trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Measuring aversion and habit strength
by Academian — 2011-05-27T01:05:25.387Z

tl;dr: Strong aversions don't always originate from strong feelings (see Ugh fields). It's useful to measure the strength of an aversion by how effectively it averts your thoughts/behavior instead of how saliently you can feel it, or even remember feeling it. If there's a low cost behaviour that you somehow always "end up not doing", there's evidence for a mechanism steering you away from it. Try to find it, and defy it.

Story

Right after writing Break your habits: be more empirical, someone asked me to a live music show, and I declined, with some explanation about being busy. This felt a little forced, and I realized: I always decline live music shows. This counts as a habit. The interesting thing was that I declined them for many different, unrelated reasons. This was evidence for something more systemic, because it would be a coincidence if random, unrelated reasons always came up to prevent me from attending live music.

So I asked myself if I really disliked live music. Emotions returned: "Not really. It's not awesome, but it's not terrible." Now, there was a time when I would have stopped thinking there. My time is valuable, and mediocrity is enough to stop me from doing anything, right?

But wait... is it? Is it enough to always stop me? If it was only mediocre, and not terrible, than surely on one of the many occasions I could have seen live music, there would have been sufficient justification to go... a particularly good composer, a particularly interesting group of people go with, a particular need to get out and do something different... but no, somehow I always didn't go.

And that's when I realized I probably had an aversion to live music: some brain mechanism that consistently and effectively averted me from seeing it, and in this case, not something I could feel. In particular, it wasn't accompanied by any sense of "Ugh". So since I couldn't feel the aversion, I took an outside view to ask what could have caused it, if it indeed exists...

My first guess was the fact that I used to perform live music a lot, until I suffered a hand injury. Huh! That could totally have been emotional at some point.

Could that be the cause of my current aversion? I instrospected on how I might have felt at live music show shortly after my injury, and the answer was "excluded". I felt disappointed that I wasn't, and couldn't be, one of the performers...
Bias in capital project decision making
by jsalvatier — 2011-05-26T18:06:52.947Z

This is a story about an odd fact about capital project decision making in engineering I noticed and how it might be related to cognitive biases

Background

Although I don't work in the field, I was trained as a chemical engineer. A chemical engineer's job is a little different than you might imagine. A chemical engineers primary job isn't to design chemical processes, they actually do relatively little chemistry, but to build, optimize and maintain industrial plants that produce chemicals (petrol products, cleaners, paint etc.) and materials that are produced similarly to chemicals (wood pulp, composite materials etc.). Questions similar to 'how fast should we mix the fluid in this reactor to make it most efficient?' or 'how can we reuse the waste heat from this process?' are much more common than questions similar to 'how can we create compound A from compound B?'.

Chemical engineers often have to make decisions about what capital improvement projects the firm will undertake, so they must answer questions such as 'install cheap pumps that wear out quickly or the expensive ones that don't?', 'what ethanol producing bacteria is most efficient for producing ethanol?' and 'is it worth it to install a heat exchanger to recover the waste head from this process or not?'. The standard technical way of judging the profitability of an option or project is to calculate the Net Present Value (NPV) of the expected cash flows to and from the firm for each different option (installing pump type A or B, using bacteria A, B or C, installing or not installing a heat exchanger). The option with the highest NPV is the most profitable. Calculating the NPV discounts future expected cash flows for the fact that they occur in the future and you have other productive things you could do with money, such as earning interest with it.

Oddly high discount rates

When I was in school, I noticed an odd thing: the interest rates that people used to evaluate projects on this basis, called the Minimum Acceptable Rate of Return (MARR), were often rather high, 15-50%/year. I saw this in textbook discussions and had it confirmed by several working engineers and engineering managers. My engineering economics teacher mentioned that firms often require two year "pay back periods" for projects; that annualizes to a 50% inter

...
Seeing Red: Dissolving Mary's Room and Qualia
by orthonormal — 2011-05-26T17:47:55.751Z

Essential Background: Dissolving the Question

How could we fully explain the difference between red and green to a colorblind person?

Well, we could of course draw the analogy between colors of the spectrum and tones of sound; have them learn which objects are typically green and which are typically red (or better yet, give them a video camera with a red filter to look through); explain many of the political, cultural and emotional associations of red and green, and so forth... but it seems that the actual difference between our experience of redness and our experience of greenness is something much harder to convey. If we focus in on that aspect of experience, we end up with the classic philosophical concept of qualia, and the famous thought experiment known as Mary’s Room1.
Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who has been colorblind from birth (due to a retina problem; her visual cortex would work normally if it were given the color input). She’s an expert on the electromagnetic spectrum, optics, and the science of color vision. We can postulate, since this is a thought experiment, that she knows and fully understands every physical fact involved in color vision; she knows precisely what happens, on various levels, when the human eye sees red (and the optic nerve transmits particular types of signals, and the visual cortex processes these signals, etc).
One day, Mary gets an operation that fixes her retinas, so that she finally sees in color for the first time. And when she wakes up, she looks at an apple and exclaims, "Oh! So that's what red actually looks like."2

Now, this exclamation poses a challenge to any physical reductionist account of subjective experience. For if the qualia of seeing red could be reduced to a collection of basic facts about the physical world, then Mary would have learned those facts earlier and wouldn't learn anything extra now– but of course it seems that she really does learn something when she sees red for the first time. This is not merely the god-of-the-gaps argument that we haven't yet found a full reductionist explanation of subjective experience, but an intuitive proof that no such explanation would be complete.

The argument in academic philosophy over Mary's Room remains unsettled to this day (though it has an interesting history, including a change of mind on the part of its originator). If we ignore the top...
[SEQ RERUN] Inductive Bias
by badger — 2011-05-26T13:20:46.506Z

Today's post, Inductive Bias was originally published on April 8, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

Inductive bias is a systematic direction in belief revisions. The same observations could be evidence for or against a belief, depending on your prior. Inductive biases are more or less correct depending on how well they correspond with reality, so "bias" might not be the best description.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments of the original post).
This post is part of a series rerunning Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts so those interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Debiasing as Non-Self-Destruction, 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, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki, or creating exercises. Go here for more details, or to discuss the Sequence Reruns.
Freedom From Choice: Should we surrender our freedom to an external agent? How much?
by Raw_Power — 2011-05-26T12:11:52.796Z

This article explores the following topic: "When we are presented with too many choices, we can get paralized, and do nothing at all, or follow harmful heuristics, such as the path of least difficulty, or the path of least risk. Should we surrender that choice to external agents, so that among the choices that remain it is easier to determine a "best" choice? But which agents should we choose, and how much of our freedom should we surrender to them? Would a general AI be able to play this role for all of humanity? Given the inevitablity of the Singularity, can this even be avoided? What possibilities does this open? Is it a desirable outcome? We might end up becoming eternal minors. Literally, if immortality is reached."

Sometimes life can feel like a wide open quicksand box: you have so many choices before you, calculating the optimal choice is nigh-impossible. The more options you have, the harder it is to make a decision. To employ a visual metaphor, there is no greater freedom of movement than floating in an empty void Yet there's nowhere to go from there, and all choices are meaningless. Drawing a floor, a horizon, allows you to move along it... but you have sacrificed a degree of freedom.

Life choices present you with a bit of a traveling salesman's dilemma. You may use some heuristic or another, but since heuristics by definition don't guarantee the optimum result, you still have to choose between heuristics, and consistently use the same heuristic. However, the more restrictions you place on your journey, the easier it is to discriminate between routes, and come out of it with the impression of having made the right choice, rather than lingering doubt that plagues you ever time your path becomes dangerously steep, or crowded to a crawl, where you tell yourself "I really shouldn't have taken that right turn at Albuquerque. Or should I have? Either way, there's no way for me to have known. But there's no way I can climb this road. I have ruined my life. But right now there's nowhere to go but on. There is no hope. There is no respite. There is only car."

Hence, to make your choice in the crossroads of life, which can look less like the intersection of two curves and more like a point connecting an infinity of hyperplanes, you might be tempted to let other people, or other... things, outside of yourself, make the choices for you, just the...
Edinburgh LW meetup, Saturday May 28, 2pm
by sark — 2011-05-26T11:11:37.524Z

Location: Delhi Cafe, 67 Nicolson Street

Map: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?ie=UTF8&t=h&cid=1874860554950886070

I will be there with the Oxford Book of Aphorisms (let me know if you object to this)

Apologies for the fact that there was no meetup last week, some coordination failure on our part.
The cost of universal cryonics
by The Dao of Bayes — 2011-05-26T02:33:58.215Z

INTRODUCTION
I recently got sparked by both Eliezer's post on Cryonics(http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/) and lsparrish's post on the economies of scale(http://lesswrong.com/lw/2f5/cryonics_wants_to_be_big/) that go in to cryonics, to do some actual research. Unfortunately, while both authors are happy to assert that there are "economies of scale" at work, there doesn't seem to actually be any published research on the matter. If I happen to be wrong, and someone else has more accurate numbers, I'll be pleasantly surprised to see myself corrected :)

Alcor Costs as of 1990 (http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CostOfCryonicsTables.txt) seems like a reasonably reliable source of information. I'll be using them primarily because they were the only institute I could find that actually provides a break-down of their costs. The accompany article(http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CostOfCryonics.html) suggests that the labor rates and equipment markups are actually excessively optimistic, but it gives a simple cost of $18,908.76 for neurosuspension (not whole body). Maintenance costs are given as $66.08 annually, which would require a $6600 investment to yield suitable interest. Call it $25K total.
Now, figuring out how economies of scale will affect this is tricky. I'll go ahead and run two estimates, but they're both reasonably crude. I'm trying to be optimistic in my math, because my starting premise is "cryonics is not financially viable, even with economies of scale", and I don't want my numbers to favour my starting hypothesis. It's also worth noting that I am assuming that the major cryonics facilities are already taking advantage of some economies of scale: it is quite true that one can get a 90% discount on liquid nitrogen, if you start at the price that someone would pay for a liter for personal usage; it is far less likely that a business that already dropped it's prices from $0.50/L to $0.13/L [1] can still claim a 90% savings by sufficient economies of scale.
----
METHOD 1
The actual cost of the chemicals and equipment won't scale dramatically - you can't get a 90% discount just because you're huge, unless the company is making a 10x profit off the item normally. A 50% reduction due to bulk savings is therefor a reasonably optimistic assumption.
Transportation is going to remain an issue, although certainly as this becomes more "main stream", you coul...
Dominus' Razor
by badger — 2011-05-26T01:05:49.558Z

You are probably familiar with Hanlon’s Razor, the adage that you should never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity. In Bayesian terms, stupidity is sufficiently abundant that even fairly strong evidence of harmful intent can’t overcome the base rate. However, there is something of a converse, which to my knowledge doesn’t have an eponymous name. In honor of a recent post by Mark Dominus, I propose Dominus’ Razor: Never attribute to complete stupidity what can adequately be explained by ordinary stupidity and a good reason.

Dominus, well-known as a Perl programmer, found that astonishingly bad code looks better (if still bad) after hearing the reasons for its development. For instance, one program passed data between functions by writing it to a temporary file, only to read it back again. It turns out the programmer did this for debugging purposes, an admirable goal, even if done in non-standard ways.

The Razor is one more explanation for the frequent failure of other-optimization. People and institutions usually have some reason for doing what they do, even if they’ve since forgotten or never knew in the first place. “Evolution is cleverer than you are” (Orgel’s Second Rule) and “Free markets are cleverer than you are” are two related rules of thumb. Something that looks obviously stupid was probably implemented to meet some non-obvious need or constraint.

In the end, this is another way of saying to not expect short inferential distances. Based on personal observation, this community does a good job anticipating inferential jumps when playing the role of the sender, but not quite as well when acting as the receiver. Even if someone is wrong, be careful not to dismiss them entirely.
Torture Simulated with Flipbooks
by Amanojack — 2011-05-26T01:00:12.649Z

What if the brain of the person you most care about were scanned and the entirety of that person's mind and utility function at this moment were printed out on paper, and then several more "clock ticks" of their mind as its states changed exactly as they would if the person were being horribly tortured were printed out as well, into a gigantic book? And then the book were flipped through, over and over again. Fl-l-l-l-liiiiip! Fl-l-l-l-liiiiip!

Would this count as simulated torture? If so, would you care about stopping it, or is it different from computer-simulated torture?
Houston Hackerspace Meetup: Sunday May 29, 5:00PM
by Cog — 2011-05-26T00:08:50.702Z

Sunday May 29, 5:00PM

TX/RX Hackerspace

2010 Commerce St

Houston, TX 77002

Another meeting at the TX/RX hackerspace will happen on Sunday, May 29th at 5PM. Since we had no attendance last week,it will again be a meet and greet and planning for future activities. Pizza can and will be ordered if people show up.

I understand many of the people who have expressed interest in a Houston meet up find this to be an inconvenient time. Unfortunately, my Saturday and early Sunday have been consumed by other plans this week. If this is a bad time for you, I plan to have a meetup the Saturday after next in the early afternoon. If that is usually more convenient for you, let me know, and I can decide how to structure future scheduling.

Directions

A pictoral view

This is the set of buildings that the hackerspace is in. It's difficult to see our front from this angle - unfortunately google maps decided to map everything but our little section of commerce street. It's near where the white truck and red motorcycle are. Currently, there is an old military vehicle and generator in front.

And this is the empty lot that you can park in .

For more reference:

http://maps.google.com/maps?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=2010+Commerce+St.+Houston,+Tx+77002&oe=utf-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x8640bed8ed95625d:0x4c9af214d2032035,2010+Commerce+St,+Houston,+TX+77002&gl=us&ei=C9LRTYHvE8fL0QGu8OjlCw&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBkQ8gEwAA
Link: If you don't already read Bad Science
by Manfred — 2011-05-25T22:28:59.388Z

So there's this blog called Bad Science, consisting mostly of the articles that medical doctor Ben Goldacre writes for the Guardian. It's about pseudoscience, medicine and medical research. And also awesome.

The recent article was a wonderful bit of emotional whiplash, and is about as subject I think is useful to keep in mind when contemplating research. But really, I recommend reading everything.

http://www.badscience.net/2011/05/existential-angst-about-the-bigger-picture/

Also, the second-most-recent article, which should appeal to LW-types:

http://www.badscience.net/2011/05/we-should-so-blatantly-do-more-randomised-trials-on-policy/
Peter Thiel announces the 20 talented people he will pay to drop out of college to pursue innovative scientific and technical projects
by InquilineKea — 2011-05-25T20:08:55.418Z

http://thielfoundation.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15&Itemid=19

Thoughts?

A lot of Thiel's beliefs are in line with those of a significant portion of the LessWrong community, so I trust his judgment more than I trust that of most.
Strategic Reliablism
by badger — 2011-05-25T17:33:03.814Z

Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment by Michael Bishop and J.D. Trout

Ch 1. Laying Our Cards on the Table

Epistemology as a discipline needs to start offering practical advice for living. Defective epistemologies can compromise one's ability to act in all areas, but there is little social condemnation of weak reasoning. Prescriptive epistemology might be called "critical thinking", but this field is divorced from contemporary epistemology. This book is driven by a vision of what epistemology could be, but is, of course, only a modest first step in that direction.

Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE) is primarily concerned with an account of knowledge and epistemic justification. This program assumes any account of justification must not radically alter our existing judgments, even if this commitment to stasis is not explicitly stated. SAE tends to unproductively proceed via counterexamples. SAE might provide some useful advice, but it's goals and methods are beyond repair.

In the authors' view, epistemology is a branch of philosophy of science and should start from Ameliorative Psychology, which encompasses parts of cognitive science, the heuristics and biases program, statistics, and artificial intelligence. This field makes recommendations about how to reason based on empirical findings. For example, statistical prediction rules (SPRs) were found to be at least as reliable as human experts and frequently more so. As another example, Bayesian reasoning is more successful when information is presented in frequencies rather than probabilities. Rather than being concerned with an account of knowledge or warrant, the authors' approach is to provide an account of reasoning excellence.

A healthy epistemological tradition will have theoretical, practical, and social components. Theory and practice should mutually inform one another. Communication of practical results to the wider public is an important aspect of the social component. Since the authors argue epistemology is a science, but nevertheless normative, one might worry the approach is circular. This concern assumes the normative must come all at once, though. Instead, one can rely on the Aristotelian Principle as an empirical hook to accumulate justification. The Aristotelian Principle says that in the long run, good reasoning tends to lead to better outcomes than poor reasoning. Why accep...
[SEQ RERUN] Debiasing as Non-Self-Destruction
by badger — 2011-05-25T14:14:03.878Z

Today's post, Debiasing as Non-Self-Destruction was originally published on April 7, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

Not being stupid seems like a more easily generalizable skill than breakthrough success. If debiasing is mostly about not being stupid, its benefits are hidden: lottery tickets not bought, blind alleys not followed, cults not joined. Hence, checking whether debiasing works is difficult, especially in the absence of organizations or systematized training.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments of the original post).
This post is part of a series rerunning Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts so those interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People, 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, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki, or creating exercises. Go here for more details, or to discuss the Sequence Reruns.