trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Evangelical Rationality
by CannibalSmith — 2009-04-20T04:51:42.006Z

Spreading the Word prompted me to report back as promised.

I have two sisters aged 17 and 14, and mom and dad aged 40-something. I'm 22, male. We're all white and Latvian. I translated the articles as I read them.

I read Never Leave Your Room to the oldest sister and she expressed great interest in it.

I read Cached Selves to them all. When I got to the part about Greenskyers the older sister asserted "the sky is green" for fun. Later in the conversation I asked her, "Is the sky blue?", and her answer was "No. I mean, yes! Gah!" They all found real life examples of this quickly - it turns out this is how the older sister schmoozes money and stuff out of dad ("Can I have this discount cereal?" followed by "Can I have this expensive yogurt to go with my cereal?").

I started reading The Apologist and the Revolutionary to them but halfway through the article they asked "what's the practical application for us?", and I realized that I couldn't answer that question - it's just a piece of trivia. So I moved on.

I tried reading about near-far thing to them, but couldn't find a single good article that describes it concisely. Thus I stumbled around, and failed to convey the idea properly.

In the end I asked whether they'd like to hear similar stuff in the future, and the reply was an unanimous yes. I asked them why, in their opinion, haven't they found this stuff by themselves and the reason seems to be that they have have no paths that lead to rationality stuff in their lives. Indeed, I found OB through Dresden Codak, which I found through Minus, which I found through some other webcomic forum. Nobody in my family reads webcomics not to mention frequenting their forums.

The takeaway, I think, is this: We must establish non-geeky paths to rationality. Go and tell people how to not be suckers. Start with people who would listen to you. You don't have to advertise LW - just be +5 informative. Rationality stuff must enter the mass media: radio, TV, newspapers. If you are in a position to make that happen, act!

I would also like to see more articles like this one on LW - go, do something, report back.
The ideas you're not ready to post
by JulianMorrison — 2009-04-19T21:23:42.999Z

I've often had half-finished LW post ideas and crossed them off for a number of reasons, mostly they were too rough or undeveloped and I didn't feel expert enough. Other people might worry their post would be judged harshly, or feel overwhelmed, or worried about topicality, or they just want some community input before adding it.

So: this is a special sort of open thread. Please post your unfinished ideas and sketches for LW posts here as comments, if you would like constructive critique, assistance and checking from people with more expertise, etc. Just pile them in without worrying too much. Ideas can be as short as a single sentence or as long as a finished post. Both subject and presentation are on topic in replies. Bad ideas should be mined for whatever good can be found in them. Good ideas should be poked with challenges to make them stronger. No being nasty!
Spreading the word?
by Paul Crowley — 2009-04-19T19:25:32.850Z

This has been discussed some, but I don't think it's been the sole subject of a top-level post. I want to find out other people's ideas rather than driving the discussion into my ideas, so I'm asking the question in a very general form, and holding off on my own answers:

Should we be trying to spread the word?

If so, what is the word, and how should we be trying to spread it?
The True Epistemic Prisoner's Dilemma
by MBlume — 2009-04-19T08:57:02.580Z

I spoke yesterday of the epistemic prisoner's dilemma, and JGWeissman wrote:

I am having some difficulty imagining that I am 99% sure of something, but I cannot either convince a person to outright agree with me or accept that he is uncertain and therefore should make the choice that would help more if it is right, but I could convince that same person to cooperate in the prisoner's dilemma. However, if I did find myself in that situation, I would cooperate.

To which I said:

Do you think you could convince a young-earth creationist to cooperate in the prisoner's dilemma?

And lo, JGWeissman saved me a lot of writing when he replied thus:

Good point. I probably could. I expect that the young-earth creationist has a huge bias that does not have to interfere with reasoning about the prisoner's dilemma.

So, suppose Omega finds a young-earth creationist and an atheist, and plays the following game with them. They will each be taken to a separate room, where the atheist will choose between each of them receiving $10000 if the earth is less than 1 million years old or each receiving $5000 if the earth is more than 1 million years old, and the young earth creationist will have a similar choice with the payoffs reversed. Now, with prisoner's dilemma tied to the young earth creationist's bias, would I, in the role of the atheist still be able to convince him to cooperate? I don't know. I am not sure how much the need to believe that the earth is around 5000 years would interfere with recognizing that it is in his interest to choose the payoff for earth being over a million years old. But still, if he seemed able to accept it, I would cooperate.

I make one small modification. You and your creationist friend are actually not that concerned about money, being distracted by the massive meteor about to strike the earth from an unknown direction. Fortunately, Omega is promising to protect limited portions of the globe, based on your decisions (I think you've all seen enough PDs that I can leave the numbers as an excercise).

It is this then which I call the true epistemic prisoner's dilemma. If I tell you a story about two doctors, even if I tell you to put yourself in the shoes of one, and not the other, it is easy for you to take yourself outside them, see the symmetry and say "the doctors should cooperate". I hope I have now broken some of that emotio...
Weekly Wiki Workshop and suggested articles
by badger — 2009-04-19T01:13:23.164Z

Now 12 days old, LWiki is still growing. Most of the articles are stubs, but progress is being made. Eliezer confirmed that an official wiki hosted on LW is eventually coming, so be careful about linking to the wiki, but don't let that deter you from adding content.

Standards and conventions are still being hashed out, so jump in now if you want to contribute. There is broad consensus that articles should primarily defer to existing work, either on OB/LW or Wikipedia. However, even quick summaries and links to blog posts can look very different depending on the subject. For example, contrast Rationality as Martial Art and Bias. The former is short and to the point, whereas the latter annotates each link. The latter also makes for much more interesting reading, in my opinion.

Ok, then where do we go from here? The two main avenues of development are creating stubs and then fleshing them out with content. For the first, please suggest any topics, concepts, established phrases, acronyms, techniques, or jargon in this thread that you can think of, and I will be happy to add them as new articles. Or, better yet, feel free to add them yourself.

For the second, I suggest we have a weekly thread that designates one topic for our community to throw its collective intelligence at. That way, we can get all the relevant discussion about the content of an article out at once. For this inaugural Weekly Wiki Workshop, I'm going to suggest the Rationality article.

So, what articles could the wiki use? What should the Rationality article look like?
Great Books of Failure
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-04-19T00:59:14.063Z

Followup to: Unteachable Excellence

As previously observed, extraordinary successes tend to be considered extraordinary precisely because it is hard to teach (relative to the then-current level of understanding and systematization). On the other hand, famous failures are much more likely to contain lessons on what to avoid next time.

Books about epic screwups have constituted some of my more enlightening reading. Do you have any such books to recommend?

Please break up multiple recommendations into multiple comments, one book per comment, so they can be voted on and discussed separately. And please say at least a little about the book's subject and what sort of lesson you learned from it.
Atheist or Agnostic?
by byrnema — 2009-04-18T21:25:14.492Z

If you’re not sure:

Where I come from, if you don’t believe in God and you don’t have a proof that God doesn’t exist, you say you’re agnostic. A typical conversation in polite company would go like this:

Woman: What are your religious views?

Me: Oh, I’m an atheist. You?

Woman: Well, do you know for certain that God doesn’t exist?

Me: I’m pretty sure, that’s what I believe.

Woman: How do you know that God isn’t withholding all evidence that he exists to test your faith? How do you know that’s not the case?

Me: Well, it’s possible that everything is an illusion.

Woman (with finality): You’re agnostic.

Every community has its own set of definitions. Here on LW, you are an atheist, simply, if you don’t believe in God. You don’t have to be 100% certain – we understand that nothing is 100% certain and you believe in God’s non-existence if you believe it with the same conviction that you believe other things, such as the Earth is orbiting around the sun. For a fuller explanation, see this comment.

For the rest of us:

My favorite passage in the Bible is Exodus 4 because this is the part of the bible that made me suspect that it was written by men; men that were pretty unsophisticated in their sense of justice and reasonable deity behavior. God asks Moses to come be on His side, and Moses agrees. The next thing that happens is that God is trying to kill Moses because his son isn’t circumcised. I guess God already asked Moses to do that? They left that part out of the story. Nevertheless, God seems more peevish than rational here. Presumably, he chose Moses for a reason. So trying to kill him in the very next scene doesn’t make a lot of sense.

As someone who has had some trouble figuring out how things are thought about in atheist circles, I would like to suggest not being like God in Exodus 4 when people ask why we’re atheist even though we can’t prove there’s no God. It’s understandably annoying to repeat yourself, but they need to understand the context of atheism here. You can refer them to this comment again or "The Fallacy of Gray" or here.

And steel yourself for the inevitable argument that belief in God is a special case and deserves extra certainty. These are final steps…

----

I would l...
How a pathological procrastinor can lose weight [Anti-akrasia]
by dreeves — 2009-04-18T20:05:49.049Z

[This post has now been subsumed by the following: blog.beeminder.com/akrasia. Also, the service described below, then known as Kibotzer, is now a real startup called Beeminder, announced here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7z1/antiakrasia_tool_like_stickkcom_for_data_nerds/]

If you are a pathological procrastinator you're pretty screwed when it comes to weight loss. You have this monumental goal like "lose 20 pounds" but there's no "last minute" that you can put it off until.

I and my partner have thought a lot about akrasia (ie, failure to do what we think we should be doing) and have a tool that tries to apply some anti-akrasia principles. It's called Kibotzer (for "kibitzing robot") and is currently in private beta.

This is not necessarily the best way to use Kibotzer but if you're a pathological procrastinator and want to just embrace that flaw, Kibotzer can help: (It's more general than weight-loss but that makes for a nice example.)

1. Pick your goal weight and goal date.

2. Kibotzer creates your "Yellow Brick Road."

3. Place a bet with us that you'll stay on your Road.

(if you go off your Road for even a single day, you lose.)

4. Procrastinate like hell until you're about to lose the bet.

The change in focus from "weigh 20 pounds less next year" to "be on the yellow brick road tomorrow morning" makes all the difference. If you're in the wrong "lane" of your Road today then it's crunch time. You have to be on your road tomorrow morning. Pull an all-nighter on the treadmill if that's what it takes.

In one sense that mentality's crazy. Whatever you do in any single 24 hour period makes essentially no difference to your weight next year. But that's the kind of thinking that let you drift away from your ideal weight in the first place. The whole secret of Kibotzer is to automatically break down your long-term goal into day-to-day guidance. And then, critically, add a wager to force you to stick to it.

Kibotzer's tagline is "Bring Long-Term Consequences Near!" (Note that this differs from Stickk.com which adds consequences but can't bring them quite so near!)

We're interested to get the opinions of folks on LessWrong and perhaps some of you would like to be guinea pigs...

I'll put the rest of the details in the form of an FAQ. Basically, we want to make sure we never cheat anyone out of money so w...
The Epistemic Prisoner's Dilemma
by MBlume — 2009-04-18T05:36:17.561Z

Let us say you are a doctor, and you are dealing with a malaria epidemic in your village. You are faced with two problems. First, you have no access to the drugs needed for treatment. Second, you are one of two doctors in the village, and the two of you cannot agree on the nature of the disease itself. You, having carefully tested many patients, being a highly skilled, well-educated diagnostician, have proven to yourself that the disease in question is malaria. Of this you are >99% certain. Yet your colleague, the blinkered fool, insists that you are dealing with an outbreak of bird flu, and to this he assigns >99% certainty.

Well, it need hardly be said that someone here is failing at rationality. Rational agents do not have common knowledge of disagreements etc. But... what can we say? We're human, and it happens.

So, let's say that one day, OmegaDr. House calls you both into his office and tells you that he knows, with certainty, which disease is afflicting the villagers. As confident as you both are in your own diagnoses, you are even more confident in House's abilities. House, however, will not tell you his diagnosis until you've played a game with him. He's going to put you in one room and your colleague in another. He's going to offer you a choice between 5,000 units of malaria medication, and 10,000 units of bird-flu medication. At the same time, he's going to offer your colleague a choice between 5,000 units of bird-flu meds, and 10,000 units of malaria meds.

(Let us assume that keeping a malaria patient alive and healthy takes the same number of units of malaria meds as keeping a bird flu patient alive and healthy takes bird flu meds).

You know the disease in question is malaria. The bird-flu drugs are literally worthless to you, and the malaria drugs will save lives. You might worry that your colleague would be upset with you for making this decision, but you also know House is going to tell him that it was actually malaria before he sees you. Far from being angry, he'll embrace you, and thank you for doing the right thing, despite his blindness.

So you take the 5,000 units of malaria medication, your colleague takes the 5,000 units of bird-flu meds (reasoning in precisely the same way), and you have 5,000 units of useful drugs with which to fight the outbreak.

Had you each taken that which you supposed to be worthless, you'd be guaranteed 10,000 ...
Rationality Quotes - April 2009
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-04-18T01:26:13.041Z

A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.

Please post all quotes separately (so that they can be voted up (or down) separately) unless they are strongly related/ordered.

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB - if we do this, there should be a separate thread for it.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Just for fun - let's play a game.
by CronoDAS — 2009-04-17T23:13:08.720Z

How well can we, at Less Wrong, tell the difference between truth and fiction? Let's play a little game, which I once saw in a movie.

In this game, we each say five things about ourselves, four of which are true. We then try to guess which ones are true and which ones are lies. (Go ahead and use Google, if you like.) I'll start.

My five facts:

1) I have another LessWrong commenter's autograph.

2) I once received the first place prize in an (unsanctioned, online) Magic tournament that lasted a total of ten rounds (seven rounds of Swiss pairings, plus three single elimination rounds) but only beat an opponent at Magic during four of them.

3) I've beaten Battletoads, on an actual NES, without using a Game Genie or other cheat device.

4) Not too long ago, I made a $500 donation to Population Services International, using my debit card. Unfortunately, this overdrew my checking account. My parents were not pleased, not only because I overdrew my checking account, but also because they disapproved of my donating such a large amount of money.

5) My favorite Star Wars movie is "Attack of the Clones."

(Note: I used a random number generator to determine which position would contain the lie.)
My main problem with utilitarianism
by taw — 2009-04-17T20:26:26.304Z

It seems that in the rationalist community there's almost universal acceptance of utilitarianism as basics of ethics. The version that seems most popular goes something like this:

Everybody has preference function assigning real values (utilons) to states of reality

Preference function is a given and shouldn't be manipulated

People try to act to maximize number of utilons, that's how we find about their preference function

People are happier when they get more utilons

We should give everybody as much utilons as we can

There are a few obivous problems here, that I won't be bothering with today:

Any affine transformation of preference function leaves what is essentially the same preference function, but it matters when we try to aggregate them. If we multiply one person's preference function values by 3^^^3, they get to decide everything in every utilitarian scenario

Problem of total vs average number of utilons

People don't really act consistently with "maximizing expected number of utilons" model

Time discounting is a horrible mess, especially since we're hyperbolic so inconsistent by definition

But my main problem is that there's very little evidence getting utilons is actually increasing anybody's happiness significantly. Correlation might very well be positive, but it's just very weak. Giving people what they want is just not going to make them happy, and not giving them what they want is not going to make them unhappy. This makes perfect evolutionary sense - an organism that's content with what it has will fail in competition with one that always wants more, no matter how much it has. And organism that's so depressed it just gives up will fail in competition with one that just tries to function the best it can in its shabby circumstances. We all had extremely successful and extremely unsuccessful cases among our ancestors, and the only reason they are on our family tree was because they went for just a bit more or respectively for whatever little they could get.

Modern economy is just wonderful at mass producing utilons - we have orders of magnitude more utilons per person than our ancestors - and it doesn't really leave people that much happier. It seems to me that the only realistic way to significantly increase global happiness is directly hacking happiness function in brain - by making people happy with what they have. If there's a limit in our br...
Two-Tier Rationalism
by Alicorn — 2009-04-17T19:44:16.522Z

Related to: Bayesians vs. Barbarians
Consequentialism1 is a catchall term for a vast number of specific ethical theories, the common thread of which is that they take goodness (usually of a state of affairs) to be the determining factor of rightness (usually of an action). One family of consequentialisms that came to mind when it was suggested that I post about my Weird Forms of Utilitarianism class is called "Two-Tier Consequentialism", which I think can be made to connect interestingly to our rationalism goals on Less Wrong. Here's a summary of two-tier consequentialism2.
(Some form of) consequentialism is correct and yields the right answer about what people ought to do. But (this form of) consequentialism has many bad features:

It is unimplementable (because to use it correctly requires more calculation than anyone has time to do based on more information than anyone has time to gather and use).

It is "alienating" (because people trying to obey consequentialistic dictates find them very unlike the sorts of moral motivations they usually have, like "I want to be a nice person" or "so-and-so is my friend")3.

It is "integrity-busting" (because it can force you to consider alternatives that are unthinkably horrifying, if there is the possibility that they might lead to the "best" consequences).

It is "virtue-busting" (because it too often requires a deviation from a pattern of behavior that we consider to be an expression of good personal qualities that we would naturally hope and expect from good people).

It is prone to self-serving abuse (because it's easy, when calculating utilities, to "cook the books" and wind up with the outcome you already wanted being the "best" outcome).

It is "cooperation-busting" (because individuals don't tend to have an incentive to avoid free-riding when their own participation in a cooperative activity will neither make nor break the collective good).

To solve these problems, some consequentialist ethicists (my class focused on Railton and Hare) invented "two-tier consequentialism". The basic idea is that because all of these bad features of (pick your favorite kind of) consequentialism, being a consequentialist has bad consequences, and therefore you shouldn't do it. Instead, you should layer on top of your consequentialist thinking a second tier of moral principles called your "Practically I...