trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
On the Importance of Systematic Biases in Science
by gwern — 2013-01-20T21:39:01.820Z

From pg812-1020 of Chapter 8 “Sufficiency, Ancillarity, And All That” of Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by E.T. Jaynes:

The classical example showing the error of this kind of reasoning is the fable about the height of the Emperor of China. Supposing that each person in China surely knows the height of the Emperor to an accuracy of at least ±1 meter, if there are N=1,000,000,000 inhabitants, then it seems that we could determine his height to an accuracy at least as good as

(8-49)

merely by asking each person’s opinion and averaging the results.

The absurdity of the conclusion tells us rather forcefully that the rule is not always valid, even when the separate data values are causally independent; it requires them to be logically independent. In this case, we know that the vast majority of the inhabitants of China have never seen the Emperor; yet they have been discussing the Emperor among themselves and some kind of mental image of him has evolved as folklore. Then knowledge of the answer given by one does tell us something about the answer likely to be given by another, so they are not logically independent. Indeed, folklore has almost surely generated a systematic error, which survives the averaging; thus the above estimate would tell us something about the folklore, but almost nothing about the Emperor.

We could put it roughly as follows:

error in estimate = (8-50)

where S is the common systematic error in each datum, R is the RMS ‘random’ error in the individual data values. Uninformed opinions, even though they may agree well among themselves, are nearly worthless as evidence. Therefore sound scientific inference demands that, when this is a possibility, we use a form of probability theory (i.e. a probabilistic model) which is sophisticated enough to detect this situation and make allowances for it.

As a start on this, equation (8-50) gives us a crude but useful rule of thumb; it shows that, unless we know that the systematic error is less than about of the random error, we cannot be sure that the average of a million data values is any more accurate or reliable than the average of ten1. As Henri Poincare put it: “The physicist is persuaded that one good measurement is worth many bad ones.” This has been well recognized by experimental physicists for generations; but warnings about it are co

...
Meetup :  Bielefeld Meetup, January 23rd
by Just_existing — 2013-01-20T12:55:15.254Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Bielefeld Meetup, January 23rd

WHEN:
23 January 2013 07:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Grill/Bar Verve, Klosterplatz 13, Bielefeld

We are meeting once again in Bielefeld.

The topics of this evening will be the current series "Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners", in particular the post "Casual Diagrams and Casual Models", some thoughts on lifehacks and some Bayes training.

If you live in the area, consider dropping by.

Discussion article for the meetup : Bielefeld Meetup, January 23rd
[SEQ RERUN] The Uses of Fun (Theory)
by MinibearRex — 2013-01-20T07:56:46.160Z

Today's post, The Uses of Fun (Theory) was originally published on 02 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Fun Theory is important for replying to critics of human progress; for inspiring people to keep working on human progress; for refuting religious arguments that the world could possibly have been benevolently designed; for showing that religious Heavens show the signature of the same human biases that torpedo other attempts at Utopia; and for appreciating the great complexity of our values and of a life worth living, which requires a correspondingly strong effort of AI design to create AIs that can play good roles in a good future.

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 Free to Optimize, 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.
How confident are you in the Atomic Theory of Matter?
by DataPacRat — 2013-01-19T20:39:25.614Z

How much confidence do you place in the scientific theory that ordinary matter is made of discrete units, or 'atoms', as opposed to being infinitely divisible?

More than 50%? 90%? 99%? 99.9%? 99.99%? 99.999%? More? If so, how much more? (If describing your answer in percentages is cumbersome, then feel free to use the logarithmic scale of decibans, where 10 decibans corresponds to 90% confidence, 20 to 99%, 30 to 99.9%, etc.)

This question freely acknowledges that there are aspects of physics which the atomic theory does not directly cover, such as conditions of extremely high energy. This question is primarily concerned with that portion of physics in which the atomic theory makes testable predictions.

This question also freely acknowledges that its current phrasing and presentation may not be the best possible to elicit answers from the LessWrong community, and will be happy to accept suggestions for improvement.

Edit: By 'atomic theory', this question refers to the century-plus-old theory. A reasonably accurate rewording is: "Do you believe 'H2O' is a meaningful description of water?".
Long-chain correlation: lead paint and crime
by ChrisHibbert — 2013-01-19T19:47:37.077Z

A friend has been asking my views on the likelihood that there's anything to a correlation between changing levels of lead in paint (and automotive exhaust) and the levels of crime. He quoted from a Reason Blog:

So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

I responded with the following:

Sounds like a stretch to me. I'd want to hear that they didn't test more than 5 other hypothesis before coming to that conclusion, or the p value was far better than .05. I kind of doubt that either is the case.

He's apparently continued to pursue the question, and just forwarded these remarks from Steven Pinker that I thought were very illuminating, and probably deserve a place in this community's toolkit for skeptics. Pinker's main point is that the association between Lead and crime is a long tenuous chain of suppositions, and several of the intermediate points should be far easier to measure. Finding correlations at this distance is not very informative.

http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/pinker_comments_on_lead_removal_and_declining_crime.pdf

Does the phrase "long-chain correlation" stick in your head and make it easier to dismiss this kind of argument?
[SEQ RERUN] Free to Optimize
by MinibearRex — 2013-01-19T05:32:00.465Z

Today's post, Free to Optimize was originally published on 02 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It may be better to create a world that operates by better rules, that you can understand, so that you can optimize your own future, than to create a world that includes some sort of deity that can be prayed to. The human reluctance to have their future controlled by an outside source is a nontrivial part of morality.

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 A New Day, 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.
Michael Vassar's Edge contribution: summary
by Stabilizer — 2013-01-19T03:44:01.123Z

Michael Vassar has written a provocative response to this year's Edge question: "What *should* we be worried about?". But, I'm confused about his post. My attempt to summarize his point of view follows:

1. People have physiological needs (food, shelter, safety etc.) and social needs (esteem, love, respect etc.).

2. People have mental programs to try to achieve both needs.

3. Modern society has been exceptional at fulfilling people's physiological needs but not very good at fulfilling their social needs.

4. Thus, mental programs that were meant to achieve physiological needs do not develop very well relative to mental programs meant to achieve social needs .

5. Mental programs for achieving physiological needs are more precise and hence harder to hack. Mental programs for social needs are fuzzy and vague and thus more easily hackable.

6. Thus, and because of (4), people are more hackable.

7. This manifests operationally as a few powerful people (the rich, the politicians etc.) hacking the majority into submitting to their will.

8. But even the powerful do not have significantly better mechanisms for precise thought. It is just that their social weirdness (need for power, lack of empathy etc.) allowed them to be the hacker instead of the hacked.

9. Thus for most of our useful innovations, we are forced to rely on the rare people who are capable of precise abstract thought because they worry less about their social needs.

So, I guess Vassar's point is that this pattern is what we should worry about as it systematically suppresses useful innovators.

Would agree about my reading of his short essay?

How solid do you think his argument is?
Meetup : Third Purdue Meetup
by Curiouskid — 2013-01-19T02:56:03.259Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Third Purdue Meetup

WHEN:
25 January 2013 06:50:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Hicks Library -Purdue

The first meetup had 5 people. The second had 8. PM me if you plan on coming.

Discussion article for the meetup : Third Purdue Meetup
Meetup : Vancouver Bias and Such
by  — 2013-01-18T17:09:54.077Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Bias and Such

WHEN:
19 January 2013 01:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
2505 West broadway vancouver

Hello everybody.

We had a blast when jsalvatier came to visit last weekend.

This weekend, I think we should talk about the biases. So come out and we'll have a nice discussion about all the hueristics and biases and maybe even what we can do about them.

We'll meet at Bennys Bagels at 13:00 on Saturday

As usual come join us on our mailing list.

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Bias and Such
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Durham, London, Melbourne, Purdue, Vancouver, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2013-01-18T16:01:05.120Z

This summary was posted to LW main on January 11th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

First Purdue Meetup: 11 January 2013 06:50PM
Durham HPMoR Discussion, chapters 27-29: 12 January 2013 11:00AM
Austin, TX: 12 January 2019 01:30PM
Vancouver Fashion for Rationalists: 13 January 2013 01:00PM
13th January London Meetup: 13 January 2013 02:00PM
Washington DC measurement meetup: 13 January 2013 03:00PM
Moscow: Applied Rationality: 19 January 2013 04:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Melbourne Social Meetup: 18 January 2013 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

Whether or not there's currently a meetup in your area, you can sign up to be notified automatically of any future meetups. And if you're not interested in notifica...
TIL in Medical School - Doctors have myths too.
by ancientcampus — 2013-01-18T14:59:23.620Z

Today I Learned in Medical School:

Doctors have medical myths too! According to my prof, many doctors believe that aspiration (having stuff go down into the lungs) causes anaerobic pneumonia, but that is rarely the case. He says that myth is often taught resident-to-student, but it isn’t actually backed up by any research, and isn’t true. The kicker - if the doctor would stop to think about it, it should jump out as unintuitive – it would take some serious changes inside the *lung* to make an *anaerobic* infection – an infection of bacteria that thrive in areas with no oxygen. In reality it takes frequent aspirations over a long period of time to block off an area of the lungs.

I think the moral of this story (though this just may be preaching to the choir here at LW) – all people, be they doctors or kindergarteners, don’t usually check facts they’re taught, especially when being taught by an authoritative teacher. Unless they’re lead to discover/derive a fact themselves, they usually assimilate it into their network of beliefs as a brute fact – “carbon has four valence electrons,” “don’t end a sentence with a preposition,” “in 1492 Columbus discovered America.”

Now, you frequently don’t have enough time to “learn it the hard way” or derive an answer yourself. If I had to read every single research publication that populated the facts in my textbooks, I might not ever graduate. However, it is important to remember that you’ve taken shortcuts for most of your education (and religion/lack thereof, and life in general) – and if some fact ever later strikes you as being odd, look into it. Otherwise, we’re just playing the telephone game.
Banish the Clippy-creating Bias Demon!
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-01-18T14:57:15.907Z

I posted in Practical Ethics, arguing that if we mentally anthropomorphised certain risks, then we'd be more likely to give them the attention they deserved. Slaying the Cardiovascular Vampire, defeating the Parasitic Diseases Death Cult, and banishing the Demon of Infection... these stories give a mental picture of the actual good we're doing when combating these issues, and the bad we're doing by ignoring them. Imagine a politician proclaiming:

I will not let the Cardiovascular Vampire continue his unrelenting war upon the American people, slaying over a third of our citizens - the eldest, in their weakened state, among his most numerous victims. There is no negotiating with such a terrorist - I will direct the full resources of the state to crushing his campaign of destruction.

An amusing thing to contemplate - except, of course, if there were a real Cardiovascular Vampire, politicians and pundits would be falling over themselves with those kinds of announcements.

The field of AI is already over-saturated with anthropomorphisation, so we definitely shouldn't be imagining Clippy as some human-like entity that we can heroically combat, with all the rules of narrative applying. Still it can't hurt to dream up a hideous Bias Demon in its mishaped (though superficially plausible) lair, cackling in glee as someone foolishly attempts to implement an AI design without the proper safety precautions, smiling serenely as prominent futurist dismiss the risk... and dissolving, hit by the holy water of increased rationality and proper AI research. Those images might help us make the right emotional connection to what we're achieving here.
My simple hack for increased alertness and improved cognitive functioning: very bright light
by chaosmage — 2013-01-18T13:43:01.031Z

This is a simple idea that I came up with by myself. I was looking for a means to enter high functioning lots-of-beta-waves modes without the use of chemical stimulants. What I found was that very bright light works really, really well.

I got the brightest light bulbs I could get cheaply. 105 watts of incandescents with halogen gas, billed as the equivalent of 130 watts of incandescent light. And I got an adaptor like this that lets me screw four of those into the same socket in the ceiling. The result is about as painful to look at as the sun. It makes my (small) room brighter than a clear summer's day at my latitude and slightly brighter than a supermarket.

I guess it affects adenosine much like caffeine does because that's what it feels like. Yet unlike caffeine, it can be rapidly turned on and off, literally with the flip of a switch.

For waking up in the morning, I find bright light more effective than a 200mg caffeine tablet, although my caffeine tolerance is moderate for a scientist.

I have not compared the effects of very bright light to modafinil, which requires a prescription in my country.

When under this amount of light, I need to remind myself to go to bed, because I tire about three hours later than with common luminosity. Yet once I switch it off, I can usually sleep within a few minutes, as (I'm guessing) a flood of unblocked adenosine suddenly overwhelms me. I used to have those unproductive late hours where I was too awake to sleep but too tired to be smart. I don't have those anymore.

You've probably heard of light therapy, which uses light to help manage seasonal affective disorder. I don't have that issue, but I definitely notice that the light does improve my mood. (Maybe that's simply because I like to function well.) I'm pretty sure the expensive "light therapy bulbs" you can get are scams, because the color of the light doesn't actually make a difference. The amount of light does.

One nice side benefit is that it keeps me awake while meditating, so I don't need the upright posture that usually does that job. Without the need for an upright posture, I can go beyond two hours straight, which helps enter more profoundly altered states.

After about 10 months of almost daily use of this lighting, I have not noticed any decrease in effectiveness. I do notice I find normally-lit rooms comparatively gloomy, and have an increasingly hard time underst...
Meetup : Berlin social meetup
by blob — 2013-01-18T08:19:48.395Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin social meetup

WHEN:
26 January 2013 05:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
S Wuhletal, Berlin, Germany

We're meeting at my house for a social meetup on Jan 26th. Everyone is welcome. Please check the thread on our mailing list for details and the precise location.

This is an informal event where we plan to play Go, Resistance, maybe other boardgames and chat. Some people have volunteered to bring food and you're welcome to participate (organize on mailing list). I expect we'll have food delivered for dinner.

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin social meetup
[SEQ RERUN] A New Day
by MinibearRex — 2013-01-18T05:53:03.979Z

Today's post, A New Day was originally published on 31 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Try spending a day doing as many new things as possible.

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 Dunbar's Function, 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 : Melbourne, practical rationality
by matt — 2013-01-18T01:23:19.205Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality

WHEN:
01 February 2013 07:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
55 Walsh Street, West Melbourne VIC 3003, Australia

Practical rationality. This meetup repeats on the 1st Friday of each month and is distinct from our social meetup on the 3rd Friday of each month.

Discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/melbourne-less-wrong
(we'll discuss an organised activity for the night here, so jump in)

All welcome from 6:30pm. Call the phone number on the door and I'll let you in.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne, practical rationality