trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Evidence and counterexample to positive relevance
by fsopho — 2013-05-25T18:40:36.006Z

I would like to share a doubt with you. Peter Achinstein, in his The Book of Evidence considers two probabilistic views about the conditions that must be satisfied in order for e to be evidence that h. The first one says that e is evidence that h when e increases the probability of h when added to some background information b:

(Increase in Probability) e is evidence that h iff P(h|e&b) > P(h|b).

The second one says that e is evidence that h when the probability of h conditional on e is higher than some threshold k:

(High Probability) e is evidence that h iff P(h|e) > k.

A plausible way of interpreting the second definition is by saying that k = 1/2. When one takes k to have such fixed value, it turns out that P(h|e) > k has the same truth-conditions as P(h|e) > P(~h|e) - at least if we are assuming that P is a function obeying Kolmogorov's axioms of the probability calculus. Now, Achinstein takes P(h|e) > k to be a necessary but insufficient condition for e to be evidence that h - while he claims that P(h|e&b) > P(h|b) is neither necessary nor sufficient for e to be evidence that h. That may seem shocking for those that take the condition fleshed out in (Increase in Probability) at least as a necessary condition for evidential support (I take it that the claim that it is necessary and sufficient is far from accepted - presumably one also wants to qualify e as true, or as known, or as justifiably believed, etc). So I would like to check one of Achinstein's counter-examples to the claim that increase in probability is a necessary condition for evidential support.

The relevant example is as follows:

The lottery counterexample

Suppose one has the following background b and piece of evidence e1:

b: This is a fair lottery in which one ticket drawn at random will win.

e1: The New York Times reports that Bill Clinton owns all but one of the 1000 lottery tickets sold in a lottery.

Further, one also learns e2:

e2: The Washington Post reports that

...
Collecting expressions of interest in a rationality conference in August
by purplerabbits — 2013-05-25T10:58:40.175Z

On the principle of organising events that I want to attend myself, I would very much like to organise a rationality conference/convention in the UK. I organise events for a living; in addition, in my free time I've organised five ~200 person weekend conventions and several other events.

At the moment I am thinking of a one day event on a weekend or a Friday in August, at Stamford Bridge or somewhere else easy to get to around London. There would probably also be a pre-conference dinner, or private bar night with music.

Costs would be in the region of £50-£100 a head including lunch.

Can I get a show of hands to see if the idea is viable?
Be a little bit more trusting than most people think sensible
by purplerabbits — 2013-05-25T10:31:51.169Z

I am just working on a list of rationalist rules I live by, and this is the one I have most confidence in, so it seems a good topic for my first ever post (which will be short as I have to be on a train in 15)

Since people routinely exaggerate risk, and social norms pull us towards the crabs in a bucket effect (especially for women) I want to correct for that. (Preferably without ending up with a giant Rob Me sign over my head, but that's not the direction I err in.)

For example, there was this rationalist walked into a bar. I had a lot of luggage - everything I need for a four day break, including over two thousand pounds worth of electronic devices and binoculars. I am insured, but it would be an especially annoying time to lose stuff. I had a coffee and then I needed the bathroom, which was far away through a lot of people.

I knew logically how little risk there was in leaving all my stuff; a Highland bar in the middle of the afternoon is even safer than where I live in Edinburgh, and no-one was pinging any alarm bells, but I still spent more time than I'd like to admit convincing myself I didn't have to drag the huge bag with me to the ladies and back. Yes brain, even though I'm alone, and the customers are men, and I'm a middle aged woman, and my mother would freak if she saw me...

Of course it was fine, like it was the last hundred times. One day I hope to not even have to persuade myself, but meanwhile I notice my prediction was correct and feel just a little bit pleased with myself.
Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions
by JonahS — 2013-05-25T04:12:37.939Z

Note: I completed a PhD in Mathematics from University of Illinois under the direction of Nathan Dunfield in 2011. I worked as a research analyst at GiveWell from April 2012 to May 2013. All views expressed here are my own.

About this post: I've long been interested in ways in which mathematicians can contribute high social value. In this post, I discuss a tentative idea along these lines. My thoughts are very preliminary in nature, and my intent in making this post is to provide a launching point for further exploration of the subject, rather than to persuade.

Recessions as a serious threat to global welfare

In 2008, the US housing bubble popped, precipitating the Great Recession. The costs of this were staggering:

It’s been claimed that the cost to US taxpayers in bank bailouts was $9 trillion.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by almost 50% and took over 4 years to recover.

US unemployment jumped from ~5% to ~10%, and has only gradually been declining.

Budget cuts were especially great for government support of activities with unusually high humanitarian value to those without political constituency, such as investment in global health.

It’s been claimed that recessions cause a drop in prosocial behavior.

All told, the Great Recession had massive negative humanitarian disvalu

...
Being Foreign and Being Sane 
by fowlertm — 2013-05-25T00:58:11.748Z

I've been reading Less Wrong for a while now, and have recently been casting about for suitable topics to write on. I've decided to break the ice now with an essay on what living and working abroad in Korea has taught me which carries over into studying rationality. While more personal than technical, this inaugural post contains generalizable lessons that I think will be of interest to anyone trying to improve their thinking.

You may be skeptical, so let me briefly make my case that traveling offers something to the aspiring rationalist. Many have written about the benefits of traveling, but for our purposes here is what matters:

Being abroad can make certain important concepts in rationality a part of you in ways studying can't match.

It's easy to read -- and to really believe -- that the map is not the territory, say, without it changing how you actually act. Information often gathers dust on the shelves in your frontal lobe without ever making it into the largely unconscious bits of your brain where so much of your deciding takes place.

With this in mind travel can be seen as part of the class of efforts to learn rationality without directly studying the science, instead doing something like playing Go or poker, for example. I don't know for sure, but such efforts could hold the promise of teaching us to incorporate insights into emotional attachment, statistical probabilities, strategy, maximizing utility, and the like -- things we've known for a long time -- into our instincts, deep down where they can actually change how we behave.

I say all this because what living in a foreign country has given me is not so much a software update which has remade me into a paragon of rationality, but rather a hearty appreciation for certain facts which might make my thought-improvement efforts more fruitful. No doubt many of you have already long-ago internalized all of this, and for you I won't be saying anything very profound.

Nevertheless, here is what I've learned:

1) You are vastly more complicated than you think you are.

The proposal for the Dartmouth conference of 1956, considered by some to be the birth of the field of AI research, had this to say:

An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems

...
Could Robots Take All Our Jobs?: A Philosophical Perspective
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-05-24T22:06:54.688Z

Note: The following is a draft of a paper written with an audience of philosophers in mind. It focuses on answering objections to AI likely to be made by contemporary philosophers, but it is still likely to be of interest to readers of LessWrong for obvious reasons, and I've tried to avoid assuming any specialized philosophical background.

The title of this paper probably sounds a little strange. Philosophy is generally thought of as an armchair discipline, and the question of whether robots could take all our jobs doesn’t seem like a question that can be settled from the armchair. But it turns out that when you look at this question, it leads you to some other questions that philosophers have had quite a bit to say about.

Some of these other questions are conceptual. They seem like they could in fact be answered from the armchair. Others are empirical but very general. They seem like they require going out and looking at the world, but they’re not about specific technologies. They’re about how the universe works, how the mind works, or how computers work in general. It’s been suggested that one of the distinctive things about philosophical questions is their level of generality. I don’t know whether that’s true, but I do know that some of these general empirical questions are ones that philosophers have had quite a bit to say about.

The line of reasoning in this paper is similar to arguments discussed by Alan Turing (1950), Hubert Dreyfus (1992), and David Chalmers (2010). I won’t say much about those discussions, though, for reasons of space and also because I’ll frame the discussion a bit differently. I want to avoid debates about what “intelligence” is, what “information processing” is, or what it would mean to say the brain is a machine. Hence the focus on machines taking human jobs. I should mention that I’m not the first to suggest this focus; after writing the first draft of this paper I found out that one AI researcher had already proposed replacing the “Turing test” with an “employment test” (Nilsson 2005).

Here, I’m going to assume no job has “done by a human” as part of its definition. I realize that in the future, there may be demand for having jobs specifically done by humans. People might want to be served by human bartenders eve...
Robustness of Cost-Effectiveness Estimates and Philanthropy
by JonahS — 2013-05-24T20:28:43.492Z

Note: I formerly worked as a research analyst at GiveWell. This post describes the evolution of my thinking about robustness of cost-effectiveness estimates in philanthropy. All views expressed here are my own.

Up until 2012, I believed that detailed explicit cost-effectiveness estimates are very important in the context of philanthropy. My position was reflected in a comment that I made in 2011:

The problem with using unquantified heuristics and intuitions is that the “true” expected values of philanthropic efforts plausibly differ by many orders of magnitude, and unquantified heuristics and intuitions are frequently insensitive to this. The last order of magnitude is the only one that matters; all others are negligible by comparison. So if at all possible, one should do one’s best to pin down the philanthropic efforts with the “true” expected value per dollar of the highest (positive) order of magnitude. It seems to me as though any feasible strategy for attacking this problem involves explicit computation.

During my time at GiveWell, my position on this matter shifted. I still believe that there are instances in which rough cost-effectiveness estimates can be useful for determining good philanthropic foci. But I’ve shifted toward the position that effective altruists should spend much more time on qualitative analysis than on quantitative analysis in determining how they can maximize their positive social impact.

In this post I’ll focus on one reason for my shift: explicit cost-effectiveness estimates are generally much less robust than I had previously thought.

The history of GiveWell’s estimates for lives saved per dollar

Historically, GiveWell used “cost per life saved” as a measure of the cost-effectiveness of its global health recommendations. Examination of the trajectory of GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness estimates shows that GiveWell has consistently updated in the direction of its ranked charities having higher “cost per life saved” than GiveWell had previously thought. I give the details belo

...
Is a paperclipper better than nothing?
by DataPacRat — 2013-05-24T19:34:59.071Z

Thought experiment:

Through whatever accident of history underlies these philosophical dilemmas, you are faced with a choice between two, and only two, mutually exclusive options:

* Choose A, and all life and sapience in the solar system (and presumably the universe), save for a sapient paperclipping AI, dies.

* Choose B, and all life and sapience in the solar system, including the paperclipping AI, dies.

Phrased another way: does the existence of any intelligence at all, even a paperclipper, have even the smallest amount of utility above no intelligence at all?

If anyone responds positively, subsequent questions would be which would be preferred, a paperclipper or a single bacteria; a paperclipper or a self-sustaining population of trilobites and their supporting ecology; a paperclipper or a self-sustaining population of australopithecines; and so forth, until the equivalent value is determined.
New LW Meetups: Bristol, Tel Aviv
by FrankAdamek — 2013-05-24T15:07:32.948Z

This summary was posted to LW main on May 17th. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

First Bristol meetup: 25 May 2013 03:00PM
Tel Aviv, Israel Meetup - Goal Clarification with special guest Cat from CFAR: 23 May 2013 07:00PM

Other irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta Lesswrong's May Meetup: The Rationality of Social Relationships, Friendship, Love, and Family.: 17 May 2013 07:00PM
Bielefeld Meetup May 22nd: 22 May 2013 07:00PM
Berlin Social Meetup: 15 June 2013 05:00PM
Bratislava lesswrong meetup III: 20 May 2013 06:30PM
Brussels meetup: 18 May 2013 01:00PM
Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 65-68: 18 May 2013 12:30PM
London Meetup: 26th May: 26 May 2013 02:00PM
[Moscow] Belief cleaning: 26 May 2013 04:00PM
Paris Meetup: Sunday, May 26.: 26 May 2013 02:00PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 18 May 2019 01:30PM
Seattle-Vancouver Kilomeetup: 18 May 2013 11:54AM
Vienna meetup #3: 18 May 2013 04:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

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, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you c...
Orwell and fictional evidence for dictatorship stability
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-05-24T12:19:13.010Z

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair), Nineteen Eighty-Four

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is brilliant, terrifying and useful. It's been at its best fighting against governmental intrusions, and is often quoted by journalists and even judges. It's cultural impact has been immense. And, hey, it's well written.

But that doesn't mean it's accurate as a source of predictions or counterfactuals. Orwell's belief that "British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war" was wrong. Nineteen Eighty-Four did not predict the future course of communism. There is no evidence that anything like the world he envisaged could (or will) happen. Which isn't the same as saying that it couldn't, but we do require some evidence before accepting Orwell's world as realistic.

Yet from this book, a lot of implicit assumptions have seeped into our consciousness. The most important one (shared with many other dystopian novels) is that dictatorships are stable forms of government. Note the "forever" in the quote above - the society Orwell warned about would never change, never improve, never transform. In several conversations (about future governments, for instance), I've heard - and made - the argument that a dictatorship was inevitable, because it's an absorbing state. Democracies can come become dictatorships, but dictatorships (barring revolutions) will endure for good. And so the idea is that if revolutions become impossible (because of ubiquitous surveillance, for instance), then we're stuck with Big Brother for life, and for our children's children'c children's lives.

But thinking about this in the context of history, this doesn't seem credible. The most stable forms of government are democracies and monarchies; nothing else endures that long. And laying revolutions aside, there have been plenty of examples of even quite nasty governments improving themselves. Robespierre was deposed from within his own government - and so the Terror, for all its bloodshed, didn't even last a full year. The worse excesses of Stalinism ended with Stalin. Gorbachev voluntarily opened up his regime (to a certain extent). Mao would excoriate the China of today. Britain's leaders in the 19th and 20th century gradually opened up the franchise, without ...
Problems with Academia and the Rising Sea
by JonahS — 2013-05-23T19:17:41.213Z

Severe problems with the biomedical research process

GiveWell has recently been investigating ways to improve biomedical research. When I discovered GiveWell's research I was shocked by how severe and comprehensive the problems with the field seem to be:

From a conversation with Ferric Fang:

Because scientists have to compete for grants, they spend a very large fraction of their time fundraising, sometimes more than 50% of their working hours. Scientists feel [strong] pressure to optimize their activities for getting tenure and grants, rather than for doing good science.

From a conversation with Elizabeth Iorns:

Researchers are rewarded primarily for publishing papers in prestigious journals such as Nature, Science and Cell. These journals select for papers that report on surprising and unusual findings. Papers that report on unsound research that is apparently exciting are more likely to be published than papers which report on less exciting research that is sound.

There is little post-publication check on the soundness of papers’ findings, because journals, especially prestigious ones, generally don’t publish replications, and there is little funding for performing replications.

[…]

Pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer and Amgen have studied the frequency with which studies are reproducible by trying to reproduce them, and they have found that about 70% of published papers in the areas that they considered don’t reproduce.

[…]

Because many published results are not reproducible, it is difficult for scientists to use the published literature as a basis for deciding what experiments to perform.

[…]

As things stand, the pharmaceutical industry does replications, however, these are generally unpublished. Because a given lab doesn’t know whether other labs have found that a study fails to replicate, labs duplicate a lot of effort.

From a conversation with Ken Witwer:

Dr. Witwer published a study in Clinical Chemistry examining 127 papers that had been published in between July 2011 and April 2012 in journals that ostensibly require that research

...
Maximizing Financial Utility and Frugality
by Petruchio — 2013-05-23T15:55:33.672Z

The past few days have seen an increase of chatter concerning retirement and financial planning. One of us is even putting out a prospectus for a rational financial planning sequence. Some others have derided the concept of saving for retirement, as there is a probability of death before that time.

I am of the Extreme Early Retirement group. The idea is to save and invest 60-90% of your income, and you will have enough money to retire within a decade rather than four decades of the normal working career. This requires you to exercise your frugality muscle (such as cutting cable, biking to work, eating out less), but due to hedonistic adaptation, you will come out no less unhappy.

The sequences have already spoken on how spending money does not make us happier (after our basic needs are met). A Rational Financial plan should take this into account, even if a majority of people would not want to consider it.

I am just a beginner, so I linked the two big names in EEA, Mr. Money Mustache and Early Retirement Extreme. You can find their journeys towards financial independence here and here.

ERE is an austerity heavyweight, while MMM lives a pretty luxurious lifestyle, but still spends much less than his former coworkers. He just spends on what is important to him, such as travelling with his family and eating organic food, and not on anything frivolous, such as cable or eating out. He lives very far from a deprived lifestyle which the average person would shy away from. It takes a paradigm shift and some grit, but the people of LessWrong are not the type to reject munchkin ideas because it takes a little bit of mental effort.

If I were to make a compilation of posts for a Rational Financial Planning sequence, it will go as such…

How Little Money you need to Retire ?
Basic Retirement Math
Rationalist Spending
Maximizing Utilons per Dollar
Utilons Free Of Charge
Investing Rationally Basics

These are just the basics. Investment advice is scare, and the above does not talk about many fianacial aspects, such as insurance, children, career choice. The authors do speak about them on their blog’s, but I omitted them for brevity. Read and follow these posts however, and you will be better off than 90% of your peers, and well on the road to Extreme Early Retirement...
[LINK] Does Time Exist? With Julian Barbour
by Ben Pace — 2013-05-23T14:38:57.275Z

About six months ago, Julian Barbour did a introductory-level talk, attempting to explain the ideas in his book 'The End of Time'. The topic of his book, Yudkowsky has blogged about several times, but to the non-mathsy non-physicists, this talk might be a good introduction. It's very easygoing, and has also persuaded me to buy his book.

http://ww3.tvo.org/video/185595/julian-barbour-does-time-exist

If someone has already linked it, please say so.

Yudkowsky's related posts can mostly be found by typing 'Julian Barbour' in the search bar.