trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Sequence translations: Seeking feedback/collaboration
by komponisto — 2011-05-28T22:24:25.727Z

(...and also permission from Eliezer, who has the right to veto this whole idea should he so desire.)

In the hope of launching a collaborative project, I've set up Wordpress sites for translations of the Sequences into French, Italian, and Spanish; and to get things started, I've put up my own attempts at translating the first post, The Martial Art of Rationality.

I'm looking for collaborators. At the very least, I'm hoping to find folks who would be willing to proofread my translations and help improve them -- in particular to help me purge them of the inevitable mistakes, non-native shibboleths, and typos with which they're bound to be infused. Beyond that, it would of course be nice to have people contribute translations of their own of entire posts. (I'll keep plugging away myself no doubt, but if I'm the only one, it will take a very long time to complete.)

If you'd like to translate articles yourself into one of these languages, send me a PM so I can add you as an author on the appropriate blog(s). Proofreading my work can be done either privately or in comments here on LW; I'd probably prefer to reserve the comments sections of the actual sites for discussion of the posts' content (in the target languages), although this isn't an inflexible demand.

Also, one would like to add more languages, of course...
[SEQ RERUN] Marginally Zero-Sum Efforts
by badger — 2011-05-28T16:07:39.641Z

Today's post, Marginally Zero-Sum Efforts was originally published on April 11, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

After a point, labeling a problem as "important" is a commons problem. Rather than increasing the total resources devoted to important problems, resources are taken from other projects. Some grants proposals need to be written, but eventually this process becomes zero- or negative-sum on the margin.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments of the original post).
This post is part of a series rerunning Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts so those interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Futuristic Predictions as Consumable Goods, 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, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki, or creating exercises. Go here for more details, or to discuss the Sequence Reruns.
Rationality case study: How to evaluate untested medical procedures?
by jimrandomh — 2011-05-28T11:17:17.349Z

I'm presently on a flight to the rationality minicamp (hooray for free in-flight wifi!), and the passenger next to me has an interesting story to tell. He suffers from chronic renal failure, which has recently worsened, and is on a flight to Beijing to have an experimental stem-cell based treatment performed at Shijiazhuang Kidney Disease Hospital. His United States doctor, predictably, thinks this idea is crazy; the alternatives would be transplantation or dialysis, neither of which seems appealing. He's not particularly clear on the details, and isn't savvy enough to productively research the issue himself or to generate outcome probabilities. My first reflex, upon hearing this story, was to jump on the internet and spend an hour on PubMed.

There are two interesting questions to consider here. The first is: is getting the experimental treatment a good idea or not? And the second is: is attempting to arrive at an answer to the first question a good idea or not? He is already sufficiently committed that a "no" answer would almost certainly be ignored, unless it had an extremely compelling justification behind it.
What can you teach us?
by Emile — 2011-05-28T09:57:10.801Z

In a recent thread, SarahC said:

I'd prefer more posts that aim to teach something the author knows a lot about, as opposed to an insight somebody just thought of. Even something less immediately related to rationality -- I'd love, say, posts on science, or how-to posts, at the epistemic standard of LessWrong.

... so here's the place to float ideas around: is there an area you know a lot about? A topic you've been considering writing about? Here's the place to mention it!

From a poll on what people want to see more of, the most votes went to:

Statistics

Game Theory

Direct advice for young people

General cognitive enhancing tools (such as Adderall and N-Back)

Information Theory

Economics

Some that got less votes:

Data visualization

(Defence against the) Dark Arts

Moral Philosophy (looks like that's being done already)

Postmodernism

Getting along in an irrational world

Existential risks

Medicine, Applied Human Biology

... but there are certainly many more things that would be interesting and useful to the community. So what can you teach us?
Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment
by badger — 2011-05-28T05:15:50.017Z

Strategic Reliabilism is an epistemological framework that, unlike other contemporary academic theories, is grounded in psychology and seeks to give genuine advice on how to form beliefs. The framework was first laid out by Michael Bishop and J.D. Trout in their book Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment. Although regular readers here won’t necessarily find a lot of new material here, Bishop and Trout provide a clear description of many of the working assumptions and goals of this community. In contrast to standard epistemology, which seeks to explain what constitutes a justified belief, Strategic Reliabilism is meant to explain excellent reasoning. In particular, reasoning is excellent to the extent it reliably and efficiently produces truths about significant matters. When combined with the Aristotelian principle that good reasoning tends to produce good outcomes in the long run (i.e. rationalists should win), empirical findings about good reasoning gain prescriptive power. Rather than getting bogged down in definitional debates, epistemology really is about being less wrong.

The book is an easily read 150 pages, and I highly recommend you find a copy, but a chapter-by-chapter summary is below. As I said, you might not find a lot of new ideas in this book, but it went a long ways in clarifying how I think about this topic. For instance, even though it can seem trivial to be told to focus on significant problems, these basic issues deserve a little extra thought.

If you enjoy podcasts, check out lukeprog’s interview with Michael Bishop. This article provides another overview of Strategic Reliabilism, addressing objections raised since the publication of the book.

Ch 1. Laying Our Cards on the Table

Epistemology as a discipline needs to start offering practical advice. Defective epistemologies can compromise one’s ability to act in all areas, but there is little social condemnation of weak reasoning. Prescriptive epistemology might be called “critical thinking”, but this field is divorced from contemporary epistemology. This book is driven by a vision of what epistemology could be, although, of course, is only a modest first step in that direction.

Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE) is primarily concerned with an account of knowledge and epistemic justification. This program assumes any account of justification mus...
Ottawa LW meetup, June 2, 7pm; two Bayesian Conspiracy sessions
by Cyan — 2011-05-28T03:22:53.260Z

Less Wrong meeting:

Date: Thursday June 2, 7:00pm 'til whenever.

Venue: Pub Italia, 434.5 Preston St.

Bayes study group: Anyone in the region interested in learning how to do Bayesian statistics is welcome to join us. We'll be using the statistical package R (http://cran.r-project.org/) as a platform, so bring your laptop if you have one.

Date: Thursday June 2, 9:00am to 10:30am. NB: 9 in the morning.

Venue: Jeanne Mance Building, Tunney's Pasture. Meet me in the lobby.

Bayes study group: This session will run in parallel (but slightly delayed relative) to the sessions at Tunney's Pasture. This session will cover the introductory material. I'm not sure yet if I'll cover material on R in this series -- I'll see what the attendees want to do.

Date: Tuesday May 31, 9:30pm

Venue: wmiles's house; join the Google group for the address.
Upcoming meet-ups: Bangalore, Minneapolis, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Houston, Dublin
by FrankAdamek — 2011-05-28T01:52:32.732Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Bangalore: Saturday May 28, 4 pm
Minneapolis: Saturday May 28, 3 pm
Edinburgh LW meetup, Saturday May 28, 2pm
Melbourne Meetup: Friday 3rd June, 7pm
Houston Hackerspace Meetup: Sunday May 29, 5:00P
Dublin Less Wrong meetup Sunday 29 May
Triangle/Durham, NC: Wednesday June 1, 7:00PM
Ottawa LW meetup, June 2, 7pm; two Bayesian Conspiracy sessions
London: Sunday June 5, 14:00

And while not quite a meet-up, there will be a one-day Singularity Summit in Salt Lake City.

Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: New York, Berkeley, Mountain View, Cambridge, MA, Toronto, Seattle, San Francisco, Irvine.

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!

To reduce front page clutter, the new plan is for meetups to be initially posted in the Discussion section, and for Anna Salamon to make a promoted post "upcoming meetups" post every Friday that links to every meet-up that has been planned for the next two weeks. [HT: Carl Shulman.] Please let her know if your meetup is omitted. (I'm filling in for Anna this week, as she's directing her powers at the minicamp.)

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post about 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 to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: London, Chicago, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Ottawa, Helsinki, Melbourne.
Teachable Rationality Skills
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2011-05-27T21:57:39.619Z

Recent brainstorming sessions at SIAI (with participants including Anna, Carl, Jasen, Divia, Will, Amy Willey, and Andrew Critch) have started to produce lists of rationality skills that we could potentially try to teach (at Rationality Boot Camp, at Less Wrong meetups, or similar venues). We've also been trying to break those skills down to the 5-second level (step 2) and come up with ideas for exercises that might teach them (step 3) although we haven't actually composed those exercises yet (step 4, where the actual work takes place).

The bulk of this post will mainly go into the comments, which I'll try to keep to the following format: A top-level comment is a major or minor skill to teach; upvote this comment if you think this skill should get priority in teaching. Sub-level comments describe 5-second subskills that go into this skill, and then third-level comments are ideas for exercises which could potentially train that 5-second skill. If anyone actually went to the work of composing a specific exercise people could run through, that would go to the fourth-level of commenting, I guess. For some major practicable arts with a known standard learning format like "Improv" or "Acting", I'll put the exercise at the top and guesses at which skills it might teach below. (And any plain old replies can go at any level.)

I probably won't be able to get to all of what we brainstormed today, so here's a PNG of the Freemind map that I generated during our session.
A Study of Scarlet: The Conscious Mental Graph
by orthonormal — 2011-05-27T20:13:26.876Z

Sequel to: Seeing Red: Dissolving Mary's Room and Qualia

Seriously, you should read first: Dissolving the Question, How an Algorithm Feels From Inside

In the previous post, we introduced the concept of qualia and the thought experiment of Mary's Room, set out to dissolve the question, and decided that we were seeking a simple model of a mind which includes both learning and a conscious/subconscious distinction. Since for now we're just trying to prove a philosophical point, we don't need to worry whether our model corresponds well to the human mind (though it would certainly be convenient if it did); we'll therefore pick an abstract mathematical structure that we can analyze more easily.

The Mobile Graph

Let's consider a graph, or a network of simple agents1; nodes can correspond to concepts, representations of objects and people, emotions, memories, actions, etc. These nodes are connected to one another, and the connections have varying strengths. At any given moment, some of the nodes are active (changing their connections and affecting nearby nodes), and others are not. This skein of nodes and connections will serve to direct the actions of some organism; let's call her Martha, and let's call this graph Martha's mind.

It's important to note that the graph is all there is to Martha's mind; when the mental agent for "hunger" is activated, that doesn't mean that some homunculus within her mind becomes hungry, but rather that the agents corresponding to eating nearby food are strongly activated (unless otherwise inhibited by nodes pertaining to social constraints, concerns of sanitation, etc), that other nodes which visualize and evaluate plans of action to obtain food are activated, that other mental processes are somewhat inhibited to save energy and prevent distraction, and so on. (The evolutionary benefits of such an admittedly complicated system directing an organism are relatively significant.)

Since we'll be discussing experience and learning, the graph will need to change over time, and perhaps change structure in large ways. As different agents are activated, connections can form, strengthen, weaken, or sever, and the graph as a whole can rearrange itself in response2. Imagine, as a geometric analogy, that the nodes repel each other and the connections pull them together. Like a protein folding itself as it is assembled or a rope assuming surprising new ...
[SEQ RERUN] Futuristic Predictions as Consumable Goods
by badger — 2011-05-27T15:57:47.356Z

Today's post, Futuristic Predictions as Consumable Goods was originally published on April 10, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

The Friedman Unit is named after Thomas Friedman who called "the next six months" the critical period in Iraq eight times between 2003 and 2007. This is because future predictions are created and consumed in the now; they are used to create feelings of delicious goodness or delicious horror now, not provide useful future advice.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments of the original post).
This post is part of a series rerunning Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts so those interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Inductive Bias, 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, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki, or creating exercises. Go here for more details, or to discuss the Sequence Reruns.
A less wrong way to discuss the arts?
by  — 2011-05-27T15:52:26.823Z

A comment by komponisto got me thinking. Why are favorite movie/book/tv show/etc exchanges typically low on content? Do they need to be? Here's a sample exchange, exaggerated for comic effect:

X: "Did you see The Hangover 2?"

Y: "No. I don't feel compelled to."

X: "Why not? I think it looks really funny! Don't you think it looks really funny? Plus, the first one was funny."

Y: "I didn't see the first one. Like everyone, I enjoy the physical experience of laughter, but I expect that if I laugh at all during this particular movie, it will be 'uncomfortable situation' or 'shocking moment' tension-releasing laughter, or at best 'aren't we all having a nice time together in front of this huge image and amidst these loud noises.' I seriously doubt that I will experience the transportive joy of 'in spite of myself,' 'my stomach hurts,' 'I can't breathe,' 'this is better than an orgasm' laughter. In fact, the incidence of that kind of laughter post-adolescence is disappointingly low. Do you ever think about that? Do you worry that the best kind of laughter vanishes as our lives contain fewer and fewer novel experiences?"

X: "Uh... "

Y: "Exactly. So why would I want to pay $12 to hollowly go through the motions?"

X: "How can you be sure you won't laugh?"

Y: "I guess I can't be 100% sure. Nothing in the advertising speaks to my cached expectations of what constitutes true funniness. Are you sure you've made a conscious decision to see The Hangover 2 specifically because you expect to laugh really hard? And that's why you're willing to invest your hard-earned money?"

X: "I don't know. It just seems like a fun thing to do. I like Zach Galifianakis. He's so weird."

...and so forth. I sometimes get the sense that LWers advocate using their bird's-eye-view of interpersonal communication to blend in rather than exclude, but I personally prefer to challenge others because I wish to be challenged. That way, I believe I'm more likely to form relationships that rest on equal footing.

This isn't a comprehensive thesis or anything, but rather an attempt to start a conversation. The general idea is that most people talk about the arts in order to get to know each other--as well as decide who they wish to know. Why not improve the signal/no...
Advice request: Homeownership
by AdeleneDawner — 2011-05-27T11:44:04.222Z

So I'm probably about two months from owning a home. (Realtor says we might close within a month; experienced friend says 3-6 weeks; I'll be vaguely surprised if it's not done by August.)

This is exciting, and also more than a little daunting. My near-mode brainbits don't know quite what to make of it; this is my first time owning anything on nearly this scope (I don't drive, so I've never owned a car), and also my first time taking on any large amount of debt. It's pretty obviously a good thing overall - my mortgage payment should be not much more than half of what I've been paying for my apartment, and I'll be in an area that's better by several relevant measurements, and I'll have more space and more freedom - but it's still a rather large change.

So, on behalf of those near-mode brainbits, which are mostly going aaaaaaaaah what have you gotten us into, I'd like to request any advice that you might have for a soon-to-be new homeowner.

(More information is available, but I'm not even sure what's important enough about the situation to mention.)
Requesting advice
by Carinthium — 2011-05-27T10:12:36.305Z

I've noticed during my thoughts on the issue that I seem to be biased against Christianity- although raised in a Christian household, I have noticed that I become more tense when reading effective arguments for Christianity and more relaxed when reading good arguments against it- I also feel strongly tempted to pull out books which I know give good arguments against Christianity.

I thought the issue of whether Christianity was actually true concluded- but given that I am now aware I'm biased, it's difficult to be sure. On the one hand, there is a lot of evidence against it (biblical contradictions etc...). On the other, there are some pieces of evidence that appear false 'on the surface' but which seem plausible when I take my bias into account.
The 48 Rules of Power; Viable?
by Raw_Power — 2011-05-27T01:36:48.891Z

This is not a thesis post, it's an open-question, discussion-provoking post. That's why I'm posting it as Discussion, since this is what appears to serve the function of forum on this site. I am not looking for ratings, but for answers. With everyone's collaboration, they should present themselves, at least in outline. Please don't hesitate to point it out if you think i have completely misunderstood the purpose of the Discussion section and if I should refrain from this sort of posting in the future.

So, here is a summary of the rules the book proposes. Here is a little more expanded text.

To be honest, my first reaction to reading this was visceral rejection ("Preposterous! Try to act by those rules and you'll be labeled a psychopath, people will know not to trust you or deal with you."). The second was consternated acceptance ("But people do seem to behave in the way this book suggests... wouldn't it be better to adapt to a reality we have no power to change?"). This is the result of the third approximation: confused questioning.

The question I'd like to ask is this: are they rational? As in, would everyone's lives improve or worsen from following this? Unlike riches and actual achievements, competition for power does seem to be a Zero Sum Game, at least in a society that isn't expanding (demographically or by conquest or otherwise). Not only that, it appears to be a resource-intensive game, one that even gets in the way of doing actual work.

What is remarkable is that, when I think of my experiences in hindsight, Real Life does appear to work this way, and these would explain many behaviors people demonstrate that are out of synch with what they profess. This is especially egregious if you compare it with fiction, in which such behavior isn't used except by the most magnificent bastards, and even then it is portrayed as extremely questionable, and common moral philosophy, that seems to preach the opposite.

However, everything seems to indicate that this is definitely not the optimum way for things to work, in a utilitarian sense. If everyone followed the rules of this book, would we ever get anything done?

So should these social, anti-productive tendencies, be fought with education, or should they be embraced? Is there a way to harness them into a motivation for productive work, the way Capitalism advocates harnessing human greed?¹

1.Remarkably eno...