trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Wanted: Python open source volunteers
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-11T04:59:40.459Z

Less Wrong is a fork of the open Reddit codebase, written in Python. Less Wrong's code is online at Github (look in r2/r2 for the meat), the issues tracker is at code.google.com. See Contributing to Less Wrong for a gentle introduction to getting started.

According to Reddit's blog, we are the coolest use of reddit source code they've seen! But we've still got a long way to go before we're as cool as we want to be.

If anyone out there is fluent in Python and willing to donate a noticeable amount of time to a good cause, an extra hand or two might help us implement many Less Wrong features a lot sooner.

The Reddit codebase does not have unit tests or a whole lot of documentation. Contributors need to be able to wade through Reddit's code to grok it, and write unit tests for what they do (or better yet, write unit tests for existing code).

Items on the issues tracker marked "Contributions-Welcome" are those that look relatively easy to contribute. Items marked "Contributions-LeaveItToUs" are those that look big and complicated, or that Tricycle (the main developers) have strong opinions about how to design and implement. You could hack the big ones, but the developers might need to spend time talking to you - so please don't step up unless you're fluent in Python, have the necessary time, and are serious about it.

An example of a Welcome contribution would be having the registration page explain what is a valid username, or making sure that any HTML generated automatically in comments is also legal to enter directly (like <a href></a>).

An example of a LeaveItToUs contribution would be the future Tag and Sequence system - a next/prev tracking system for tags (so that you can navigate through via "next in self_deception" / "prev in self_deception" arrows); a system that lets authors create sequences which behave like tags but are owned by that author; and RSS feeds for tags and sequences that feed a specified number of posts per day to new users trying to catch up. An experienced volunteer Python dev with enough block hours free to run out and do this would be very welcome.

Items like making the site fluid-width or importing old posts from Overcoming Bias are probably best left to the current site designers.

Hopefully this gives you an idea of what kind of work needs doing. See the issues tracker for more.
Striving to Accept
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-09T23:29:46.758Z

Reply to: The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist
Followup to: Don't Believe You'll Self-Deceive

Should a rationalist ever find themselves trying hard to believe something?

You may be tempted to answer "No", because "trying to believe" sounds so stereotypical of Dark Side Epistemology. You may be tempted to reply, "Surely, if you have to try hard to believe something, it isn't worth believing."

But Yvain tells us that - even though he knows damn well, on one level, that spirits and other supernatural things are not to be found in the causal closure we name "reality" - and even though he'd bet $100 against $10,000 that an examination would find no spirits in a haunted house - he's pretty sure he's still scared of haunted houses.

Maybe it's okay for Yvain to try a little harder to accept that there are no ghosts, since he already knows that there are no ghosts?

In my very early childhood I was lucky enough to read a book from the children's section of a branch library, called "The Mystery of Something Hill" or something. In which one of the characters says, roughly: "There are two ways to believe in ghosts. One way is to fully believe in ghosts, to look for them and talk about them. But the other way is to half-believe - to make fun of the idea of ghosts, and talk scornfully of ghosts; but to break into a cold sweat when you hear a bump in the night, or be afraid to enter a graveyard."

I wish I remembered the book's name, or the exact quote, because this was one of those statements that sinks in during childhood and remains a part of you for the rest of the life. But all I remember was that the solution to the mystery had to do with hoofbeats echoing from a nearby road.

So whenever I found something that I knew I shouldn't believe, I also tried to avoid half-believing; and I soon noticed that this was the harder part of the problem. In my childhood, I cured myself of the fear of the dark by thinking: If I'm going to think magically anyway, then I'll pretend that all the black and shapeless, dark and shadowy things are my friends. Not quite the way I would do it nowadays, but it worked to counteract the half-belief, and in not much time I wasn't thinking about it at all.

Considerably later in my life, I realized that I was having a problem with half-believing in magical thinking - that I would sometimes tr...
You May Already Be A Sinner
by Scott Alexander — 2009-03-09T23:18:35.876Z

Followup to: Simultaneously Right and Wrong

Related to: Augustine's Paradox of Optimal Repentance

"When they inquire into predestination, they are penetrating the sacred precincts of divine wisdom. If anyone with carefree assurance breaks into this place, he will not succeed in satisfying his curiosity and he will enter a labyrinth from which he can find no exit."

-- John Calvin
John Calvin preached the doctrine of predestination: that God irreversibly decreed each man's eternal fate at the moment of Creation. Calvinists separate mankind into two groups: the elect, whom God predestined for Heaven, and the reprobate, whom God predestined for eternal punishment in Hell.
If you had the bad luck to be born a sinner, there is nothing you can do about it. You are too corrupted by original sin to even have the slightest urge to seek out the true faith. Conversely, if you were born one of the elect, you've got it pretty good; no matter what your actions on Earth, it is impossible for God to revoke your birthright to eternal bliss.
However, it is believed that the elect always live pious, virtuous lives full of faith and hard work. Also, the reprobate always commit heinous sins like greed and sloth and commenting on anti-theist blogs. This isn't what causes God to damn them. It's just what happens to them after they've been damned: their soul has no connection with God and so it tends in the opposite direction.
Consider two Calvinists, Aaron and Zachary, both interested only in maximizing his own happiness. Aaron thinks to himself "Whether or not I go to Heaven has already been decided, regardless of my actions on Earth. Therefore, I might as well try to have as much fun as possible, knowing it won't effect the afterlife either way." He spends his days in sex, debauchery, and anti-theist blog comments.
Zachary sees Aaron and thinks "That sinful man is thus proven one of the reprobate, and damned to Hell. I will avoid his fate by living a pious life." Zachary becomes a great minister, famous for his virtue, and when he dies his entire congregation concludes he must have been one of the elect.
Before the cut: If you were a Calvinist, which path would you take?

Amos Tversky, Stanford psychology professor by day, bias-fighting superhero by night, thinks you should live a life of sin. He bases his analysis of the i...
LessWrong anti-kibitzer (hides comment authors and vote counts)
by Marcello — 2009-03-09T19:18:44.923Z

Related to Information Cascades

Information Cascades has implied that people's votes are being biased by the number of votes already cast. Similarly, some commenters express a perception that higher status posters are being upvoted too much.

EDIT: the UserScript below no longer works because it is a very old version of the site. LessWrong v2.0 Anti-Kibitzer is for the new version of the site (working as of May 2020). It has the added feature that each user is assigned a color and style of censor-bar to represent their username, which makes threaded conversations easier to follow.

If, like me, you suspect that you might be prone to these biases, you can correct for them by installing LessWrong anti-kibitzer which I hacked together yesterday morning. You will need Firefox with the greasemonkey extention installed. Once you have greasemonkey installed, clicking on the link to the script will pop up a dialog box asking if you want to enable the script. Once you enable it, a button which you can use to toggle the visibility of author and point count information should appear in the upper right corner of any page on LessWrong. (On any page you load, the authors and pointcounts are automatically hidden until you show them.) Let me know if it doesn't work for any of you.
Already, I've had some interesting experiences. There were a few comments that I thought were written by Eliezer that turned out not to be (though perhaps people are copying his writing style.) There were also comments that I thought contained good arguments which were written by people I was apparently too quick to dismiss as trolls. What are your experiences?
The Mistake Script
by jimrandomh — 2009-03-09T17:35:42.390Z

Here on Less Wrong, we have hopefully developed our ability to spot mistaken arguments. Suppose you're reading an article and you encounter a fallacy. What do you do? Consider the following script:

Reread the argument to determine whether it's really an error. (If not, resume reading.)

Verify that the error is relevant to the point of the article. (If not, resume reading.)

Decide whether the remainder of the article is worth reading despite the error. Resume reading or don't.

This script seems intuitively correct, and many people follow a close approximation of it. However, following this script is very bad, because the judgement in step (3) is tainted: you are more likely to continue reading the article if you agree with its conclusion than if you don't. If you disagreed with the article, then you were also more likely to have spotted the mistake in the first place. These two biases can cause you to unknowingly avoid reading anything you disagree with, which makes you strongly resist changing your beliefs. Long articles almost always include some bad arguments, even when their conclusion is correct. We can greatly improve this script with an explicit countermeasure:

Reread the argument to determine whether it's really an error. (If not, resume reading.)

Verify that the error is relevant to the point of the article. (If not, resume reading.)

Decide whether you agree with the article's conclusion. If you are sure you do, stop reading. If you aren't sure what the conclusion is or aren't sure you agree with it, continue.

Decide whether the remainder of the article is worth reading despite the error. Resume reading or don't.

This extra step protects us from confirmation bias and the "echo chamber" effect. We might try adding more steps, to reduce bias even further:

Reread the argument to determine whether it's really an error. (If not, resume reading.)

Verify that the error is relevant to the point of the article. (If not, resume reading.)

Attempt to generate other arguments which could substitute for the faulty one. If you produce a valid one, resume reading.

Decide whether you agree with the article's conclusion. (If you are sure you do, stop reading. If you aren't sure what the conclusion is or aren't sure you agree with it, continue.)

Decide whether the remainder of the article is worth reading despite the error. Resume reading or don't.

While seemin...
The Wrath of Kahneman
by steven0461 — 2009-03-09T12:52:41.695Z

Cass Sunstein, David Schkade, and Daniel Kahneman, in a 1999 paper named Do People Want Optimal Deterrence, write:

Previous research suggests that people’s judgments about punitive damage awards are a reflection of outrage at the defendant’s actions rather than of deterrence. This is not to say that people do not care about deterrence; of course they do. Our hypothesis here is that they do not attempt to promote optimal deterrence; for this reason they do not make the kinds of distinctions that are obvious, even secondnature, for those who study deterrence questions. Above all, they may not believe that in order to ensure optimal deterrence, the amount that a given defendant is required to pay should be increased or decreased depending on the probability of detection, a central claim in the economic analysis of law.

If we're after optimal deterrence, we should punish potentially harmful actions more if they're hard to detect, or else the expected disutility of the punishment is too small. But apparently this does not accord with people's sense of justice.

Does this mean we should change our sense of justice? And should we apply optimal deterrence theory to informal social rewards and punishments, such as by getting angrier at antisocial behaviors that we learned of by (what the wrongdoer thought was) a freak coincidence?
Don't Believe You'll Self-Deceive
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-09T08:03:20.329Z

I don't mean to seem like I'm picking on Kurige, but I think you have to expect a certain amount of questioning if you show up on Less Wrong and say:

One thing I've come to realize that helps to explain the disparity I feel when I talk with most other Christians is the fact that somewhere along the way my world-view took a major shift away from blind faith and landed somewhere in the vicinity of Orwellian double-think.

"If you know it's double-think...

...how can you still believe it?" I helplessly want to say.

Or:

I chose to believe in the existence of God—deliberately and consciously. This decision, however, has absolutely zero effect on the actual existence of God.

If you know your belief isn't correlated to reality, how can you still believe it?

Shouldn't the gut-level realization, "Oh, wait, the sky really isn't green" follow from the realization "My map that says 'the sky is green' has no reason to be correlated with the territory"?

Well... apparently not.

One part of this puzzle may be my explanation of Moore's Paradox ("It's raining, but I don't believe it is")—that people introspectively mistake positive affect attached to a quoted belief, for actual credulity.

But another part of it may just be that—contrary to the indignation I initially wanted to put forward—it's actually quite easy not to make the jump from "The map that reflects the territory would say 'X'" to actually believing "X". It takes some work to explain the ideas of minds as map-territory correspondence builders, and even then, it may take more work to get the implications on a gut level.

I realize now that when I wrote "You cannot make yourself believe the sky is green by an act of will", I wasn't just a dispassionate reporter of the existing facts. I was also trying to instill a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It may be wise to go around deliberately repeating "I can't get away with double-thinking! Deep down, I'll know it's not true! If I know my map has no reason to be correlated with the territory, that means I don't believe it!"

Because that way—if you're ever tempted to try—the thoughts "But I know this isn't really true!" and "I can't fool myself!" will always rise readily to mind; and that way, you will indeed be less likely to fool yourself successfully. You're more likely to get, on a gut level, that telling yourself X ...
The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist
by Scott Alexander — 2009-03-08T20:39:39.139Z

Followup to: Simultaneously Right and Wrong

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

- H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
There is an old yarn about two skeptics who stayed overnight in a supposedly haunted mansion, just to prove they weren't superstitious. At first, they laughed and joked with each other in the well-lit master bedroom. But around eleven, there was a thunderstorm - hardly a rare event in those parts - and all the lights went off. As it got later and later, the skeptics grew more and more nervous, until finally around midnight, the stairs leading up to their room started to creak. The two of them shot out of there and didn't stop running until they were in their car and driving away.
So the skeptics' emotions overwhelmed their rationality. That happens all the time. Is there any reason to think this story proves anything more interesting than that some skeptics are cowards?

The Koreans have a superstition called "fan death": if you sleep in a closed room with a fan on all night, you will die. Something about the fan blades shredding the oxygen molecules or something. It all sounds pretty far-fetched, but in Korea it's endorsed by everyone from doctors to the government's official consumer safety board.
I don't believe in ghosts, and I don't believe in fan death. But my reactions to spending the night in a haunted mansion and spending the night with a fan are completely different. Put me in a haunted mansion, and I'll probably run out screaming the first time something goes bump in the night1. Put me in a closed room with a fan and I'll shrug and sleep like a baby. Not because my superior rationality has conquered my fear. Because fans just plain don't kill people by chopping up oxygen, and to think otherwise is just stupid.

So although it's correct to say that the skeptics' emotions overwhelmed their rationality, they wouldn't have those emotions unless they thought on some level that ghosts were worth getting scared about.
A psychologist armed with the theory of belief-profession versus anticipation-control would conclude that I profess disbelief in ghosts to fit in with my rationalist friends, but that I anticipate being killed by a ghost if I remain in the haunted mansion. He'd dismiss my skepticism ...
Lies and Secrets
by steven0461 — 2009-03-08T14:43:22.152Z

My intuition says presenting bad facts or pieces of reasoning is wrong, but withholding good facts or pieces of reasoning is less wrong. I assume most of you agree.
This is a puzzle, because on the face of it, the effect is the same.
Suppose the Walrus and the Carpenter are talking of whether pigs have wings.
Scenario 1: The Carpenter is 80% sure that pigs have wings, but the Walrus wants him to believe that they don't. So the Walrus claims that it's a deep principle of evolution theory that no animal can have wings, and the Carpenter updates to 60%.
Scenario 2: The Carpenter is 60% sure that pigs have wings, and the Walrus wants him to believe that they don't. So the Walrus neglects to mention that he once saw a picture of a winged pig in a book. Learning this would cause the Carpenter to update to 80%, but he doesn't learn this, so he stays at 60%.
In both scenarios, the Walrus chose for the Carpenter's probability to be 60% when he could have chosen for it to be 80%. So what's the difference?
If there isn't any, then we're forced to claim bias (maybe omission bias), which we can then try to overcome.
But in this post I want to try rationalizing the asymmetry. I don't feel that my thinking here is clear, so this is very tentative.
If a man is starving, not giving him a loaf of bread is as deadly as giving him cyanide. But if there are a lot of random objects lying around in the neighborhood, the former deed is less deadly: it's far more likely that one of the random objects is a loaf of bread than that it is an antidote to cyanide.
I believe that, likewise, it is more probable that you'll randomly find a good argument duplicated (conditioning on it makes some future evidence redundant), than that you'll randomly find a bad argument debunked (conditioning on it makes some future counter-evidence relevant). In other words, whether you're uninformed or misinformed, you're equally mistaken; but in an environment where evidence is not independent, it's normally easier to recover from being uninformed than from being misinformed.
The case becomes stronger when you think of it in terms of boundedly rational agents fishing from a common meme pool. If agents can remember or hold in mind fewer pieces of information than they are likely to encounter, pieces of disinformation floating in the pool not only do damage by themselves, but do further damage by displacing pieces of go...
It's the Same Five Dollars!
by Z_M_Davis — 2009-03-08T07:23:41.621Z

From Tversky and Khaneman's "The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice" (Science, Vol. 211, No. 4481, 1981):

The following problem [...] illustrates the effect of embedding an option in different accounts. Two versions of this problem were presented to different groups of subjects. One group (N = 93) was given the values that appear in parentheses, and the other group (N = 88) the values shown in brackets.

[...] Imagine that you are about to purchase a jacket for ($125) [$15], and a calculator for ($15) [$125]. The calculator salesman informs you that the calculator you wish to buy is on sale for ($10) [$120] at the other branch of the store, located 20 minutes drive away. Would you make the trip to the other store?

The response to the two versions of [the problem] were markedly different: 68 percent of the respondents were willing to make an extra trip to save $5 on a $15 calculator; only 29 percent were willing to exert the same effort when the price of the calculator was $125. [...] A closely related observation has been reported [...] that the variability of the prices at which a given product is sold by different stores is roughly proportional to the mean price of that product. The same pattern was observed for both frequently and infrequently purchased items. Overall, a ratio of 2:1 in the mean price of two products is associated with a ratio of 1.86:1 in the standard deviation of the respective quoted prices. If the effort that consumers exert to save each dollar on a purchase [...] were independent of price, the dispersion of quoted prices should be about the same for all products.

This one's a killer. Money is supposed to be fungible, but these observations really highlight how difficult it is to really behave as if you believed that. So, aspiring rationalists, how might we combat this in ourselves? Maybe it would help to consciously convert between money and time: if you value your time at 25 $/hr, then the cost of a twenty-minute drive is 25 $/hr * (1/3) hr = $8.33 > $5, so you buy the calculator in front of you in either case. So this heuristic at least takes care of the calculator problem, although I would guess it fails miserably in other contexts, I currently know not which.

Another takeaway lesson is to ignore advertisements boasting that a product is currently such-and-such percent off. We don't care about the percentag

...