trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Significance of Compression Rate Method
by Daniel_Burfoot — 2010-05-30T03:50:25.401Z

Summary: The significance of the Compression Rate Method (CRM) is that it justifies a form of empirical inquiry into aspects of reality that have previously resisted systematic interrogation. Some examples of potential investigations are described. A key hypothesis is discussed, and the link between empirical science and lossless data compression is emphasized.

In my previous post, the protagonist Sophie developed a modified version of the scientific method. It consists of the following steps:

Obtain a large database T related to a phenomenon of interest.

Develop a theory of the phenomenon, and instantiate the theory as a compression program.

Test the theory by invoking the compressor on T and measuring the net codelength achieved (encoded data plus length of compressor).

Given two rival theories of the phenomenon, prefer the one that achieves a shorter net codelength.

This modified version preserves two of the essential attributes of the traditional method. First, it employs theoretical speculation, but guides and constrains that speculation using empirical observations. Second, it permits Strong Inference by allowing the field to make decisive comparisons between rival theories.

The key difference between the CRM and the traditional method is that the former does not depend on the use of controlled experiments. For that reason, it justifies inquiries into aspects of empirical reality that have never before been systematically interrogated. The kind of scientific theories that are tested by the CRM depend on the type of measurements in the database target T. If T contains measurements related to physical experiments, the theories of physics will be necessary to compress it. Other types of data lead to other types of science. Consider the following examples:

Set up a camera next to a highway, and record the stream of passing cars. To compress the resulting data, you will need to develop a computational understanding of the visual appearance of automobiles. You will need theories of hubcaps, windshields, license plates, car categories, and so on.

Position some microphones in the tops of trees and start recording. A major source of variation in the resulting data will be bird vocalization. To compress the data, you will need to find ways to differentiate between bird songs and bird calls, tools to identify species-characteristic vocalizations, and maps s

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Composting fruitless debates
by Academian — 2010-05-29T16:59:20.996Z

Why do long, uninspiring, and seemingly-childish debates sometimes emerge even in a community like LessWrong? And what can we do about them? The key is to recognize the potentially harsh environmental effect of an audience, and use a dying debate to fertilize a more sheltered private conversation.

Let me start by saying that LessWrong generally makes excellent use of public debate, and naming two things I don't believe are solely responsible for fruitless debates here: rationalization biases and self-preservation1. When your super-important debate grows into a thorny mess, the usual aversion to say various forms of "just drop it" are about signaling that:

you're not skilled enough to continue arguing, so you'd look bad,

the other person isn't worth your time, in which case they'd be publicly insulted and compelled to continue with at least one self-defense comment, extending the conflict, or

the other person is right, which would risk spreading what appear to be falsehoods.

"Stop the wrongness", the last concern, is in my opinion the most perisistent here simply because it is the least misguided. It's practically the name of the site. Many LessWrong users seem to share a sincere, often altruistic desire to share truth, abolish falsehood, and overcome conflict. Public debate is a selection mechanism generally used very effectively here to grow and harvest good arguments. But we can still benefit from diffusing the weed-like quibbling that sometimes shows up in the harsh environment of debate, and for that you need a response that avoids the problematic signals above. So try this:

"I'm worried that debating this more here won't be useful to others, but I want to keep working on it with you, so I'm responding via private message. Let's post on it again once we either agree or better organize our disagreement. Hopefully at least one of us will learn and refine a new argument from this conversation."

Take a moment to see how this carefully avoids (1)-(3). Then you can try changing the tone of the private message to be more collaborative than competitive; the change in medium will help mark the transition. This way you'll each be less afraid of having been wrong and more concerned with learning to be right, so rationalization bias will also be diminished. As well,...
Aspergers Survey Re-results
by Roko — 2010-05-29T16:58:34.925Z

Followup to: Aspergers Poll results

Since my little survey about the degree to which the Less Wrong community has a preponderance of people with systematizing personality types, I've been collecting responses only from those people who considered taking the survey after looking at the original post, but didn't, in order to combat nonresponse bias.

82 people responded to the initial survey, and another 186 responded after the request for non-responders to respond. In the initial survey, 26% of responders scored 32+ (which is considered to be a "high" score, and out of a group of Cambridge mathematics students, 7 out of 11 who scored over 32 were said to fit the full diagnostic criteria for aspergers syndrome after being interviewed).

In the combined survey of 82 initial responders and 186 "second"-responders, this increased to 28%. In the original survey, 5% of respondents said they had already been diagnosed with aspergers syndrome, and in the combined survey this increased to 7.5%.

Overall, this indicates that response bias is probably not significantly skewing our picture of the LW audience, though, as always, it is possible that there is a more sophisticated bias at work and that these 268 people are not representative of LW.
Thinking makes for a better chase
by KatjaGrace — 2010-05-28T21:02:17.000Z

Great post by Robin on reading:

Hunting has two main modes: searching and chasing. With searching you look for something to chase. With chasing, in contrast, you have a focus of attention that drives your actions…

while reading non-fiction, most folks are in searching mode. Most would be more intellectually productive, however, in chasing mode. It helps to have in mind a question, puzzle, or problem…

In searching mode, readers tend to be less critical…keep reading along even if they aren’t quite sure what the point is… more likely to talk about whether they enjoyed the read…In chasing mode, you continually ask yourself whether what you are reading is relevant for your quest…

Also, search-readers often don’t have a good mental place to put each thing they learn…Chasers, in contrast, always have specific mental places they are trying to fill…

…People often hope that search-mode reading will inspire them to new thoughts, and are disappointed to find that it doesn’t. Chase-mode reading, in contrast, requires constant thinking…

I’ve noticed this most strongly before in the context of fleeing more than chasing. That is, genuine near mode fear helps a lot. If you really want to find out if that spider was poisonous, you probably have a wonderfully efficient intuitive research strategy. This may be useful for researching more abstract potentially frightening topics such as societal catastrophe, if you can drum up some proper fear.

I think Robin’s dichotomy goes a long way to explaining why reading is disappointing relative to thinking. In thinking it’s much easier to chase. Refraining from following a line of inquiry, and filling in gaps, and jumping to conclusions, can be harder than doing these things. There is usually some interesting path open to chase down. You don’t have to page through all your memories and concepts to catch a glimpse of your prey.

Reading on the other hand is usually designed for search, with chase-friendly features added sometimes as an afterthought. If you want to chase something, you basically face the tedium of skimming lots of material without understanding. What would books look like if they were designed for a chase? For instance:

They would have good tools for finding narrow topics within book (very thorough indexes or keys)

Arranged for easy conceptual narrowing to the area of int

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This is your brain on ambiguity
by Morendil — 2010-05-28T15:47:55.075Z

Let's look at one more optical illusion which reveals important features of how our brains perform inference, and suggests how better awareness of these processes of inference can lead to improved thinking, including in our daily lives. This time around the theme is ambiguity.

The spinning dancer

The spinning dancer is a remarkable piece of work. Do you see the dancer pivoting clockwise on her left foot? Or counterclockwise on her right? If you're at all like me, you're now seeing one or the other - but if you look at the picture for some time, you'll suddenly see the dancer spinning in the opposite direction. It may help (for reasons I'll explain below) to focus on the pivot foot or thereabouts, mentally blocking out the rest of the image. Can you pick a direction on purpose? (Part of what makes investigating the human mind fascinating hobby is finding out what others' brains can do that mine can't, and vice versa. Initially I had no control at all, but interestingly, over the course of writing this post I got much better.)

Focusing on the foot helps explain how the illusion works: the image provides no clue to distinguish between "toes front" or "heel front", it's all a dark shadow with no depth information. What we see is a foot-shaped cutout growing and shrinking due to a foreshortening effect, alternately to the left and right. This information is perfectly compatible with either direction of spin. (The rest of the image is more of the same; the entire image is functionally equivalent to a dark bar growing and shrinking in alternate directions.) The interesting question is then, why does our consciousness insist on reporting that we're seeing a perfectly unambiguous direction of motion? We're not seeing an ambiguous dancer: we're seeing one that is clearly spinning one way - until the "flip" happens, and we see her just as clearly spinning the other way.

Ambiguity, uncertainty and inference

This is reminiscent of the way our explicit models of the world have trouble dealing with quantum uncertainty - our intuition is that things must happen one way or the other, "as if the half-silvered mirror did different things on different occasions", as if the dancer actually was spinning one way then another. In the latter case at least, sober reflection tells us this can only be in the map, not in the territory - the animated GIF isn't being changed right under ou...
Beyond Optimization by Proxy
by Alexandros — 2010-05-27T13:16:45.798Z

Followup to: Is Google Paperclipping the Web? The Perils of Optimization by Proxy in Social Systems

tl;dr: In this installment, we look at methods of avoiding the problems related to optimization by proxy. Many potential solutions cluster around two broad categories: Better Measures, and Human Discretion. Distribution of decisions to the local level is a solution that seems more promising and is examined in more depth.

In the previous article I had promised that if there was a good reception, I would post a follow-up article to discuss ways of getting around the problem. That article made it to the front page, so here are my thoughts on how to circumvent Optimization by Proxy (OBP). Given that the previous article was belabored over at least a year and a half, this one will be decidedly less solid, more like a structured brainstorm in which you are invited to participate.

In the comments of the previous article I was pointed to The Importance of Goodhart's Law, a great article, which includes a section on mitigation. Examining those solutions in the context of OBP seems like a good skeleton to build on.

The first solution class is 'Hansonian Cynicism'. In combination with awareness of the pattern, pointing out that various processes (such as organizations) are not actually optimizing around their stated goal, but some proxy, creates cognitive dissonance for the thinking person. This sounds more like a motivation to find a solution than a solution itself. At best, knowing what goes wrong, you can use the process in a way that is informed by its weaknesses. Handling with care may mitigate some symptoms, but it doesn't make the problems go away.

The second solution class mentioned is 'Better Measures'. That is indeed what is usually attempted. The 'purist' approach to this is to work hard on finding a computable definition of the target quality. I cannot exclude the possibility of cases where this is feasible no immediate examples come to mind. The proxies that I have in mind are deeply human (quality, relevance, long-term growth) and boil down to figuring out what is 'good', thus, computing them is no small matter. Coherent Extrapolated Volition is the extreme end of this approach, boiling a few oceans in the process, certainly not immediately applicable.

A pragmatic approach to Better Measures is to simply monitor better, making the proxy more complex and therefore...
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread
by Unnamed — 2010-05-27T00:10:57.279Z

Update: Please post new comments in the latest HPMOR discussion thread, now in the discussion section, since this thread and its first few successors have grown unwieldy (direct links: two, three, four, five, six, seven).

As many of you already know, Eliezer Yudkowsky is writing a Harry Potter fanfic, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, starring a rationalist Harry Potter with ambitions to transform the world by bringing the rationalist/scientific method to magic. But of course a more powerful Potter requires a more challenging wizarding world, and ... well, you can see for yourself how that plays out.
This thread is for discussion of anything related to the story, including insights, confusions, questions, speculation, jokes, discussion of rationality issues raised in the story, attempts at fanfic spinoffs, comments about related fanfictions, and meta-discussion about the fact that Eliezer Yudkowsky is writing Harry Potter fan-fiction (presumably as a means of raising the sanity waterline).
I'm making this a top-level post to create a centralized location for that discussion, since I'm guessing people have things to say (I know I do) and there isn't a great place to put them. fanfiction.net has a different set of users (plus no threading or karma), the main discussion here has been in an old open thread which has petered out and is already near the unwieldy size that would call for a top-level post, and we've had discussions come up in a few other places. So let's have that discussion here.
Comments here will obviously be full of spoilers, and I don't think it makes sense to rot13 the whole thread, so consider this a spoiler warning: this thread contains unrot13'd spoilers for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality up to the current chapter and for the original Harry Potter series. Please continue to use rot13 for spoilers to other works of fiction, or if you have insider knowledge of future chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
A suggestion: mention at the top of your comment which chapter you're commenting on, or what chapter you're up to, so that people can understand the context of your comment even after more chapters have been posted. This can also help people avoid reading spoilers for a new chapter before they realize that there is a new chapter.
Abnormal Cryonics
by Will_Newsome — 2010-05-26T07:43:49.650Z

Written with much help from Nick Tarleton and Kaj Sotala, in response to various themes here, here, and throughout Less Wrong; but a casual mention here1 inspired me to finally write this post. (Note: The first, second, and third footnotes of this post are abnormally important.)

It seems to have become a trend on Less Wrong for people to include belief in the rationality of signing up for cryonics as an obviously correct position2 to take, much the same as thinking the theories of continental drift or anthropogenic global warming are almost certainly correct. I find this mildly disturbing on two counts. First, it really isn't all that obvious that signing up for cryonics is the best use of one's time and money. And second, regardless of whether cryonics turns out to have been the best choice all along, ostracizing those who do not find signing up for cryonics obvious is not at all helpful for people struggling to become more rational. Below I try to provide some decent arguments against signing up for cryonics — not with the aim of showing that signing up for cryonics is wrong, but simply to show that it is not obviously correct, and why it shouldn't be treated as such. (Please note that I am not arguing against the feasibility of cryopreservation!)

Signing up for cryonics is not obviously correct, and especially cannot obviously be expected to have been correct upon due reflection (even if it was the best decision given the uncertainty at the time):

Weird stuff and ontological confusion: quantum immortality, anthropic reasoning, measure across multiverses, UDTesque 'decision theoretic measure' or 'probability as preference', et cetera, are not well-understood enough to make claims about whether or not you should even care about the number of 'yous' that are living or dying, whatever 'you' think you are.3 This does not make cryonics a bad idea — it may be the correct decision under uncertainty — but it should lessen anyone's confidence that the balance of reasons ultimately weighs overwhelmingly in favor of cryonics.

If people believe that a technological singularity is imminent, then they may believe that it will happen before they have a significant chance of dying: either everyone (including cryonauts) dies anyway when an unFriendly artificial intelligence goes FOOM, or a Friendly artificial intelligence is created and death is solved (or

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On Enjoying Disagreeable Company
by Alicorn — 2010-05-26T01:47:24.490Z

Bears resemblance to: Ureshiku Naritai; A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations In Favor of Niceness

In this comment, I mentioned that I can like people on purpose. At the behest of the recipients of my presentation on how to do so, I've written up in post form my tips on the subject. I have not included, and will not include, any specific real-life examples (everything below is made up), because I am concerned that people who I like on purpose will be upset to find that this is the case, in spite of the fact that the liking (once generated) is entirely sincere. If anyone would find more concreteness helpful, I'm willing to come up with brief fictional stories to cover this gap.

It is useful to like people. For one thing, if you have to be around them, liking them makes this far more pleasant. For another, well, they can often tell, and if they know you to like them this will often be instrumentally useful to you. As such, it's very handy to be able to like someone you want to like deliberately when it doesn't happen by itself. There are three basic components to liking someone on purpose. First, reduce salience of the disliked traits by separating, recasting, and downplaying them; second, increase salience of positive traits by identifying, investigating, and admiring them; and third, behave in such a way as to reap consistency effects.

1. Reduce salience of disliked traits.

Identify the traits you don't like about the person - this might be a handful of irksome habits or a list as long as your arm of deep character flaws, but make sure you know what they are. Notice that however immense a set of characteristics you generate, it's not the entire person. ("Everything!!!!" is not an acceptable entry in this step.) No person can be fully described by a list of things you have noticed about them. Note, accordingly, that you dislike these things about the person; but that this does not logically entail disliking the person. Put the list in a "box" - separate from how you will eventually evaluate the person.

When the person exhibits a characteristic, habit, or tendency you have on your list (or, probably just to aggravate you, turns out to have a new one), be on your guard immediately for the fundamental attribution error. It is especially insidious when you already dislike the person, and...
Shock Level 5: Big Worlds and Modal Realism
by Roko — 2010-05-25T23:19:44.391Z

In recent times, science and philosophy have uncovered evidence that there is something very seriously weird about the universe and our place in it. We used to think that there was one planet earth, inside a universe that is very large (at least 10^26 meters in diameter) but that the reachable universe (future light-cone in the terminology of special relativity, or causal future in the terminology of GR) was finite. Anything outside the reachable universe is irrelevant, since we can't affect it.

However, cosmologists went on to study the process that probably created the universe, known as inflation. Inflation solves a number of mysteries in cosmology, including the flatness problem. The process of inflation seems to create an infinite number of mini-universes, or "inflationary bubbles" - this is known as chaotic inflation theory. The physical parameters and initial conditions of these bubbles are determined randomly, so every possible set of particle masses, force strengths, etc is realized. To quote from this piece by Alan Guth:

The role of eternal inflation in scientific thinking, however, was greatly boosted by the realization that string theory has no preferred vacuum, but instead has perhaps 101000 metastable vacuum-like states. Eternal inflation then has potentially a direct impact on fundamental physics, since it can provide a mechanism to populate the landscape of string vacua. While all of these vacua are described by the same fundamental string theory, the apparent laws of physics at low energies could differ dramatically from one vacuum to another.

To top this off, the dominant theory about the spacetime manifold we live on is that it is infinitely large in all directions. If you look at this picture of a reconstruction of the large-scale structure of the universe, the idea that we are living in something like an infinite volume with a finite speed-limit and a uniform random distribution of matter and energy that clumps over time becomes plausible.

A final step along this line of increasingly large Big Worlds is modal realism, the idea that all possible worlds exist. Max Tegmark has formalized this as the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis: All structures that exist mathematically also exist physically.

If any of these theories turn out to be true, then we are living in a Big World, a cosmology where every finite collection of atoms, ...