trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Great Explanations
by lukeprog — 2011-10-31T23:58:38.110Z

Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your reader understands the words; [I try to] explain something so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones.

Richard Dawkins

My private school taught biology from the infamous creationist textbook Biology for Christian Schools, so my early understanding of evolution was a bit... confused. Lacking the curiosity to, say, check Altavista for a biologist’s explanation (faith is a virtue, don’t ya know), I remained confused about evolution for years.

Eventually I stumbled across an eloquent explanation of the fact that natural selection follows necessarily from heritability, variation, and selection.

Click. I got it.

Explaining is hard. Explainers need to pierce shields of misinformation (creationism), bridge vast inferential distances (probability theory), and cause readers to feel the truth of foreign concepts (quantum entanglement) in their bones. That isn’t easy. Those who do it well are rare and valuable.

Textbook writers are often skilled at explaining complex fields. That’s why I called on my fellow Less Wrongers to name their favorite textbooks (if they had read at least two other textbooks on those subjects). The Best Textbooks on Every Subject now gives 22 textbook recommendations, for fields as diverse as scientific self-help and representation theory.

Now I want to jump down a few levels in granularity. Let’s pool our knowledge to find great explanations for each important idea (in math, science, philosophy, etc.), whether or not there is equal value in the rest of the book or article in which each explanation is found.

Great explanations, in my meaning, have four traits:

A great explanation does more than report facts; it uses analogy and rhetoric and other tools to make readers feel the target idea in their bones.

A great explanation is not a single analogy nor a giant book. It is, roughly, between 2 and 100 pages in length.

A great explanation is comprehensible at best to a young teenager, or at least to a 75th percentile college graduate. (There may be no way to seriously explain string theory to an average 13-year-old.)

A great explanation is exciting to read.

By sharing great explanations we can more often experience that magical click.

List of Great Explanations

I’ve barely begun to assemble the list below. Please comment ...
Foundations of Inference
by amcknight — 2011-10-31T19:48:33.263Z

I've recently been getting into all of this wonderful Information Theory stuff and have come across a paper (thanks to John Salvatier) that was written by Kevin H. Knuth:

Foundations of Inference

The paper sets up some intuitive minimal axioms for quantifying power sets and then (seems to) use them to derive Bayesian probability theory, information gain, and Shannon Entropy. The paper also claims to use less assumptions than both Cox and Kolmogorov when choosing axioms. This seems like a significant foundation/unification. I'd like to hear whether others agree and what parts of the paper you think are the significant contributions.

If a 14 page paper is too long for you, I recommend skipping to the conclusion (starting at the bottom of page 12) where there is a nice picture representation of the axioms and a quick summary of what they imply.
Wiki Quote Attributions
by RobertLumley — 2011-10-31T18:40:41.441Z

After an interesting discussion the last time this topic came up, I wanted people's input on the best way to attribute a quote to the LessWrong Wiki. The passage is obviously based on Eliezer's work, but he himself didn't write the summary. From the quote logs, it was Z. M. Davis who originally wrote the passage. Below is the attribution as I currently have it. The issues with this are fairly obvious: The wiki can change. There's a legitimate argument that Eliezer really deserves the intellectual credit for this, even though they're not exactly his words. And is it more appropriate for the link to go to the wiki, which doesn't justify the words as Davis's, or to the quote logs, which do?

"The point of all this discussion of rationality is to actually achieve truer beliefs and more effective actions. It's not some arbitrary social fashion; there are actual criteria of success. It is for this reason that it is written that rationalists should win. If some particular ritual of cognition—even one that you have long cherished as "rational"—systematically gives poorer results relative to some alternative, it is not rational to cling to it. The rational algorithm is to do what works, to get the actual answer—in short, to win, whatever the method, whatever the means. If you can detect a systematic mistake in your thinking, then fix it; if you can see a better method, then adopt it.” – Z. M. Davis, “Rationalists Should Win”, on the LessWrong Wiki
Less Wrong Couchsurfing Network
by loxfordian — 2011-10-31T02:46:50.656Z

One of my favorite aspects of Less Wrong is that every time I go to a new city (Oxford, Boston, Philadelphia and New York soon!), I know there’s a group of people who will be happy to discuss rationality and welcome me into their community.

It would be really cool if more Less Wrongers could have these experiences by traveling cheaply from city to city, meeting up with other smart, interesting people to have fantastic conversations, go to meetups/conferences/summits in new cities, and make friends in real life!

Unfortunately, while traveling to different meetups (and conferences/summits) is intellectually and emotionally rewarding, hotels can be prohibitively expensive. In order to make traveling more affordable, the Less Wrong community could implement a system where community members can stay at each others houses (in guest rooms, on sofas, or on floors) for free/extremely affordable rates.

Benefits of this system:
1) The traveler gets a free/affordable place to stay.
2) The host gets guaranteed company and (hopefully) some great conversation.
3) Less Wrong community bonds will be strengthened through real life interactions between members.
4) The value of meetups, which largely derives from the chance to meet other LWers, will increase as the pool of people attending grows.
5) People can be friends in real life!
6) Implementing this system is super easy. We just add a google maps page to Less Wrong.

Logistics:
1) LW could create a google map where people interested in hosting put down a place marker in their general location (no need to list their actual address) and tag it with their username.
2) In their LW profiles, hosts could write a short description of what kind of accommodations they'll be providing (room/sofa/floor), what kind of guest they want to host (eg., male vs. female, people who are willing to talk a lot, etc.), how they want to be compensated by their traveler (e.g., conversation, a meal, a chore, a small monetary gift, etc.) and usernames of at least two other Less Wrong members who would be willing to serve as "references" to the host's non-creepiness.
3) Likewise, travelers should have a section in their LW profile that list at least two other Less Wrong members who are willing to serve as references as well as how they're willing to compensate their hosts.
4) A potential traveler would look at the map, find a suitable location, an...
Meetup : West LA Meetup 11-02-2011
by  — 2011-10-31T01:27:46.552Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup 11-02-2011

WHEN:
02 November 2011 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7pm - 9pm Wednesday, November 2nd.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar, located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters.

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Recommended Reading:

The theme this week is goals. To that end, I recommend people have a look at the posts in The Science of Winning at Life.

Whether you're a regular reader or totally new, here for the theoretical musings or the practical things, come by and say hello! The conversation is largely unstructured, and the people are awesome.

I will bring a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup 11-02-2011
[SEQ RERUN] Conjuring an Evolution to Serve You
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-31T01:18:17.035Z

Today's post, Conjuring An Evolution To Serve You was originally published on 19 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you take the hens who lay the most eggs in each generation, and breed from them, you should get hens who lay more and more eggs. Sounds logical, right? But this selection may actually favor the most dominant hen, that pecked its way to the top of the pecking order at the expense of other hens. Such breeding programs produce hens that must be housed in individual cages, or they will peck each other to death. Jeff Skilling of Enron fancied himself an evolution-conjurer - summoning the awesome power of evolution to work for him - and so, every year, every Enron employee's performance would be evaluated, and the bottom 10% would get fired, and the top performers would get huge raises and bonuses...

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 The Simple Math of Everything, 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.
Why would we think artists perform better on drugs ?
by kilobug — 2011-10-30T14:01:33.566Z

Introduction

It is common knowledge that many artists have used drugs (alcohol, opiates, cannabis, LSD, ...) and that this account for part of their creativity. This common knowledge is usually opposed to people advocating rationality in sentences like "but with only your rationality, we wouldn't have much art", "you need chaos to make art" or even "the best artists were that great because they were irrational".

Eliezer partly addressed the issue in the lawful intelligence Sequence. While this Sequence is very interesting, I feel it didn't completely address the issue (unlike most of the Sequences). My hypothesis is that it's mostly focused on what's important to building a Friendly AI (which is a worthy goal, this should not be taken as a criticism), not so much as explaining creativity in actual humans. So I'm writing an article with my current thoughts on the topic, and I would welcome any additional argument, hypothesis, research paper, ... that anyone from the LW community can point me to. This article is not supposed to come to any definitive conclusion, but to show my current state of thinking on that issue. I hope to both give and receive in writing it.

Reasons for which it could be an illusion

Availability bias

The first question to ask about "it is a common knowledge that many artists were using drugs" is : is this common knowledge true, or not, and if not, why do so many people believe something which is false ?

Availability bias comes will full power on this issue : when we hear that a given artist (musician, writer, painter, ...) was taking drugs, we add a "drug addict" tag to him. Or more accurately we create a link between the "drug addict" node and his node in our belief network. When asked about artists who did take drugs, we can easily state many names : for example Hemingway, Van Gogh, the Beatles. When asked about artists who didn't take drugs... well, we usually don't have "did not take drug" node in our belief networks, and no easy way to say that Asimov or Bach didn't take drugs.

Even when doing specific research, we can know with almost absolute certainty that Hemingway was drinking a lot of alcohol, but not so confidently that Asimov didn't. It's easier to be sure of the existence of something, than to be sure of its non-existence.

Reverse causality

The second question, if even after considering the affect of availability bias, it still...
[Request] Feedback on my Writing
by atucker — 2011-10-30T03:58:38.870Z

I've written some posts.

I'd like to get better at writing posts.

I still have some more material for posts.

I'd like to write it well.

So, would people be willing to critique my work so far?

Particularly helpful-awesome would be pointing out things I did well somewhere that I didn't do well somewhere else. Also nice would be pointing out what I did badly and well.

Crocker's Rules apply.

Miscellaneous:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/7ix/story_rejection/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/80t/thinking_in_bayes_light/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/64t/foma_beliefs_that_cause_themselves_to_be_true/

Consciousness:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/7pm/blindsight_and_consciousness/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/7yr/neural_correlates_of_conscious_access/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/81w/the_protagonist_problem/

Just do it:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/53e/just_try_it_quantity_trumps_quality/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/4up/dont_fear_failure/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/4ln/go_try_things/
[SEQ RERUN] The Simple Math of Everything
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-30T02:07:29.709Z

Today's post, The Simple Math of Everything was originally published on 17 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It is enormously advantageous to know the basic mathematical equations at the base of a field. Understanding a few simple equations of evolutionary biology, knowing how to use Bayes' Rule, and understanding the wave equation for sound in air are not enormously difficult challenges. However, if you know them, your own capabilities are greatly enhanced.

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 No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices, 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.
[LINK] Being proven wrong is like winning the lottery 
by Unnamed — 2011-10-29T22:40:12.609Z

Phil Birnbaum at Sabermetric Research writes about how people have things backwards; it's great to find out that you're wrong:

Let's suppose you open a restaurant, and you're very successful, and people like your food. You're very proud of being a great chef. Then, someone tells you, correctly, that one of your appetizers, one that you think is one of your best, is actually pretty awful. Your customers hate it.
Your first reaction might be to get defensive. But, again, you should be thrilled! Now you can fix that dish. Your food, your restaurant, your profit, and your reputation will all be better than before. It's almost the best thing that can happen to you. Being wrong is like winning the lottery!

...

I guess my overall point is that any online discussion, even between people who violently disagree with each other, should be a co-operative venture. One of you is wrong, and you're working together to find out who. And, we should keep in mind that most of the benefit goes to the person who was actually wrong in the first place.
When someone you respect, or someone who seems to be expert and knowledgeable, starts disagreeing with you, it's like you've stumbled upon a fistful of lottery tickets. Argue your position, yes, but don't get defensive, and keep an open mind. Sure, it might be that other guy who's wrong. But if you're really, really lucky, it'll be you.
[SEQ RERUN] No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-29T18:22:06.774Z

Today's post, No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices was originally published on 17 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Price's Equation describes quantitatively how the change in a average trait, in each generation, is equal to the covariance between that trait and fitness. Such covariance requires substantial variation in traits, substantial variation in fitness, and substantial correlation between the two - and then, to get large cumulative selection pressures, the correlation must have persisted over many generations with high-fidelity inheritance, continuing sources of new variation, and frequent birth of a significant fraction of the population. People think of "evolution" as something that automatically gets invoked where "reproduction" exists, but these other conditions may not be fulfilled - which is why corporations haven't evolved, and nanodevices probably won't.

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 Evolving to Extinction, 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.
Whole Brain Emulation: Looking At Progress On C. elgans
by jefftk — 2011-10-29T15:21:09.499Z

Being able to treat the pattern of someone's brain as software to be run on a computer, perhaps in parallel or at a large speedup, would have a huge impact, both socially and economically. Robin Hanson thinks it is the most likely route to artificial intelligence. Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom of the Future Of Humanity Institute created out a roadmap for whole brain emulation in 2008, which covers a huge amount of research in this direction, combined with some scale analysis of the difficulty of various tasks.

Because the human brain is so large, and we are so far from having the technical capacity to scan or emulate it, it's difficult to evaluate progress. Some other organisms, however, have much smaller brains: the nematode C. elegans has only 302 cells in its entire nervous system. It is extremely well studied and well understood, having gone through heavy use as a research animal for decades. Since at least 1986 we've known the full neural connectivity of C. elegans, something that would take decades and a huge amount of work to get for humans. At 302 neurons, simulation has been within our computational capacity for at least that long. With 25 years to work on it, shouldn't we be able to 'upload' a nematode by now?

Reading through the research, there's been some work on modeling subsystems and components, but I only find three projects that have tried to integrate this research into a complete simulation: the University of Oregon's NemaSys (~1997), the Perfect C. elegans Project (~1998), and Hiroshima University's Virtual C. Elegans project (~2004). The second two don't have web pages, but they did put out papers: [1], [2], [3].

Another way to look at this is to list the researchers who seem to have been involved with C. elegans emulation. I find:

Hiroaki Kitano, Sony [1]

Shugo Hamahashi, Keio University [1]

Sean Luke, University of Maryland [1]

Michiyo Suzuki, Hiroshima University [2][3]

Takeshi Goto, Hiroshima Univeristy [2]

Toshio Tsuji, Hiroshima Univeristy [2][3]

Hisao Ohtake, Hiroshima Univeristy [2]

Thomas Ferree, University of Oregon [4][5][6][7]

Ben Marcotte, University of Oregon [5]

Sean Lockery, University of Oregon [4][5][6][7]

Thomas Morse, University of Oregon [4]

Stephen Wicks, University of British Columbia [8]

Chris Roehrig, University of British Columbia [8]

Catharine Rankin,

...
Help needed: German translation of the Singularity FAQ
by cadac — 2011-10-28T21:06:19.649Z

At lukeprog's suggestion, I translated the Singularity FAQ into German. Unfortunately, Tripitaka, who volunteered to proofread, doesn't seem to have read my messages. As the translation is far from perfect, I ask German-speaking users to help with finalizing the text. Also, I have no objections if you'd like to upvote this post (and the comments of anyone who participates) as a way of incentivizing this kind of work.
The whole text should be proofread at least once, but you could help a great deal just by going over the highlighted sections. It helps if you are knowledgeable on the subject. The document is on Google docs, editable by anyone. I have made a backup and I think you can revert changes Wikipedia-style, so edit away!
Here it is.
Side-by-side version (comment only, changes should be made in the other version).
To-do-list.

Edit: Fixed links.
Whether to care about the desires of the dead
by KatjaGrace — 2011-10-28T19:15:17.000Z

Many people claim that fulfilling a person’s desires after they are dead cannot benefit that person. Not just that it isn’t strategic to honour such desires, but that such desires can’t be fulfilled. Either it is not really possible for a person to desire for things that won’t happen until after they are dead, or it is somehow not possible for such a desire to be fulfilled.

It seems possible (i.e. consistent) to have a concept of preference fulfilment that requires the person to be alive at the time the preference is fulfilled, and similarly possible to have one that doesn’t require this. Which is the ‘true’ concept seems a poorly defined question. Which concept you choose matters though. The concept is intended to fit into your ethical stance, or your preferences, so presumably one concept better fits what should really happen, or what you really want. Here are some considerations for working out which concept you want to use:

The analogy with space

If you can’t have your preferences fulfilled in parts of time where you don’t exist (after you die, or before you are born), can you have preferences fulfilled in parts of space where you don’t exist? Can I prefer for my fridge to contain milk even before I open the door? Can I prefer my brother to be alive even though we don’t cohabit the same spatial region? If so, what’s the relevant difference between time and space? You can bite the bullet and refuse to acknowledge preferences over anything other than a person’s own mental states. And you could do that without straying too far from your intuitions about what you do prefer by noting that a lot of things that are spatially distant from you will eventually send some kind of signal to you, and claim it is those signals you care about. You are still then committed to indifference about for instance what kinds of assault go on behind the closed doors of people you love, as long as you are never informed about them.

The vagueness of personal identity

Another implication of not being able to value things that don’t overlap with you in time is that what you can or can’t value depends on what counts as ‘you’. And what counts as ‘you’ is pretty vaguely defined usually. Some people think ‘you’ are the bunch of physical processes we call ‘you...