trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Treat conspicuous consumption like hard nipples?
by KatjaGrace — 2010-01-06T07:54:11.000Z

Robin asked, in relation to correlations between sexual prompts and apparently innocent behaviors:

So what would happen if we all became conscious of the above behaviors being strong clues that men are in fact actively trying for promiscuous short term sex? Would such behaviors reduce, would long term relations become less exclusive, or what? Maybe we just couldn’t admit that these are strong clues?

It isn’t usually activeness that people mind most in others’ wrongdoings, but conscious intention. These usually coincide, but when they don’t we are much more forgiving of unintentional actions, however active. So if it became known that an interest in cars or charity was a symptom of sexual desire I think it would be seen as similar to those other ‘actions’ that show sexual desire; a bad message to your spouse about your feelings, but far from a conscious attempt to be unfaithful.

While it’s not a crime to have physical signs of arousal about the wrong person, I assume it’s considered more condemnable to purposely show them off to said person. I think the same would go for the changes in interests above; if everyone knew that those behaviours were considered signs of sexual intent, realising you had them and purposely allowing potential lovers to see them would be seen as active unfaithfulness, so you would be expected to curb or hide them. Most people would want to hide them anyway, because showing them would no longer send the desired signal. Other activities are presumably popular for those interested in sex exactly because conspicuously wanting sex doesn’t get sex so well. If certain interests became a known signal for wanting sex they would be no more appealing than wearing a sign that says ‘I want sex’. This would be a shame for all those who are interested in charity and consumerism less contingently.
A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations in Favor of Niceness
by Alicorn — 2010-01-05T21:32:38.765Z

tl;dr: Sometimes, people don't try as hard as they could to be nice. If being nice is not a terminal value for you, here are some other things to think about which might induce you to be nice anyway.

There is a prevailing ethos in communities similar to ours - atheistic, intellectual groupings, who congregate around a topic rather than simply to congregate - and this ethos says that it is not necessary to be nice. I'm drawing on a commonsense notion of "niceness" here, which I hope won't confuse anyone (another feature of communities like this is that it's very easy to find people who claim to be confused by monosyllables). I do not merely mean "polite", which can be superficially like niceness when the person to whom the politeness is directed is in earshot but tends to be far more superficial. I claim that this ethos is mistaken and harmful. In so claiming, I do not also claim that I am always perfectly nice; I claim merely that I and others have good reasons to try to be.

The dispensing with niceness probably springs in large part from an extreme rejection of the ad hominem fallacy and of emotionally-based reasoning. Of course someone may be entirely miserable company and still have brilliant, cogent ideas; to reject communication with someone who just happens to be miserable company, in spite of their brilliant, cogent ideas, is to miss out on the (valuable) latter because of a silly emotional reaction to the (irrelevant) former. Since the point of the community is ideas; and the person's ideas are good; and how much fun they are to be around is irrelevant - well, bringing up that they are just terribly mean seems trivial at best, and perhaps an invocation of the aforementioned fallacy. We are here to talk about ideas! (Interestingly, this same courtesy is rarely extended to appalling spelling.)

The ad hominem fallacy is a fallacy, so this is a useful norm up to a point, but not up to the point where people who are perfectly capable of being nice, or learning to be nice, neglect to do so because it's apparently been rendered locally worthless. I submit that there are still good, pragmatic reasons to be nice, as follows. (These are claims about how to behave around real human-type persons. Many of them would likely be obsolete if we were all perfect Bayesians.)

It provides good incentiv

...
TakeOnIt: Database of Expert Opinions
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2010-01-05T20:54:27.847Z

Ben Albahari wrote to tell us about TakeOnIt, which is trying to build a database of expert opinions. This looks very similar to the data that would be required to locate the Correct Contrarian Cluster - though currently they're building the expert database collaboratively, using quotes, rather than by directly polling the experts on standard topics. Searching for "many worlds" and "zombies" didn't turn up anything as yet; "God" was more productive.

The site is open to the public, you can help catalog expert opinions, and Ben says they're happy to export the data for the use of anyone interested in this research area.

Having this kind of database in standardized form is critical for assessing the track records of experts. TakeOnIt is aware of this.
Why are wine competitions unpredictable?
by KatjaGrace — 2010-01-05T06:54:29.000Z

Assume:

Entering wine competitions costs $x, and winning gets you $y (>x) in increased profits

Wine competitions A, B and C are in that order chronologically, and all give medals to a third of entrants

There are nine wines, called 1-9

There is fair agreement between wine authorities at the competitions on good wine, such that if your wine wins one competition it is almost certain to win the next.

What should the wine sellers do to maximize money? All enter A. Three win. Those three go on to enter B, and its winner enters C, while the others stay out unless y is radically > x, as they are likely to lose again.

That means that A makes $9x, B $3x and C $x. An easy way for B and C to increase their profits is to be less predictable then. At the extreme of unpredictability, all wines would enter all competitions, and A, B and C would all make $9x profits, and medals wouldn’t mean much about wine quality.

Of course when people notice that prizes correlate less with wine quality they ignore prizes more, and competitions must charge less entry. In reality most consumers get virtually no evidence of the quality of wine by drinking it, so they are only likely to notice whether better wines get prizes if someone pays attention to the statistics and finds no correlation between winners in different competitions. Someone did this, and found that, prompting me to try to explain it. What do you think?
When does an insight count as evidence?
by Alex Flint — 2010-01-04T09:09:23.345Z

Bayesianism, as it is presently formulated, concerns the evaluation of the probability of beliefs in light of some background information. In particular, given a particular state of knowledge, probability theory says that there is exactly one probability that should be assigned to any given input statement. A simple corrolary is that if two agents with identical states of knowledge arrive at different probabilities for a particular belief then at least one of them is irrational.

A thought experiment. Suppose I ask you for the probability that P=NP (a famous unsolved computer science problem). Sounds like a difficult problem, I know, but thankfully all relevant information has been provided for you --- namely the axioms of set theory! Now we know that either P=NP is proveable from the axioms of set theory, or its converse is (or neither is proveable, but let's ignore that case for now). The problem is that you are unlikely to solve the P=NP problem any time soon.

So being the pragmatic rationalist that you are, you poll the world's leading mathematicians, and do some research of your own into the P=NP problem and the history of difficult mathematical problems in general to gain insight into perhaps which group of mathematicians may be more reliable, and to what extent thay may be over- or under-confident in their beliefs. After weighing all the evidence honestly and without bias you submit your carefully-considered probability estimate, feeling like a pretty good rationalist. So you didn't solve the P=NP problem, but how could you be expected to when it has eluded humanity's finest mathematicians for decades? The axioms of set theory may in principle be sufficient to solve the problem but the structure of the proof is unknown to you, and herein lies information that would be useful indeed but is unavailable at present. You cannot be considered irrational for failing to reason from unavailable information, you say; rationality only commits you to using the information that is actually available to you, and you have done so. Very well.

The next day you are discussing probability theory with a friend, and you describe the one-in-a-million-illness problem, which asks for the probability that a patient has a particular illness, which is known to exist within only one in a million individuals, given that a particular diagnostic test with known 1% false positive rate h...
Advertise while honoring the dead
by KatjaGrace — 2010-01-04T05:00:38.000Z

Roadside suggestions not to kill yourself driving seem to be getting more humorous around here, which suggests that someone is trying to improve them. The best advertisements for careful driving I’ve seen are the little white stick crosses tied to trees and telegraph poles with withered flowers and photographs. I doubt I’m alone in finding the death of a real person smashed into a telegraph pole on my usual route more of a prompt to be careful than an actor looking stern at me or a pun (‘slowing down won’t kill you’). Plus nothing makes an activity feel safe like a gargantuan authority calmly informing me of the risks of it. If the government’s advertising something, everyone knows about it, and if there’s no panic or banning, it’s probably safe. A bedraggled, unprepared memorial is a reminder that ‘they’ aren’t really protecting me.

But how could a road authority use these? They could either increase the number or the visibility of them. The usual methods of increasing the number defeat the purpose, and inventing fatal crashes might make people cross. Making memorials more visible is hard, because they are put up by families, besides which the home-made look is valuable, so billboard versions wouldn’t do so well. One solution is just to give bereaved families a bit of the money they usually use on a billboard to construct a temporary memorial of their choice at the site. That way more people would do it, and they could afford more extravagant decoration, so enhancing visibility.
Disclosure vs. Bans: Reply to Robin Hanson
by David_J_Balan — 2010-01-04T01:09:04.349Z

A little while back I wrote a post arguing that the existence of abusive terms in credit card contracts (such as huge jumps in interest rates for being one day late with a payment) do not satisfy the conditions for standard economic models of asymmetric information between rational agents, but rather are trickery, pure and simple. If this is right, then the standard remedy of mandating the provision of more information to the less-informed party, but not otherwise interfering in the market (the idea being that any voluntary agreement must make both parties better off, no matter how strange or one-sided the terms may appear, so any interference in contracts beyond providing information will reduce welfare), is not the right one. There is no decent argument that those terms would appear in any contract where both parties knew what they were doing, so if you see terms like that, the appropriate conclusion is that someone has been screwed, not that Goddess of Capitalism, in her infinite-but-inscrutable wisdom, has uncovered the only terms that, strange as they may seem to mere mortals, make a mutually beneficial contract possible. The goal is to get rid of those terms, and the most direct way to do that is simply to prohibit them. There are some good reasons to be reluctant to have the government go around prohibiting things, so mandatory disclosure might still be a good policy (though the Federal Reserve has investigated this and concluded that it isn't), but the goal would be to use the disclosures to eliminate the abusive terms. There is no justification for the standard economist's agnosticism about whether the terms are good or not: they're bad and the only question is how best to get rid of them.

Robin Hanson left some comments to that post, in which he made the point that since people voluntarily choose these terms, they must like them and so prohibiting them would have to mean protecting people against their will. I answered that while I'm enough of a paternalist to be willing, under some circumstances, to impose limited protections on people even if those people would oppose them, that I didn't think that was an issue here, as I would guess (though I have no proof), that the Federal Reserve's recent decision to ban certain credit card practices was probably very popular, even (especially?) among the people who are harmed by those practices. Robin's reply...
Max Tegmark on our place in history: "We're Not Insignificant After All"
by Roko — 2010-01-04T00:02:04.868Z

An uplifting message as we enter the new year, quoted from Edge.org:

We're Not Insignificant After All
Max Tegmark, Physicist, MIT
When gazing up on a clear night, it's easy to feel insignificant. Since our earliest ancestors admired the stars, our human egos have suffered a series of blows. For starters, we're smaller than we thought. Eratosthenes showed that Earth was larger than millions of humans, and his Hellenic compatriots realized that the solar system was thousands of times larger still. Yet for all its grandeur, our Sun turned out to be merely one rather ordinary star among hundreds of billions in a galaxy that in turn is merely one of billions in our observable universe, the spherical region from which light has had time to reach us during the 14 billion years since our big bang. Then there are probably more (perhaps infinitely many) such regions. Our lives are small temporally as well as spatially: if this 14 billion year cosmic history were scaled to one year, then 100,000 years of human history would be 4 minutes and a 100 year life would be 0.2 seconds. Further deflating our hubris, we've learned that we're not that special either. Darwin taught us that we're animals, Freud taught us that we're irrational, machines now outpower us, and just last month, Deep Fritz outsmarted our Chess champion Vladimir Kramnik. Adding insult to injury, cosmologists have found that we're not even made out of the majority substance.

The more I learned about this, the less significant I felt. Yet in recent years, I've suddenly turned more optimistic about our cosmic significance. I've come to believe that advanced evolved life is very rare, yet has huge growth potential, making our place in space and time remarkably significant.

The nature of life and consciousness is of course a hotly debated subject. My guess is that these phenomena can exist much more generally that in the carbon-based examples we know of.
I believe that consciousness is, essentially, the way information feels when being processed. Since matter can be arranged to process information in numerous ways of vastly varying complexity, this implies a rich variety of levels and types of consciousness. The particular type of consciousness that we subjectively know is then a phenomenon that arises in certain highly complex physical systems that input, process, store and output information. Clearly, if atoms

...
Drawing Two Aces
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2010-01-03T10:33:46.067Z

Suppose I have a deck of four cards: The ace of spades, the ace of hearts, and two others (say, 2C and 2D).

You draw two cards at random.

Scenario 1: I ask you "Do you have the ace of spades?" You say "Yes." Then the probability that you are holding both aces is 1/3: There are three equiprobable arrangements of cards you could be holding that contain AS, and one of these is AS+AH.

Scenario 2: I ask you "Do you have an ace?" You respond "Yes." The probability you hold both aces is 1/5: There are five arrangements of cards you could be holding (all except 2C+2D) and only one of those arrangements is AS+AH.

Now suppose I ask you "Do you have an ace?"

You say "Yes."

I then say to you: "Choose one of the aces you're holding at random (so if you have only one, pick that one). Is it the ace of spades?"

You reply "Yes."

What is the probability that you hold two aces?

Argument 1: I now know that you are holding at least one ace and that one of the aces you hold is the ace of spades, which is just the same state of knowledge that I obtained in Scenario 1. Therefore the answer must be 1/3.

Argument 2: In Scenario 2, I know that I can hypothetically ask you to choose an ace you hold, and you must hypothetically answer that you chose either the ace of spades or the ace of hearts. My posterior probability that you hold two aces should be the same either way. The expectation of my future probability must equal my current probability: If I expect to change my mind later, I should just give in and change my mind now. Therefore the answer must be 1/5.

Naturally I know which argument is correct. Do you?
A status theory of blog commentary
by KatjaGrace — 2010-01-03T06:51:19.000Z

Commentary on blogs usually comes in two forms: comments there and posts on other blogs. In my experience, comments tend to disagree and to be negative or insulting much more than links from other blogs are. In a rough count of comments and posts taking a definite position on this blog, 25 of 35 comments disagreed, while 1 of 12 posts did, even if you don’t count another 11 posts which link without comment, a seemingly approving act. Why is this?

Here’s a theory. Lets say you want status. You can get status by affiliating with the right others. You can also get status within an existing relationship by demonstrating yourself to be better than others in it. When you have a choice of who to affiliate with, you will do better not to affiliate at all with most of the people you could demonstrate your superiority to in a direct engagement, so you mostly try to affiliate with higher status people and ignore or mock from a distance those below you. However when it is already given that you affiliate with someone, you can gain status by seeming better than they.

These things are supported if there is more status conflict in less voluntary relationships than in voluntary ones, which seems correct. Compare less voluntary relationships in workplaces, schoolgrounds, families, and between people and employees of organizations they must deal with (such as welfare offices) with more voluntary relationships such as friendships, romantic relationships, voluntary trade, and acquaintanceships.

This theory would explain the pattern of blog commentary. Other bloggers are choosing whether to affiliate with your blog, visibly to outside readers. As in the rest of life, the blogger would prefer to be seen as up with good bloggers and winning stories than to be bickering with bad bloggers, who are easy to come by. So bloggers mostly link to good blogs or posts and don’t comment on bad ones.

Commenters are visible only to others in that particular comments section. Nobody else there will be impressed or interested to observe that you read this blogger or story, as they all are. So the choice of whether to affiliate doesn’t matter, and all the fun is in showing superiority within that realm. Pointing out that the blogger is wrong shows you are smarter than they, while agreeing says nothing. So commenters tend to criticize where they can and not bother commenting...
Stigmergy and Pickering's Mangle
by Johnicholas — 2010-01-02T19:14:21.432Z

Stigmergy is a notion that an agent's behavior is sometimes best understood as coordinated by the agent's environment. In particular, social insects build nests, which have a recognizable standard pattern (different patterns for different species). Does the wasp or termite have an idea of what the standard pattern is? Probably not. Instead, the computation inside the insect is a stateless stimulus/response rule set. The partially-constructed nest catalyzes the next construction step.

An unintelligent "insect" clambering energetically around a convoluted "nest", with the insect's local perceptions driving its local modifications is recognizably something like a Turing machine. The system as a whole can be more intelligent than either the (stateless) insect or the (passive) nest. The important computation is the interactions between the agent and the environment.

Theraulaz and Bonabeau have simulated lattice swarms, and gotten some surprisingly realistic wasp-nest-like constructions. A paper is in CiteSeer, but this summary gives a better rapid overview.

Humans modify the environment (e.g. by writing books and storing them in libraries), and human behavior is affected by their environment (e.g. by reading books). Wikipedia is an excellent example of what human-human stigmergic coordination looks like. Instead of interacting directly with one another, each edit leaves a trace, and future edits respond to the trace (this impersonal interaction may avoid some biases towards face-saving and status-seeking).

Andrew Pickering is a sociologist who studies science and technology. He wrote a book called "The Mangle of Practice". He includes in his sociology non-human "actors". For example, he would say that a bubble chamber acts on a human observer when the observer sees a tracery of bubbles after a particle physics experiment. This makes his theory less society-centric and more recognizable to a non-sociologist.

As a programmer, the best way I can explain Pickering's mangle is by reference to programming. In trying to accomplish something using a computer, you start with a goal, a desired "capture of machinic agency". You interact with the computer, alternating between human-acts-on-computer (edit) phases, and computer-acts-on-human (run) phases. In this process, the computer may display "resistances" and, as a consequence, you might change yo...