trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Short introductory materials for a rationality meetup
by Dolores1984 — 2012-11-13T05:10:38.251Z

So, I and a few other people are starting a Bayesian Conspiracy chapter at my university (New Mexico Tech). We're trying to put together a short (three page) introductory packet to give to new members. We'd like the packet to introduce people to what rationality is, what it's useful for, and some of the basic techniques. We'd like it to be as readable and palatable as possible, to avoid the intimidation factor of simply pointing people at the Sequences, which are not particularly friendly to a casual reader.
I'm compiling some materials of my own for this purpose, but before I get too excited, I thought I ought to check if any of the other meetups had or knew of something along these lines already created. If not, we'll post our packet on our website for other meetups to use as they see fit.
Simulationist sympathetic magic
by DataPacRat — 2012-11-13T03:45:57.989Z

While I've been wrestling with the inspiration needed to turn my fanfiction into actual fiction rather than just an author's tract... I have had an unrelated but fun thought, which I'm throwing into the breeze here for any improvements that can be suggested.

If our universe is more likely to be a simulation, a reconstruction of the past by our descendants than the base level of reality; then that reconstruction is likely to be imperfect, based mainly on surviving records (and memories of anyone whose brain survives intact long enough for upload-style scanning).

Therefore, if somebody precommits to only leave behind records which correspond to particular events... then it seems plausible (to within the bounds of 'the brain is a quantum computer' levels of plausibility) that those events become more likely to be experienced. For example, if a protagonist were to precommit to mentioning that during their walk, a bird landed right in their hand to eat a bread crust, whether or not such an event actually happened; then the probability that they will then experience a bird landing in their hand increases.

There are, of course, extreme limits on what can be accomplished with such trickery, even in theory. Violating the known laws of physics is right out, as are events dramatic enough to leave behind more traces than their own memories and journals. It also seems highly recommended for someone who wishes to try this to precommit to never leaving a trace that they are going to try it, as that would leave a record the future simulationists could use to discount their less-probable reports.

So - what additional thoughts could be added to the above to make it more plausible, at least to those who've heard of simulationism in the first place?

(And since it seems more likely than not that someone will ask: No I've never tried using such simulationist sympathetic magic myself, and since I still question the basic assumptions behind such mass-simulation in the first place, I have no intention of trying it in the future, either.)
Coursera course on critical thinking
by daenerys — 2012-11-13T02:13:12.719Z

Coursera has an upcoming course on critical thinking called "Think Again: How to Reason and Argue". A bunch of the locals here in Columbus will be taking it, and I thought some other LWers might also be interested. If you decide to sign up, let us know, and we might get a discussion group going, or something.

Linky: https://www.coursera.org/course/thinkagain

Some info from the website:

About the Course:

Reasoning is important. This course will teach you how to do it well. You will learn some simple but vital rules to follow in thinking about any topic at all and some common and tempting mistakes to avoid in reasoning. We will discuss how to identify, analyze, and evaluate arguments by other people (including politicians, used car salesmen, and teachers) and how to construct arguments of your own in order to help you decide what to believe or what to do. These skills will be useful in dealing with whatever matters most to you.

Course Syllabus

Week One: How to Spot an Argument (and separate it from surrounding verbiage)

Week Two: How to Untangle an Argument (or break it into parts and tell what different parts are doing)

Week Three: How to Reconstruct an Argument (or arrange its parts to show how they are connected in a structure)

Week Four: How to Evaluate an Argument Deductively (or determine whether its conclusion follows validly from its premises) – Part 1: Propositional Logic

Week Five: How to Evaluate an Argument Deductively (or determine whether its conclusion follows validly from its premises) – Part 2: Quantificational Logic

Week Six: How to Evaluate an Argument Inductively (or assess whether its premises provide enough reason to believe its conclusion) – Part 1: Statistical Generalization and Application

Week Seven: How to Evaluate an Argument Inductively (or assess whether its premises provide enough reason to believe its conclusion) – Part 2: Causal Reasoning

Week Eight: How to Evaluate an Argument Inductively (or assess whether its premises provide enough reason to believe its conclusion) – Part 3: Probability

Week Nine: How to Evaluate an Argument Inductively (or assess whether its premises provide enough reason to believe its conclusion) – Part 4: Decisions

Week Ten: How to Mess Up an Argument (or commit common

...
A hypothesis concerning discounting.
by abramdemski — 2012-11-12T21:51:53.899Z

Humans have a value function which is inconsistent over time, discounting roughly with proportion to distance in the future, so that we discount more steeply as an event approaches. This is why we stay up late, ignore the alarm, put off work until close to a deadline, et cetera et cetera.

Yet hyperbolic discounting appears to go away as we mature. I believe this is a result of cognitive mechanisms for maintaining consistency. Cognitive dissonance is painful for us. The consistency mechanism seems to explain some of our irrational behaviour, such as the sunk cost fallacy. It provides a way for us to stick with plans which we previously made, avoiding preference changes due to hyperbolic discounting.

If a hyperbolically discounting agent could perfectly self-modify, it would fix its hyperbola to a specific point in time, resulting in an agent whose discounting would flatten out over the remainder of its life. Perhaps our consistency mechanism approximates this result; but far from perfectly. We can also resolve the inconsistency in a different way, by accepting a specific discount rate. Rather than forcing our future selves to conform to our present preferences, resulting in a gradually flattening function, our present selves may instead accept our future preferences in order to resolve the inconsistency.

Given the difficulty of forcing our future selves to accept a flat distribution, we accept that we will steeply discount in the future as we do in the present. This resolution is popular in some circles; we are often told to "live in the present" or "seize the day". In the extreme case, there is the belief (often associated with mystics) that the present moment is infinitely more important than anything else; the discount factor has collapsed to 0. While this view is intellectually coherent, it seems to be biologically impossible; we will keep taking actions based on future consequences even if we think we are only doing what we desire in the moment. Nonetheless, I suppose we can approach very high discount factors.

Based on this model, my suspicion is that we can approach any discount factor as a self-consistent equilibrium-- it is possible that we learn to make and keep very long-term plans, approximating a very low discount, but it is also possible that we learn to live in the present, or learn anything between these two. The consistency mechanism will want to...
Gap in understanding of Logical Pinpointing
by Incorrect — 2012-11-12T17:33:47.929Z

I had originally found myself very confused by how the second order axiom of induction restricted PA to a single model, leading to this discussion where I thought doing so would violate the incompleteness theorem.

What I misunderstood is that while the axiom schema of induction effectively quantifies over properties definable in PA, the SOL version quantifies over ALL properties, including those you can't even define in PA.

This seems like a really subtle point that wasn't obvious to me from the article, knowing FOL but not SOL. I actually realized my mistake when I saw that Eliezer was representing properties as sets in the visual diagram.

Anyway, I thought others might benefit by learning from my mistake. Also, I'd like to point out that this definition of the natural numbers yields no procedure that lets you produce theorems of PA as second-order logic has no computable complete definition of provability. Just use the axiom schema of induction instead of the second order axiom of induction and you will be able to produce theorems though.
SIA, conditional probability and Jaan Tallinn's simulation tree
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-11-12T17:24:44.043Z

If you're going to use anthropic probability, use the self indication assumption (SIA) - it's by far the most sensible way of doing things.

Now, I am of the strong belief that probabilities in anthropic problems (such as the Sleeping Beauty problem) are not meaningful - only your decisions matter. And you can have different probability theories but still always reach the decisions if you have different theories as to who bears the responsibility of the actions of your copies, or how much you value them - see anthropic decision theory (ADT).

But that's a minority position - most people still use anthropic probabilities, so it's worth taking a more through look at what SIA does and doesn't tell you about population sizes and conditional probability.

This post will aim to clarify some issues with SIA, especially concerning Jaan Tallinn's simulation-tree model which he presented in exquisite story format at the recent singularity summit. I'll be assuming basic familiarity with SIA, and will run away screaming from any questions concerning infinity. SIA fears infinity (in a shameless self plug, I'll mention that anthropic decision theory runs into far less problems with infinities; for instance a bounded utility function is a sufficient - but not necessary - condition to ensure that ADT give you sensible answers even with infinitely many copies).

But onwards and upwards with SIA! To not-quite-infinity and below!

SIA does not (directly) predict large populations

One error people often make with SIA is to assume that it predicts a large population. It doesn't - at least not directly. What SIA predicts is that there will be a large number of agents that are subjectively indistinguishable from you. You can call these subjectively indistinguishable agents the "minimal reference class" - it is a great advantage of SIA that it will continue to make sense for any reference class you choose (as long as it contains the minimal reference class).

The SIA's impact on the total population is indirect: if the size of the total population is correlated with that of the minimal reference class, SIA will predict a large population. A correlation is not implausible: for instance, if there are a lot of humans around, then the probability that one of them is you is much larger. If there are a lot of intelligent life forms around, then the...
SIA fears (expected) infinity
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-11-12T17:23:24.348Z

It's well known that the Self-Indication Assumption (SIA) has problems with infinite populations (one of the reasons I strongly recommend not using the probability as the fundamental object of interest, but instead the decision, as in anthropic decision theory).

SIA also has problems with arbitrarily large finite populations, at least in some cases. What cases are these? Imagine that we had these (non-anthropic) probabilities for various populations:

p0, p1, p2, p3, p4...

Now let us apply the anthropic correction from SIA; before renormalising, we have these weights for different population levels:

0, p1, 2p2, 3p3, 4p4...

To renormalise, we need to divide by the sum 0 + p1 + 2p2 + 3p3 + 4p4... This is actually the expected population! (note: we are using the population as a proxy for the size of the reference class of agents who are subjectively indistinguishable from us; see this post for more details)

So using SIA is possible if and only if the (non-anthropic) expected population is finite (and non-zero).

Note that it is possible for the anthropic expected population to be infinite! For instance if pj is C/j3, for some constant C, then the non-anthropic expected population is finite (being the infinite sum of C/j2). However once we have done the SIA correction, we can see that the SIA-corrected expected population is infinite (being the infinite sum of some constant times 1/j).
Digging the Bull's Horn
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2012-11-12T16:03:54.715Z

Some time ago I learned of the metaphor of 'digging the bull's horn'. This might sound a little strange, since horns are mostly hollow, but imagine a bull's horn used to store black powder. In the beginning the work is easy and you can scoop out a lot powder with very little effort. As you dig down, though, each scoop yields less powder as you dig into the narrow part of the horn until the only way you can get out more powder is to turn the horn over a dump it out.

It's often the same way with learning. When you start out in a subject there is a lot to be learned (both in quantity of material you have not yet seen and in quantity of benefits you have to gain from the information), but as you dig deeper into a subject the useful insights come less often or are more limited in scope. Eventually you dig down so far that the only way to learn more is to discover new things that no one has yet learned (to stretch the metaphor, you have to add your own powder back to dig out).

It's useful to know that you're digging the bull's horn when learning because, unless you really enjoy a subject or have some reason to believe that contributing to it is worthwhile, you can know in advance that most of the really valuable insights you'll gain will come early on. If you want to benefit from knowing about as much stuff as possible, you'll often want to stop actively pursuing a subject unless you want to make a career out of it.

But, for a few subjects, this isn't true. Sometimes, as you continue to learn the last few hard things that don't seem to provide big, broadly-useful insights, you manage to accumulate a critical level of knowledge about the subject that opens up a whole new world of insights to you that were previously hidden. To push the metaphor, you eventually dig so deep that you come out the other side to find a huge pile of powder.

The Way seems to be one of those subjects you can dig past the end of: there are some people who have mastered The Way to such an extent that they have access to a huge range of benefits not available to those still digging the horn. But when it comes to other subjects, how do you know? Great insights could be hiding beyond currently obscure fields of study because no one has bothered to dig deep enough. Aside from having clear examples of people who came out the other side to give us reason to believe it's worth while to deep really deep...
[SEQ RERUN] Life's Story Continues
by MinibearRex — 2012-11-12T03:08:50.983Z

Today's post, Life's Story Continues was originally published on 21 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A discussion of some of the classical big steps in the evolution of life, and how they relate to the idea of optimization.

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 Observing Optimization, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Meetup : Pittsburgh: Value of Information
by KatjaGrace — 2012-11-11T21:09:13.023Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh: Value of Information

WHEN:
13 November 2012 06:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
EatUnique, S Craig St, Pittsburgh

Phone 412-304-6258 if you can't find us

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh: Value of Information
Questions from potential donors to Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours and EAA
by Giles — 2012-11-11T18:54:32.073Z

UPDATE: Will has responded here.

The Centre for Effective Altruism has recently opened up for donations. This is the umbrella organisation for Giving What We Can (GWWC), 80,000 Hours (80K) and Effective Animal Activism (EAA, which I think is still formally part of 80K). I responded to Will Crouch in an email with a list of questions. You're welcome to add to the list in the comments and I'll make sure the questions get to him.

Will seems pretty cool about the whole transparency thing so any answers will hopefully make their way onto the LW Discussion board. Will (and Ben Todd) will try to take the time to give accurate and well-formed answers where possible.

CEA is based in the UK so figures are in GBP.

1. What would you do with different funding levels?
- The "what would my money buy" section of the donate page gives me a vague idea
- It's easier to understand information of the form "If we got £50,000 over the next year we'd do this, if we got £100,000 over the next year we'd do this and this"
- I understand if you're unable to produce that kind of information
- That kind of information is particularly useful for evaluating "did things go as well as they were supposed to, given the amount of funding we actually received"
- Particularly useful for me as I'm trying to train myself to identify funding opportunities. So I'll need feedback as to whether I got it right!
2. How much money are you expecting?
- You say on the donate page that you've spent less than £20,000
- This must have come from somewhere - how much of that particular source of funding is still available?
- Are you getting any other emails like this one? (Edit: i.e. which are offering donations, possibly conditional on answering some questions first)
- Do you have any plans (perhaps in the longer term) to chase after big money e.g. Peter Thiel?
- Are you expecting to get a lot of donations back from people who've received advice and help from 80K?
- I sort of get the impression that there's a lot of good feeling towards 80K at least within the effective altruist community, and for that reason it might not be too hard for you to find funds. To what extent do you agree with this?

3. Which is more useful, regular donations or lump sums?
4. If you had funds to hire an extra person, do you know how that person would be?
- How important is it to find talented people to work for you?
- Are you tryi...
Meetup : Paderborn Meetup, November 22th
by Just_existing — 2012-11-11T10:43:45.282Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Paderborn Meetup, November 22th

WHEN:
22 November 2012 07:00:00PM (+0100)

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

The first meetup in this city ever.

There is lots of rationality stuff to talk about and the more people come, the more interesting people will be there to meet.

Even if you are new to Lesswrong and have only read some articles, don't be to shy to
show up.

I will have a sign.

Everybody is welcome!

Discussion article for the meetup : Paderborn Meetup, November 22th
[SEQ RERUN] Observing Optimization
by MinibearRex — 2012-11-11T06:50:53.589Z

Today's post, Observing Optimization was originally published on 21 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Trying to derive predictions from a theory that says that sexual reproduction increases the rate of evolution is more difficult than it first appears.

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 Eliezer's Meta-Level Determinism, 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.
Detecting Web baloney with your nose?
by uzalud — 2012-11-10T15:50:07.292Z

Is there a useful heuristic for detecting rationally-challenged texts (as in Web pages, forum posts, facebook comments) which takes relatively superficial attributes such as formatting choices, spelling errors, etc. as input? Something a casual Internet reader may use to detect possibly unworthy content so they can suspend their belief and research the matter further. Let's call them "text smells" (analogue to code smells), like:

too much emphasis in text (ALL CAPS, bold, color, exclamations, etc.);

walls of text;

little concrete data/links/references;

too much irrelevant data and references;

poor spelling and grammar;

obvious half-truths and misinformation.

Since many crackpots, pseudoscientific con artists, and conspiracy theorists seem to have cleaned up their Web sites in recent years, I wonder do these low-cost baloney detection tools might be of real value. Does anyone know of any studies or analyses of correlation between these basic metrics and the actual quality of the content? Can you think of some other smells typical of Web baloney?
Cryonics as Charity
by jefftk — 2012-11-10T14:21:25.105Z

Imagine you accept the main idea of cryonics, that if we freeze brains future technology is likely to be able to extract the encoded information and revive the person digitally. [1] While this currently costs about $120K/person, if we did it routinely to everyone it could probably get down below $1000/person. Which is interesting: the current cost of averting a death is around $1700, but someone who doesn't die of malaria is still going to die of old age, so you can't really say their death was "averted". While someone who is revived after being frozen wouldn't live eternally, they might get to experience thousands of years of subjective life. In terms of life-years, getting cryonics to be really cheap and paying for people to get it sounds like it beats GiveWell's top charities.

Aside from not agreeing that cryonics is likely to work, however, I don't think the value is actually all that high. A future world which would revive large numbers of people we freeze today would be massively different from the current world economically, but would still have constraints. There would be some number of digital people that could run simultaneously on whatever people-emulating hardware they have. Preserving additional 21st century minds would give future people the option to run revived people instead of new people, but I don't think it affects the overall number emulated.

[1] I don't think this is likely.

I also posted this on my blog.