line of code.

2. The best teamwork is a healthy rivalry. The central group breaks down into two key teams: the coders - the people who sit and write code -- and the verifiers -- the people who try to find flaws in the code. The two outfits report to separate bosses and function under opposing marching orders. The development group is supposed to deliver completely error-free code, so perfect that the testers find no flaws at all. The testing group is supposed to pummel away at the code with flight scenarios and simulations that reveal as many flaws as possible. The result is what Tom Peterson calls "a friendly adversarial relationship."

I note that it's rivalry between people who are doing different things, not people competing to get control of a project.

3. The database is the software base.

One is the history...
Really good education podcasts
by Goobahman — 2011-07-31T13:52:42.257Z

Hi everyone,

currently temping at a job that's very autonomous and boring. good thing is i can listen to stuff on my phone while I do it.

Just wondering what people's favorite podcasts are? particularly education ones to do with neuroscience, psych and social studies.

However as long as it's interesting I'm keen give it a go.

Thanks in advance.
[SEQ RERUN] Science as Attire
by MinibearRex — 2011-07-31T05:57:50.238Z

Title: [SEQ RERUN] Science as Attire Tags: sequence_reruns Today's post, Science as Attire was originally published on 23 August 2007. A summary:

Science is about detailed models of the world. However, many people view science as a set of technical-sounding terms, or a certain type of beliefs that are professed by the group called "scientists". For instance, the X-Men series is perceived as being in the literary genre of science (fiction), instead of fantasy, because the superpowers are "explained" by the word "mutation".

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 Guessing the Teacher's Password, 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.
Requesting low cost/high payoff projects ideas
by jsalvatier — 2011-07-30T20:48:41.757Z

There are many projects that would benefit people interested in living rationally but that no individuals are motivated enough to do (more). The Public Goods Team is trying to encourage and facilitate systematic and organized work on such projects. One of our first steps is to identify the projects that are the lowest hanging fruit: those projects which are high value, and inexpensive (in terms of time, motivation, money etc.). We have come up with a preliminary list of such projects (below). What are other such projects?

1. Further contributions to the Science of Winning at Life sequence:

1.1. Cognitive science of learning

1.2. Cognitive science of memory

1.3. Ergonomics

1.4. Behavioral conditioning

1.6. Fashion

1.7. Self control/conscienciousness research

2. Guides for explicitly applying LW material to your life, smaller sequences and exercises

3. Anki cards for the sequences and other useful topics/books

4. Introductory material that gets people hooked

5. User friendly guides to existing LW material

6. Meetup materials:

6.1. Exercises

6.1.1. Anti-rationalization

6.2. Notes and slides for presentations on specific topics

6.3. Game how-tos

6.4. Rejection therapy

6.4.1. Repetition

7. Book reviews on potentially useful books

7.1. Selfish Reasons to have more kids (critique/review)

7.2. Consciousness Explained

8. Cleaning up cognitive bias Wikipedia entries

9. Developing exercises and tests that help understand or improve rationality

9.1. A large set of good calibration questions

9.2. A good website for taking calibration tests

10. Financial analyses, like Brandon Reinhart's analysis of SIAI

10.1. The Cryonics Institute

10.2. Alcor

10.3. FHI

11. Resources/Advice to help people do projects

11.1. Advice for doing research

11.1.1. Doing literature reviews

11.1.2. Dealing with publication bias

11.1.3. Signs of researcher bias

11.1.4. Searching for critical viewpoints, alternative theories, disconfirming evidence

11.1.5. How do you know when you're done?

12. Improvements to LW's site

12.1. Creation of a LW hosting image to drastically reduce the work needed to work on less wrong

12.2. Selenium tests for the less wrong site so that bugs are caught faster

12.3. Larger user pages

12.4. A better front page for lesswrong (prize?)

12.5. Setting up other language version of LW and/or translations

12.5.1. Russian

12.5.2. Portuguese

12.5.3...
Beware The Believer, or a study in depth of recursion
by Raw_Power — 2011-07-30T20:37:56.890Z

I submit to the good people of Less Wrong this wonderful video. Is it a parody of scientifism? A parody of creationist parodies of scientifism? How deep does the recursion go? (those who already know, don't spoil the fun for the rest!).
MSF Theory: Another Explanation of Subjectively Objective Probability
by Ronny Fernandez — 2011-07-30T19:46:56.701Z

Before I read Probability is in the Mind and Probability is Subjectively Objective I was a realist about probabilities; I was a frequentest. After I read them, I was just confused. I couldn't understand how a mind could accurately say the probability of getting a heart in a standard deck of playing cards was not 25%. It wasn't until I tried to explain the contrast between my view and the subjective view in a comment on Probability is Subjectively Objective that I realized I was a subjective Bayesian all along. So, if you've read Probability is in the Mind and read Probability is Subjectively Objective but still feel a little confused, hopefully, this will help.

I should mention that I'm not sure that EY would agree with my view of probability, but the view to be presented agrees with EY's view on at least these propositions:

Probability is always in a mind, not in the world.

The probability that an agent should ascribe to a proposition is directly related to that agent's knowledge of the world.

There is only one correct probability to assign to a proposition given your partial knowledge of the world.

If there is no uncertainty, there is no probability.

And any position that holds these propositions is a non-realist-subjective view of probability.

Imagine a pre-shuffled deck of playing cards and two agents (they don't have to be humans), named "Johnny" and "Sally", which are betting 1 dollar each on the suit of the top card. As everyone knows, 1/4 of the cards in a playing card deck are hearts. We will name this belief F1; F1 stands for "1/4 of the cards in the deck are hearts.". Johnny and Sally both believe F1. F1 is all that Johnny knows about the deck of cards, but sally knows a little bit more about this deck. Sally also knows that 8 of the top 10 cards are hearts. Let F2 stand for "8 out of the 10 top cards are hearts.". Sally believes F2. John doesn't know whether or not F2. F1 and F2 are beliefs about the deck of cards and they are either true or false.

So, sally bets that the top card is a heart and Johnny bets against her, i.e., she puts her money on "Top card is a heart." being true; he puts his money on "~The top card is a heart." being true. After they make their bets, one could imagine Johnny making fun of Sally; he might say something like: "Are you nuts? You know, I have a 75% chance of winning. 1/4 of the cards are hearts;...