trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Posting now enabled on Less Wrong
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-05T16:15:00.000Z

Posting is now enabled on Less Wrong, with a minimum karma required of 20 - that is, you must have gotten at least 20 upvotes on your comments in order to publish a post. Or an adminstrator such as myself or Robin (by default you should bother me) can temporarily bless you with posting ability - in the long run this shouldn't happen much.

For those of you who haven't yet subscribed to / gotten in the habit of checking Less Wrong:

Test Your Rationality by Robin Hanson. It's easy to find reasons to believe yourself more rational than others, but most people do this; what real ways can be found to test your rationality?

Unteachable Excellence and Teaching the Unteachable by Eliezer Yudkowsky. The rare superstars are rare because their skills are currently hard to transfer. A large number of Nobel laureates are students of other Nobel laureates. How do you teach skills you can't put into words?

The Costs of Rationality by Robin Hanson. Rationality can be useful for many things, but humans aren't really designed for it, and a true effort to believe truly can get in the way of many aspects of ordinary life. Are you willing to pay the real costs of ratonality?

No, Really, I've Deceived Myself and Belief in Self-Deception by Eliezer Yudkowsky. A woman I met who didn't seem to believe in God at all, while honestly believing that she had deceived herself successfully - which may bring most of the same placebo benefits.

The ethic of hand-washing and commuity epistemic practice by Steve Rayhawk and Anna Salamon. Diseases become more virulent in the presence of poor hygiene, since they can jump hosts more easily. Are there analogous effects for ideas? What is the equivalent of washing our hands?

The five most recent LW posts now appear in OB's sidebar (and vice versa), but aside from this you shouldn't expect further regular summaries of LW on OB.
Posting now enabled
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-05T15:56:45.958Z

Posting is now enabled with a minimum karma required of 20 - that is, you must have gotten at least 20 upvotes on your comments in order to publish a post. Or an adminstrator such as myself or Robin (by default you should bother me) can temporarily bless you with posting ability - in the long run this shouldn't happen much.
Rationality and Positive Psychology
by badger — 2009-03-05T15:31:16.803Z

Robin recently had us consider the costs of rationality, but I have been thinking about the benefits. I typically think of rationality as having instrumental value, but after reading Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's work on flow, I began pondering its status as an intrinsically fulfilling activity. Cognitive and evolutionary psychology are major components in the study of rationality, but I haven't seen connections drawn between rationality and positive psychology before. Csíkszentmihályi (said cheek-sent-me-high-ee) defines "flow" as a state of intense focus where you lose track of yourself and become completely involved in what you are doing. After some consideration, I am intrigued by the similarities between the practice of rationality and a flow-like state of mind.

Csíkszentmihályi identifies the following components of flow:

1. Clear goals and expectations about the task at hand.

2. Direct and immediate feedback.

3. A high degree of concentration.

4. Loss of self-consciousness.

5. Altered perception of time.

6. Challenge proportionate to your skill level.

7. Feeling of control over the situation.

8. Activity is intrinsically rewarding.

(summarized from Flow (psychology))

The first component appears directly tied to the concepts of conservation of expectation and making predictions in advance. By clearly defining your goals, how you will respond to new evidence, and what your current predictions are, you will know how to react in advance. Clear goals and expectations allow you to better recognize successes and failures. A well-defined scoring function is important to guide intelligence as an optimization process, but also allows you to be fulfilled when you do encounter success.

The second component depends on the first, but it also entails finding reliable feedback to evaluate those expectations against. Careful rationalists uses precise quantitative measures and math where possible. The precision of math can give detailed and immediate feedback, so long as it does not introduce additional unjustified complexity. As rationalists, we should actively be seeking out feedback on our beliefs and predictions. Feedback assists calibration, and if correctly used, prevents us from being trapped in bad beliefs and with poor methods.

Components three, four...
Belief in Self-Deception
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-05T15:20:27.590Z

I spoke yesterday of my conversation with a nominally Orthodox Jewish woman who vigorously defended the assertion that she believed in God, while seeming not to actually believe in God at all.

While I was questioning her about the benefits that she thought came from believing in God, I introduced the Litany of Tarski—which is actually an infinite family of litanies, a specific example being:

If the sky is blue
I desire to believe "the sky is blue"
If the sky is not blue
I desire to believe "the sky is not blue".

"This is not my philosophy," she said to me.

"I didn't think it was," I replied to her. "I'm just asking—assuming that God does not exist, and this is known, then should you still believe in God?"

She hesitated. She seemed to really be trying to think about it, which surprised me.

"So it's a counterfactual question..." she said slowly.

I thought at the time that she was having difficulty allowing herself to visualize the world where God does not exist, because of her attachment to a God-containing world.

Now, however, I suspect she was having difficulty visualizing a contrast between the way the world would look if God existed or did not exist, because all her thoughts were about her belief in God, but her causal network modelling the world did not contain God as a node. So she could easily answer "How would the world look different if I didn't believe in God?", but not "How would the world look different if there was no God?"

She didn't answer that question, at the time. But she did produce a counterexample to the Litany of Tarski:

She said, "I believe that people are nicer than they really are."

I tried to explain that if you say, "People are bad," that means you believe people are bad, and if you say, "I believe people are nice", that means you believe you believe people are nice. So saying "People are bad and I believe people are nice" means you believe people are bad but you believe you believe people are nice.

I quoted to her:

"If there were a verb meaning 'to believe falsely', it would not have any
significant first person, present indicative."
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

She said, smiling, "Yes, I believe people are nicer than, in fact, they are. I just thought I should put it that...
The ethic of hand-washing and community epistemic practice
by AnnaSalamon — 2009-03-05T04:28:28.528Z

Related to: Use the Native Architecture

When cholera moves through countries with poor drinking water sanitation, it apparently becomes more virulent. When it moves through countries that have clean drinking water (more exactly, countries that reliably keep fecal matter out of the drinking water), it becomes less virulent. The theory is that cholera faces a tradeoff between rapidly copying within its human host (so that it has more copies to spread) and keeping its host well enough to wander around infecting others. If person-to-person transmission is cholera’s only means of spreading, it will evolve to keep its host well enough to spread it. If it can instead spread through the drinking water (and thus spread even from hosts who are too ill to go out), it will evolve toward increased lethality. (Critics here.)

I’m stealing this line of thinking from my friend Jennifer Rodriguez-Mueller, but: I’m curious whether anyone’s gotten analogous results for the progress and mutation of ideas, among communities with different communication media and/or different habits for deciding which ideas to adopt and pass on. Are there differences between religions that are passed down vertically (parent to child) vs. horizontally (peer to peer), since the former do better when their bearers raise more children? Do mass media such as radio, TV, newspapers, or printing presses decrease the functionality of the average person’s ideas, by allowing ideas to spread in a manner that is less dependent on their average host’s prestige and influence? (The intuition here is that prestige and influence might be positively correlated with the functionality of the host’s ideas, at least in some domains, while the contingencies determining whether an idea spreads through mass media instruments might have less to do with functionality.)

Extending this analogy -- most of us were taught as children to wash our hands. We were given the rationale, not only of keeping ourselves from getting sick, but also of making sure we don’t infect others. There’s an ethic of sanitariness that draws from the ethic of being good community members.

Suppose we likewise imagine that each of us contain a variety of beliefs, some well-founded and some not. Can we make an ethic of “epistemic hygiene” to describe practices that will selectively cause our mo...
No, Really, I've Deceived Myself
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-04T23:29:50.910Z

I recently spoke with a person who... it's difficult to describe. Nominally, she was an Orthodox Jew. She was also highly intelligent, conversant with some of the archaeological evidence against her religion, and the shallow standard arguments against religion that religious people know about. For example, she knew that Mordecai, Esther, Haman, and Vashti were not in the Persian historical records, but that there was a corresponding old Persian legend about the Babylonian gods Marduk and Ishtar, and the rival Elamite gods Humman and Vashti. She knows this, and she still celebrates Purim. One of those highly intelligent religious people who stew in their own contradictions for years, elaborating and tweaking, until their minds look like the inside of an M. C. Escher painting.

Most people like this will pretend that they are much too wise to talk to atheists, but she was willing to talk with me for a few hours.

As a result, I now understand at least one more thing about self-deception that I didn't explicitly understand before—namely, that you don't have to really deceive yourself so long as you believe you've deceived yourself. Call it "belief in self-deception".

When this woman was in high school, she thought she was an atheist. But she decided, at that time, that she should act as if she believed in God. And then—she told me earnestly—over time, she came to really believe in God.

So far as I can tell, she is completely wrong about that. Always throughout our conversation, she said, over and over, "I believe in God", never once, "There is a God." When I asked her why she was religious, she never once talked about the consequences of God existing, only about the consequences of believing in God. Never, "God will help me", always, "my belief in God helps me". When I put to her, "Someone who just wanted the truth and looked at our universe would not even invent God as a hypothesis," she agreed outright.

She hasn't actually deceived herself into believing that God exists or that the Jewish religion is true. Not even close, so far as I can tell.

On the other hand, I think she really does believe she has deceived herself.

So although she does not receive any benefit of believing in God—because she doesn't—she honestly believes she has deceived herself into believin...
Teaching the Unteachable
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-03T23:14:39.495Z

Previously in series: Unteachable Excellence
Followup to: Artificial Addition

The literary industry that I called "excellence pornography" isn't very good at what it does. But it is failing at a very important job. When you consider the net benefit to civilization of Warren Buffett's superstar skills, versus the less glamorous but more communicable trick of "reinvest wealth to create more wealth" - there's hardly any comparison. You can see how much it would matter, if you could figure out how to communicate just one more skill that used to be a secret sauce. Not the pornographic promise of consuming the entire soul of a superstar. Just figuring out how to reliably teach one more thing, even if it wasn't everything...

What makes a success hard to duplicate?

Naked statistical chance is always incommunicable. No matter what you say about your historical luck, you can't teach someone else to have it. The arts of seizing opportunity, and exposing yourself to positive randomness, are commonly underestimated; I've seen people stopped in their tracks by "bad luck" that a Silicon Valley entrepreneur would drive over like a steamroller flattening speed bumps... Even so, there is still an element of genuine chance left over.

Einstein's superstardom depended on his genetics that gave him the potential to learn his skills. If a skill relies on having that much brainpower, you can't teach it to most people... Though if the potential is one-in-a-million, then six thousand Einsteins around the world would be an improvement. (And if we're going to be really creative, who says genes are incommunicable? It just takes more advanced technology than a blackboard, that's all.)

So when we factor out the genuinely unteachable - what's left? Where you can you push the border? What is it that might be possible to teach - albeit perhaps very difficult - and isn't being taught?

I was once told that half of Nobel laureates were the students of other Nobel laureates. This source seems to assert 155 out of 503. (Interestingly, the same source says that the number of Nobel laureates with Nobel "grandparents" (teachers of teachers) is just 60.) Even after discounting for cherry-picking of students and political pull, this suggests to me that you can learn things by apprenticeship - close sup...
The Costs of Rationality
by RobinHanson — 2009-03-03T18:13:17.465Z

The word "rational" is overloaded with associations, so let me be clear: to me [here], more "rational" means better believing what is true, given one's limited info and analysis resources.
Rationality certainly can have instrumental advantages. There are plenty of situations where being more rational helps one achieve a wide range of goals. In those situtations, "winnners", i.e., those who better achieve their goals, should tend to be more rational. In such cases, we might even estimate someone's rationality by looking at his or her "residual" belief-mediated success, i.e., after explaining that success via other observable factors.

But note: we humans were designed in many ways not to be rational, because believing the truth often got in the way of achieving goals evolution had for us. So it is important for everyone who intends to seek truth to clearly understand: rationality has costs, not only in time and effort to achieve it, but also in conflicts with other common goals.

Yes, rationality might help you win that game or argument, get promoted, or win her heart. Or more rationality for you might hinder those outcomes. If what you really want is love, respect, beauty, inspiration, meaning, satisfaction, or success, as commonly understood, we just cannot assure you that rationality is your best approach toward those ends. In fact we often know it is not.

The truth may well be messy, ugly, or dispriting; knowing it make you less popular, loved, or successful. These are actually pretty likely outcomes in many identifiable situations. You may think you want to know the truth no matter what, but how sure can you really be of that? Maybe you just like the heroic image of someone who wants the truth no matter what; or maybe you only really want to know the truth if it is the bright shining glory you hope for.

Be warned; the truth just is what it is. If just knowing the truth is not reward enough, perhaps you'd be better off not knowing. Before you join us in this quixotic quest, ask yourself: do you really want to be generally rational, on all topics? Or might you be better off limiting your rationality to the usual practical topics where rationality is respected and welcomed?
Unteachable Excellence
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-02T15:33:22.933Z

There's a whole genre of literature whose authors want to sell you the secret success sauce behind Gates's Microsoft or Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway - the common theme being that you, yes, you can be the next Larry Page.

But probably not even Warren Buffett can teach you to be the next Warren Buffett. That kind of extraordinary success is extraordinary because no one has yet figured out how to teach it reliably.

And so mostly these books are a waste of hope, feeding off the excitement from dangling the possibility of the glorious yet unattainable; which is why I call them "excellence pornography", with subgenres like investment pornography and business pornography, telling every barista how to run the next Starbucks and every MBA student how to be the best CEO in the Fortune 500. Calling this "excellence pornography" might be too unkind to pornography, which is at least overtly fiction.

Now, there are incredibly powerful techniques that civilization has figured out how to teach: techniques like "test your ideas by experiment" or "reinvest your wealth to generate more wealth". You, yes, you can be a scientist! Or maybe not everyone - but enough people can become scientists by using learnable techniques and communicable knowledge, to support our technological civilization.

"You, yes, you can reinvest the proceeds of your earlier investments!" You may not beat the market like Warren Buffett. But if you think about a whole civilization practicing that rule, we do better nowadays than historical societies with no banks or stock markets. (No, really, we still do better on net.) Because the trick of Reinvestment can be taught, can be described in words, can work for ordinary people without extraordinary luck... we don't think of it as an extraordinary triumph. Just anyone can do it, so it must not be important.

Warren Buffett did manage to turn on a lot of people to value investing. He's given out a lot of advice, and it looks like good advice to me on the occasions I've read it. The impression I get, at least, is that if he knew how to communicate what was left, he would just tell you.

But Berkshire Hathaway, and Buffett personally, still spend huge amounts of time looking for managerial excellence. Why? Because they don't know any systematically reliable process to start with bright kids and ...
Test Your Rationality
by RobinHanson — 2009-03-01T13:21:34.375Z

So you think you want to be rational, to believe what is true even when sirens tempt you? Great, get to work; there's lots you can do. Do you want to justifiably believe that you are more rational than others, smugly knowing your beliefs are more accurate? Hold on; this is hard.
Humans nearly universally find excuses to believe that they are more correct that others, at least on the important things. They point to others' incredible beliefs, to biases afflicting others, and to estimation tasks where they are especially skilled. But they forget most everyone can point to such things.
But shouldn't you get more rationality credit if you spend more time studying common biases, statistical techniques, and the like? Well this would be good evidence of your rationality if you were in fact pretty rational about your rationality, i.e., if you knew that when you read or discussed such issues your mind would then systematically, broadly, and reasonably incorporate those insights into your reasoning processes.
But what if your mind is far from rational? What if your mind is likely to just go through the motions of studying rationality to allow itself to smugly believe it is more accurate, or to bond you more closely to your social allies?
It seems to me that if you are serious about actually being rational, rather than just believing in your rationality or joining a group that thinks itself rational, you should try hard and often to test your rationality. But how can you do that?
To test the rationality of your beliefs, you could sometimes declare beliefs, and later score those beliefs via tests where high scoring beliefs tend to be more rational. Better tests are those where scores are more tightly and reliably correlated with rationality. So, what are good rationality tests?
That You'd Tell All Your Friends
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-01T12:04:39.721Z

Followup to: The Most Frequently Useful Thing

What's the number one thing that goes into a book on rationality, which would make you buy a copy of that book for a friend? We can, of course, talk about all the ways that the rationality of the Distant World At Large needs to be improved. But in this case - I think the more useful data might be the Near question, "With respect to the people I actually know, what do I want to see in that book, so that I can give the book to them to explain it?"

(And again, please think of your own answer-component before reading others' comments.)
The Most Frequently Useful Thing
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-02-28T18:43:56.156Z

Followup to: The Most Important Thing You Learned

What's the most frequently useful thing you've learned on OB - not the most memorable or most valuable, but the thing you use most often? What influences your behavior, factors in more than one decision? Please give a concrete example if you can. This isn't limited to archetypally "mundane" activities: if your daily life involves difficult research or arguing with philosophers, go ahead and describe that too.
The Most Important Thing You Learned
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-02-27T20:15:59.430Z

My current plan does still call for me to write a rationality book - at some point, and despite all delays - which means I have to decide what goes in the book, and what doesn't. Obviously the vast majority of my OB content can't go into the book, because there's so much of it.

So let me ask - what was the one thing you learned from my posts on Overcoming Bias, that stands out as most important in your mind? If you like, you can also list your numbers 2 and 3, but it will be understood that any upvotes on the comment are just agreeing with the #1, not the others. If it was striking enough that you remember the exact post where you "got it", include that information. If you think the most important thing is for me to rewrite a post from Robin Hanson or another contributor, go ahead and say so. To avoid recency effects, you might want to take a quick glance at this list of all my OB posts before naming anything from just the last month - on the other hand, if you can't remember it even after a year, then it's probably not the most important thing.

Please also distinguish this question from "What was the most frequently useful thing you learned, and how did you use it?" and "What one thing has to go into the book that would (actually) make you buy a copy of that book for someone else you know?" I'll ask those on Saturday and Sunday.

PS: Do please think of your answer before you read the others' comments, of course.