trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Paderborn Meetup, January 9th
by Just_existing — 2013-01-05T14:57:35.752Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Paderborn Meetup, January 9th

WHEN:
09 January 2013 07:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Gownsmen's Pub, Uni Paderborn, Warburger Straße 100, Paderborn

Another meetup of this group. We are meeting once every two weeks. The location switches between Bielefeld and Paderborn.

The topics of this evening will be the current series "Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners" and whatever comes to our minds.

I promised some news concerning certain plans for a Youtube-channel for rationality. Unfortunately I don't have any, but I will in a week or two.

If you happen to live in the area, feel free to drop by, we will be happy about every new face we see.

Discussion article for the meetup : Paderborn Meetup, January 9th
A reply to Mark Linsenmayer about philosophy
by lukeprog — 2013-01-05T11:25:25.242Z

Mark Linsenmayer, one of the hosts of a top philosophy podcast called The Partially Examined Life, has written a critique of the view that Eliezer and I seem to take of philosophy. Below, I respond to a few of Mark's comments. Naturally, I speak only for myself, not for Eliezer.

I'm generally skeptical when someone proclaims that "rationality" itself should get us to throw out 90%+ of philosophy...

Sturgeon's Law declares that "90% of everything is crap." I think something like that is true, though perhaps it's 88% crap in physics, 99% crap in philosophy, and 99.99% crap on 4chan.

But let me be more precise. I do claim that almost all philosophy is useless for figuring out what is true, for reasons explained in several of my posts:

Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline

Concepts Don't Work That Way

Intuitions Aren't Shared That Way

Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, Not Plato and Kant

Mark replies that the kinds of unscientific philosophy I dismiss can be "useful at least in the sense of entertaining," which of course isn't something I'd deny. I'm just trying to say that Heidegger is pretty darn useless for figuring out what's true. There are thousands of readings that will more efficiently make your model of the world more accurate.

If you want to read Heidegger as poetry or entertainment, that's fine. I watch Game of Thrones, but not because it's a useful inquiry into truth.

Also, I'm not sure what it would mean to say we should throw out 90% of philosophy because of rationality, but I probably don't agree with the "because" clause, there.

[Luke's] accusation is that most philosophizing is useless unless explicitly based on scientific knowledge on how the brain works, and in particular where intuitions come from... [But] to then throw out the mass of the philosophical tradition because it has been ignorant of [cognitive biases] is [a mistake].

I don't, in fact, think that "most philosophizing is useless unless explicitly based on scientific knowledge [about] how the brain works," nor do I "throw out the mass of the philosophical tradition because it has been ignorant of [cognitive biases]." Sometimes, people do pretty good philosophy without knowing much of modern psychology. Look at all the progress Hume and Frege made.

What I do claim is that many specific philosophical positions and methods are undermined by scientific ...
Re: Second-Order Logic: The Controversy
by abramdemski — 2013-01-05T10:33:28.928Z

Response to Second-Order Logic: The Controversy. This started out as a comment, but got fun.

Several days later, the two meet again.

"You know, I still feel uneasy about the discussion we had. I didn't walk away with the feeling that you really appreciated the point that any proof system you propose for 2nd-order logic can equally well be interpreted as a proof system for a first-order many-sorted logic. If an alien took a look at a computer program implementing 2nd-order logic, what reason would they have to conclude that the computer program was an attempt to implement true quantification over properties, with everything our mathematicians take that to mean?"

But I told you: I want a system which will be able to consider the hypothesis that time is connected, or perhaps the hypothesis that the universe is finite, and so on.

"But externally, it looks like you just have some particular first-order theory in which that term has a meaning. We can talk about the kind of 'finite' that first-order set theory allows us to define. We could suppose your brain implements some particular theory, which you can't verbally articulate, but which is what you mean when you say such things."

Turing machines either halt or don't halt! Like I said before, I don't want a system that treats "not provable one way or the other" as a physical possibility. I don't even know what that means.

"Of course you would think that. Any system implementing classical logic will think that. First-order set theory doesn't prove it one way or the other for every Turing machine, but it still claims that every Turing machine halts or doesn't halt. It just has incomplete knowledge. Everything you're saying is still consistent with the use of just first-order logic."

But I want to rule out the nonstandard models! I want a system which will not expect, with some probability, to see specific Turing machines halt at a non-standard time.

"We can't distinguish that behavior in the real world. Everything you say to me will sound the same. When you predict your observations for specific amounts of time into the future, you are making predictions about the connected chain of time. If you make a prediction about the entire future, we could say the nonstandard models slip in, but that's exactly like what happens due to the limitations of our knowledge in the 2nd-order case. There is nothing magical about saying

...
Pigliucci's comment on Yudkowsky's and Dai's stance on morality and logic
by mapnoterritory — 2013-01-05T08:05:49.246Z

Pigliucci:

So morality has a lot to do with logic — indeed I have argued that moral reasoning is a type of applied logical reasoning — but it is not logic “all the way down,” it is anchored by certain contingent facts about humanity, bonoboness and so forth.

But, despite Yudkowsky’s confident claim, morality isn’t a matter of logic “all the way down,” because it has to start with some axioms, some brute facts about the type of organisms that engage in moral reasoning to begin with. Those facts don’t come from physics (though, like everything else, they better be compatible with all the laws of physics), they come from biology. A reasonable theory of ethics, then, can emerge only from a combination of biology (by which I mean not just evolutionary biology, but also cultural evolution) and logic.

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.de/2013/01/lesswrong-on-morality-and-logic.html
[SEQ RERUN] Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun
by MinibearRex — 2013-01-05T04:35:13.715Z

Today's post, Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun was originally published on 17 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Fun Theory is an attempt to actually answer questions about eternal boredom that are more often posed and left hanging. Attempts to visualize Utopia are often defeated by standard biases, such as the attempt to imagine a single moment of good news ("You don't have to work anymore!") rather than a typical moment of daily life ten years later. People also believe they should enjoy various activities that they actually don't. But since human values have no supernatural source, it is quite reasonable for us to try to understand what we want. There is no external authority telling us that the future of humanity should not be fun.

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 Visualizing Eutopia, 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.
Meetup : Vancouver Metaethics and Really Trying
by  — 2013-01-05T03:21:35.546Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Metaethics and Really Trying

WHEN: 05 January 2013 01:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE: 2505 W broadway vancouver bc

We are going to talk about the metaethics sequence and this awesome essay by gwern.

13:00 on Saturday at Benny's Bagels in Kitsilano. Me may have a sign, but probably not.

If you aren't on already, join us on our mailing list.

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Metaethics and Really Trying
Just One Sentence
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2013-01-05T01:27:30.044Z

So apparently Richard Feynman once said:

If, in some cataclysm, all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence you will see an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.

I could be missing something, but this strikes me as a terrible answer.

When was the atomic hypothesis confirmed? If I recall correctly, it was only when chemists started noticing that the outputs of chemical reactions tended to factorize a certain way, which is to say that it took millennia after Democritus to get the point where the atomic hypothesis started making clearly relevant experimental predictions.

How about, "Stop trying to sound wise and come up with theories that make precise predictions about things you can measure in numbers."

I noticed this on Marginal Revolution, so I shall also state my candidate for the one most important sentence about macroeconomics: "You can't eat gold, so figure out how the heck money is relevant to making countries actually produce more or less food." This is a pretty large advance on how kings used to think before economics. I mean, Scott Sumner is usually pretty savvy (so is Richard Feynman btw) but his instruction to try to understand money is likely to fall on deaf ears, if it's just that one sentence. Think about money? Everyone wants more money! Yay, money! Let's build more gold mines! And "In the short run, governments are not households"? Really, Prof. Cowen, that's what you'd pass on to the next generation as they climb up from the radioactive soil?

*Cough.* Okay, I'm done. Does anyone want to take their own shot at doing better than Feynman did for their own discipline?
How to update P(x this week), upon hearing P(x next month) = 99.5%?
by RolfAndreassen — 2013-01-04T21:09:23.413Z

Suppose you want to assign a probability that a government will fall (ie the Prime Minister resigns) before the end of the year. Lacking any particular information - I haven't even told you which government it is - you say "Obviously, it's 50% - either it happens or not" (or perhaps "Oh, say, 10%, governments can usually rely on lasting a year at least"), put that prediction into your registry, and go on with your life. Then, on December 1st, you hear that the Prime Minister in question has promised to resign and call an election in March of next year. How should this affect your probability that he will resign before the end of this year?

I see several arguments:

1. Having gotten this public commitment out of him, his opponents have no particular reason to push his government further. It should become more stable for the finite time it has left. My probability of a resignation in December should go down.

2. His opponents were able to extract such a promise; it follows that he cannot be quite confident in his ability to survive a vote of no confidence. Such a signal of weakness might easily lead to a "blood-in-the-water" effect whereby his opponents become more aggressive and go for the immediate kill. His government will surely fall before this attempted compromise date; my probability should go up.

3. The March date wasn't chosen at random. Presumably there is something the PM thinks he can get accomplished if he retains his position until March, but not if he resigns right away. So, presumably, his opponents will be all the more eager for him to resign before he gets it done, whatever it is; they will put more resources into toppling him. Again, my probability should go up.

The question is not hypothetical: I was faced with precisely this problem in December, and got it wrong. I'd like to see how others think about it.
Second-Order Logic: The Controversy
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2013-01-04T19:51:28.863Z

Followup to: Godel's Completeness and Incompleteness Theorems

"So the question you asked me last time was, 'Why does anyone bother with first-order logic at all, if second-order logic is so much more powerful?'"

Right. If first-order logic can't talk about finiteness, or distinguish the size of the integers from the size of the reals, why even bother?

"The first thing to realize is that first-order theories can still have a lot of power. First-order arithmetic does narrow down the possible models by a lot, even if it doesn't narrow them down to a single model. You can prove things like the existence of an infinite number of primes, because every model of the first-order axioms has an infinite number of primes. First-order arithmetic is never going to prove anything that's wrong about the standard numbers. Anything that's true in all models of first-order arithmetic will also be true in the particular model we call the standard numbers."

Even so, if first-order theory is strictly weaker, why bother? Unless second-order logic is just as incomplete relative to third-order logic, which is weaker than fourth-order logic, which is weaker than omega-order logic -

"No, surprisingly enough - there's tricks for making second-order logic encode any proposition in third-order logic and so on. If there's a collection of third-order axioms that characterizes a model, there's a collection of second-order axioms that characterizes the same model. Once you make the jump to second-order logic, you're done - so far as anyone knows (so far as I know) there's nothing more powerful than second-order logic in terms of which models it can characterize."

Then if there's one spoon which can eat anything, why not just use the spoon?

"Well... this gets into complex issues. There are mathematicians who don't believe there is a spoon when it comes to second-order logic."

Like there are mathematicians who don't believe in infinity?

"Kind of. Look, suppose you couldn't use second-order logic - you belonged to a species that doesn't have second-order logic, or anything like it. Your species doesn't have any native mental intuition you could use to construct the notion of 'all properties'. And then suppose that, after somebody used first-order set theory to ...
Weekly LW Meetups: Bielefeld, Montpellier, Vancouver
by FrankAdamek — 2013-01-04T16:28:07.762Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on December 28th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Vancouver New Year!: 30 December 2012 01:00PM
Bielefeld Meetup: 02 January 2013 07:00PM
Montpellier: Tentative first meetup: 03 January 2013 03:00PM
Brussels meetup: 05 January 2013 01:00PM
Moscow: Applied Rationality in a New Year: 05 January 2013 04:00PM
Washington, DC Meetup with Special Guest: 06 January 2013 03:00PM
Berlin Meetup: Bayes: 09 January 2013 07:30PM
First Purdue Meetup: 11 January 2013 06:50PM

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

None this week!

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

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 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: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

Whether or not there's currently a meetup in your area, you can sign up to be notified automatically of any future meetups. And if you're not interested in n...
How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password?
by Petruchio — 2013-01-04T15:18:58.618Z

As a teacher, I wonder if it is possible to instill this skill into students the skills of rationality and critical thinking. I teach the third grade, and it is not immediately apparent how to apply this with my own class.

The problems I foresee are as follows:

Young children often do not know the basics on the subject which they are learning, be it math, science, art, religion, literature etc.

Many children are very shy, and try to give as short of an answer as doable to a verbal prompt.

Written prompts are arduous, straining the attention span and writing capabilities of the students. This is not a bad thing, but it presents difficulties in the economy of time and material to be presented.

Attention spans in general are very short.

Experiments can be very infrequent, and nigh impossible with certain subjects.

Children, at this age, are likely to take the words of a parent or teacher at face value, and naturally parrot it back. This may be a hard habit to break.

In the sequences, it is suggested teachers should drill into students words don't count, only anticipation-controllers. How practical is this for an elementary school level? Also appreciated would be any ideas or experiences on how to do this, or how to combat the above problems. Hearing from other teachers would be excellent especially.
How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password?
by Petruchio — 2013-01-04T15:09:45.703Z

As a teacher, I wonder if it is possible to instill this skill into students the skills of rationality and critical thinking. I teach the third grade, and it is not immediately apparent how to apply this with my own class.

The problems I foresee are as follows:

Young children often do not the basics on the subject which they are learning, be it math, science, art, religion, literature etc.

Many children are very shy, and try to give as short of an answer as doable to a verbal prompt.

Written prompts are arduous, straining the attention span and writing capabilities of the students. This is not a bad thing, but it presents difficulties in the economy of time and material to be presented.

Attention spans in general are very short.

Experiments can be very infrequent, and nigh impossible with certain subjects.

Children, at this age, are likely to take the words of a parent or teacher at face value, and naturally parrot it back. This may be a hard habit to break.

In the sequences, it is suggested teachers should drill into students words don't count, only anticipation-controllers. How practical is this for an elementary school level? Also appreciated would be any ideas or experiences on how to do this, or how to combat the above problems. Hearing from other teachers would be excellent especially.
[SEQ RERUN] Visualizing Eutopia
by MinibearRex — 2013-01-04T04:46:34.293Z

Today's post, Visualizing Eutopia was originally published on 16 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Trying to imagine a Eutopia is actually difficult. But it is worth trying.

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 For The People Who Are Still Alive, 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.
Meetup : Buffalo Meetup
by StonesOnCanvas — 2013-01-04T04:46:16.148Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo Meetup

WHEN:
10 January 2013 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
SPOT Coffee 5330 Main Street Williamsville, NY 14221

We'll be meeting to chat about general rationality topics. I think this this article (http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html) will make for a good discussion topic.

Come join us. We'll talk about rationality and play Zendo!

Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo Meetup
Case Study: the Death Note Script and Bayes
by gwern — 2013-01-04T04:33:37.458Z

"Who wrote the Death Note script?"

I give a history of the 2009 leaked script, discuss internal & external evidence for its authenticity including stylometrics; and then give a simple step-by-step Bayesian analysis of each point. We finish with high confidence in the script's authenticity, discussion of how this analysis was surprisingly enlightening, and what followup work the analysis suggests would be most valuable.

If you're already familiar this particular leaked 2009 live-action script, please write down your current best guess as to how likely it is to be authentic.

This is intended to be easy to understand and essentially beginner-level for Bayes's theorem and fermi estimates, like my other Death Note essay (information theory, crypto) or my console insurance page (efficient markets, positive psychology, expected value).

Be sure to check out the controversial twist ending!

(I'm sorry to post just a link, but I briefly thought about writing it and all the math in the LW edit box and decided that cutting my wrists sounded both quicker and more enjoyable. Unfortunately, there seems to be a math problem in the Google Chrome/Chromium browser where fractions simply don't render, apparently due to not enabling Webkit's MathML code; if fractions don't render for you, well, I know the math works well in my Iceweasel and it seems to work well in other Firefoxes.)