trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A brief guide to not getting downvoted
by nhamann — 2010-10-30T02:32:53.517Z

Important Question: does a guide like this already exist? I couldn't find one, but it's hard to believe there's no guide to not getting downvoted...Supposing there isn't, please give me suggestions on what such a guide needs, because I'm sort of just guessing here.

Edit: Found Your intuititions are not magic, which might be most of what I had intended to write about.

In this recent discussion post, new user draq points out that while their discussion posts have been substantially downvoted, they largely does not know why or what is wrong with these posts. I want to offer a few suggestions why a new user might find their posts being downvoted, but I should first note that many of the participants here have read a substantial portion of the sequences. This is the reason why you will occasionally see jargon-sounding terminology being used. Every so often a new (usually argumentative) user will come along and levy the charge of "groupthink" at LW, but this is merely a case of a group of people with shared knowledge/beliefs inventing shorthand for those ideas. To fully interact with the community here, you will unfortunately need to go through at least a good portion of the core sequences. Onto the troubleshooting:

1. Map and territory

Here at LW, the dominant metaphor for talking about the nature of beliefs is as a map-territory relation. The essence of this idea can be summarized as follows:

territory = The Universe

map = your beliefs

There are important omissions here, like defining "The Universe," but I'm not a specialist in these issues and that's not the point anyways. The point is we have to start somewhere, and that place is the idea that there's a universe and you and I and everyone else live there.

It's important to note that your beliefs about the world exist only in your head, and they aren't very useful at all if they don't correspond to something that we can verify through observation. That's why the only useful kind of beliefs are those that make you anticipate the world being in some set of states and not in others. For example, if I believe that "consciousness is emergent," yet I have no idea what would change in the world if "consciousness" were not "emergent," then I really don't have a belief about anything at all; I just have a bunch of words strung together that seem to refer to something. Which brings us to the next po...
Cambridge Meetups Nov 7 and Nov 21
by jimrandomh — 2010-10-30T00:32:16.595Z

The formerly monthly Cambridge meetups are now twice-monthly! Same place and time - Clear Conscience Cafe, Sunday at 4pm - now on the first and third Sundays of each month, instead of just the third. That's November 7th and 21st.

It was suggested last time that we might want to try adding some structure to these events. I thought it'd be fun to try Paranoid Debating, so I'll bring trivia cards, as suggested by eugman. Other proposals - activities, conversation topics, etc - are welcome.
What is the Archimedean point of morality?
by draq — 2010-10-29T21:56:52.218Z

It has been very enjoyable to post on LW [1, 2] and I have learned a lot from the discussions with other members, for which I am very thankful. But unfortunately, judging by my karma score which is on the same level of Kiwiallegiance and the Jewelry spammer, my opinions are not appreciated and I frequently receive the following message when posting a new comment:

You are trying to submit too fast. try again in xn minutes.

When I press the submit button after x1 + 1 minutes, I'm told to wait another x2 minutes. So commenting has become more and more frustating, and I don't want to continue burden the LW members with the heavy tast of down-voting me. But on the other hand, I still can't find any flaw in my argumentation despite many rebuttals. Maybe I am too ignorant, maybe I am on something. So I'll give myself a last try.

There is none. Some say that morality is a system that is most conductive to cooperation and thus biological fitness. Others say, it is something society creates to enable its own survival. These are explanations that try to reduce morality (values, desires and dislikes) to the concepts of the natural world, but they don't capture what we really mean by desires, dislikes and values.

You might explain my desire for pancakes as a neuronal process, as a mental function biologically evolved, but it does not capture the meaning of "desire". The concept of meaning itself has no meaning in the natural world, but it has a meaning to us, to the rational mind.

As much as we cannot explain what the natural world "really" is, since we cannot see what is behind the physical reality (unless you are an idealistic Platonist), we cannot explain what morality and values "really" are. We can only describe them using scientific theories or normative theories, respectively.
Seeking book about baseline life planning and expectations
by JenniferRM — 2010-10-29T20:31:33.891Z

In an attempt to find useful "base rate expectations" for the rest of my life (and how actions I might take now could set me up to be much better off 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70 years from now) I'm looking for a book that describes the nuts and bolts of human lives. I want coherent discussion from an actuarial/economic/probabilistic/calculating perspective, but I'd like some soulfulness too. The ideal book would be published in 2010 and have coverage of the different periods of people's lives and cover different aspects of their lives as well. In some sense the book would be like a nuts and bolts "how to your your life" manual. Hopefully it would have footnotes and generally good epistemology :-)

To take an example of the kind of content I would hope for (in a domain where I already have worked out some of the theory myself) the ideal book would explain how to calculate the ROI of different levels of college education realistically. Instead of a hand-waving argument that "on avergae you'll make more with education" it would also talk about the opportunity costs of lost wages, and how expected number of years of work impacts on what amount of training makes sense, and so on.

To be clear, I don't want a book that is simply about deciding when, how, and for how long it makes sense to train for a job. Instead I want something that talks about similar issues that I haven't already thought about but that are important, so that I can be usefully educated in ways I wasn't expecting. My goal is to find someone else's scaffold to help me project when and why I should (or shouldn't) buy a minivan, how much to budget for dentistry in my 50's, and a breakdown of the causes of bankruptcy the way insurance companies can predict causes of death.

I was hoping that the book How We Live: An Economic Perspective on Americans from Birth to Death would give me what I want (and it is still probably my fallback book if I can't find anything better) but it was written in 1983, and appears to be strongly oriented towards public policy recommendations rather than personal choice.

Books that may be conceptually nearby that seem non-ideal include:

Dear Undercover Economist: Priceless Advice on Money, Work, Sex, Kids, and Life's Other Challenges - My second place fallback because it covers real life content, is from 2009, and the first book in the series was pretty solid on economi...
Why should you vote?
by kmeme — 2010-10-29T20:15:36.818Z

For many years I've been interested in the "paradox" that your vote tends to never alter the outcome of an election, yet the outcome is in fact determined by the votes. I wrote a blog post about this and tried to explain it in terms of emergence, we as voters are just feeling what it's like to be just a tiny part of a much bigger system.

Then I tried to explain that "voter turnout" is in fact one of the most important metrics for an election, it determines the legitimacy and stability of the process. So therefore even though your vote won't determine the winner, it will contribute to voter turnout and thus is productive and useful.

http://www.kmeme.com/2010/10/why-you-should-vote.html

However I don't find my argument all that compelling, because even voter turnout is going to be approximately the same whether you vote or not.

In the post I bring up littering as something else where your tiny contribution adds up to be bigger result. I personally would never litter on purpose, yet I often skip voting because it seems like it doesn't make a difference. Is voting rational? How do you justify voting or not voting? My post was non-partisan so I'm soliciting non-partisan comments, trying to focus on the theory behind voting in general.
"The current era is the only chance of setting up game rules"
by XiXiDu — 2010-10-29T16:40:31.484Z

Here is another reason why we need to work on superhuman AI:

Thermodynamics of advanced civilizations

Link: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2010/10/visions_of_the_future_in_milano.html

Civilizations are physical objects, and nearly any ultimate goal imply a need for computation, storing bits and resources (the basic physical eschatology assumption).

The universe has a bunch of issues:

The stelliferous era will just last a trillion year or so.

Matter and black holes are likely unstable, so after a certain time there will not be any structure around to build stuff from. Dark matter doesn't seem to be structurable either.

Accelerating expansion prevents us from reaching beyond a certain horizon about 15 gigalightyears away.

It will also split the superclusters into independent "island universes" that will become unreachable from each other within around 120 billion years.

It also causes horizon radiation ~10-29 K hot, which makes infinite computation impossible.

Civilizations have certain limits of resources, expansion, processing and waste heat:

We can still lay our hands on 5.96·1051 kg matter (with dark matter 2.98·1052 kg) within the horizon, and ~2·1045 kg (with DM ~1046 kg) if we settle for a supercluster.

The lightspeed limitation is not enormously cumbersome, if we use self-replicating probes.

The finite energy cost of erasing bits is the toughest bound. It forces us to pay for observing the world, formatting new memory and correct errors.

Putting it all together we end up with the following scenario for maximal information processing:

The age of expansion: interstellar and intergalactic expansion with self-replicating probes. It looks like one can enforce "squatters rights", so there is no strong reason to start exploiting upon arrival.

The age of preservation: await sufficiently low temperatures. A halving of temperature doubles the amount of computation you can do. You only need a logarithmically increasing number of backups for indefinite survival. Since fusion will release ~1% of the mass-energy of matter but black hole conversion ~50%, it might not be relevant to turn off the stars unless you feel particularly negentropic.

The age of harvest: Exploit available energy to produce maximal amount of computation. The slower the exploitation, the more processing can be done. This is largely limi

...
META: Who Have You Told About LW?
by sixes_and_sevens — 2010-10-29T10:06:04.787Z

I've been lurking on LW since shortly after it started, and on OB for about six months before that. In that time, I've told four or five people about it. I would make a terrible evangelist.

I'm curious as to whether other people have the same problem. I'd like to tell lots of people about LW, but I don't think they're ready for it. If they read a statement like "purchase utilons and warm fuzzies separately" their eyes would glaze over, and they'd walk away thinking LW was some sort of crackpot site.

I have found certain posts and topics to be fairly good hooks for getting people interested. An Alien God is a good suggested read for people with an interest in evolutionary theory and the Cthulhu mythos (surprisingly high crossover in my experience). HP:MoR is also a pretty popular hook. The site itself isn't really optimised for word-of-mouth, though, and not everyone likes child wizards and blasphemous horrors.

How many people have you introduced to LW? Who were they, how do you do it and what was their reaction? How could we do it better?
Making your explicit reasoning trustworthy 
by AnnaSalamon — 2010-10-29T00:00:25.408Z

Or: “I don’t want to think about that! I might be left with mistaken beliefs!”

Related to: Rationality as memetic immune disorder; Incremental progress and the valley; Egan's Law.

tl;dr: Many of us hesitate to trust explicit reasoning because... we haven’t built the skills that make such reasoning trustworthy. Some simple strategies can help.

Most of us are afraid to think fully about certain subjects.

Sometimes, we avert our eyes for fear of unpleasant conclusions. (“What if it’s my fault? What if I’m not good enough?”)

But other times, oddly enough, we avert our eyes for fear of inaccurate conclusions.[1] People fear questioning their religion, lest they disbelieve and become damned. People fear questioning their “don't walk alone at night” safety strategy, lest they venture into danger. And I find I hesitate when pondering Pascal’s wager, infinite ethics, the Simulation argument, and whether I’m a Boltzmann brain... because I’m afraid of losing my bearings, and believing mistaken things.

Ostrich Theory, one might call it. Or I’m Already Right theory. The theory that we’re more likely to act sensibly if we don’t think further, than if we do. Sometimes Ostrich Theories are unconsciously held; one just wordlessly backs away from certain thoughts. Other times full or partial Ostrich Theories are put forth explicitly, as in Phil Goetz’s post, this LW comment, discussions of Tetlock's "foxes vs hedgehogs" research, enjoinders to use "outside views", enjoinders not to second-guess expert systems, and cautions for Christians against “clever arguments”.

Explicit reasoning is often nuts

Ostrich Theories sound implausible: why would not thinking through an issue make our actions better? And yet examples abound of folks whose theories and theorizing (as contrasted with their habits, wordless intuitions, and unarticulated responses to social pressures or their own emotions) made significant chunks of their actions worse. Examples include, among many others:

Most early Communists;
Ted Kaczynski (The Unabomber; an IQ 160 math PhD who wrote an interesting treatise about the human impacts of technology, and also murdered innocent people while accomplishing nothing);
Mitchell Heisman;
Folks who go to great lengths to keep kosher;
Friends of mine who’ve gone to great lengths to be meticulously denotationally honest, including refusing jobs

...
Complete Wire Heading as Suicide and other things
by h-H — 2010-10-28T23:57:30.200Z

I came to the idea after a previous lesswrong topic discussing nihilism, and its several comments on depression and suicide. My argument is that wire heading in its extreme or complete/full form can be easily modeled as suicide, or less strongly as volitional intelligence reduction, at least given current human brain structure and the technology being underdeveloped and hence understood and more likely to lead to such end states.

I define Full Wire Heading as that which a person would not want to reverse after it 'activates' and which deletes their previous utility function or most of it. a weak definition yes, but it should be enough for the preliminary purposes of this post. A full wire head is extremely constrained, much like an infant for e.g. and although the new utility function could involve a wide range of actions, the activation of a few brain regions would be the main goal, and so they are extremely limited.

If one takes this position seriously, it follows that only one's moral standpoint on suicide or say lobotomy should govern judgments about full wire heading. This is trivially obvious of course, but to take this position as true we need to understand more about wire heading, as data is extremely lacking especially in regards to human like brains. My other question then is to what extent could such an experiment help in answering the first question?
Understanding the Evidence for Killer Supplements
by Matt_Simpson — 2010-10-28T23:16:25.876Z

Related to: Even if You Have a Nail Supplements Kill

So what test, exactly, did the authors perform? And what do the results mean? It remains a mystery to me - and, I'm willing to bet, to every other reader of the paper.

I'm willing to take that bet. In March, PhilGoetz criticized a JAMA article that purported to show evidence that taking vitamins increases mortality as an example of how it's easy to misuse statistics. His conclusion is above.

Recently, Robin Hanson commented on the article and took it seriously, stating that he was now going to avoid multivitamins.

Read Phil's and Robin's posts for first for background; I'm going to explain what, exactly, the authors did in their analysis.

The first thing to understand about the JAMA article is that it was a meta-analysis based of previous relative risk studies. A relative risk study attempts to determine which of two groups is more at risk for death. In this case, the groups are subjects who take a certain vitamin (the treatment group) and subjects who don't (the control group). Significantly, subjects in the treatment group each receive the same dosage of the vitamin. After a fixed amount of time (say 3 years) the number of living and dead members of each group are recorded. Logistic regression is then performed in order to estimate the probability of someone from either group dieing. Once these two probabilities are know, the relative risk can be estimated as RR=P(death in trt group)/P(death in control group). An RR significantly greater than 1 indicates that the treatment is associated with higher mortality, while an RR significantly less than 1 indicates that the treatment is associated with lower mortality.

Enter meta-analysis. In a meta-analysis the data isn't data from actual experiments, but rather the estimated treatment effect of previous experiments. In this case, the estimated treatment effect is the estimated relative risk from previous experiments. A fairly simple way to do a meta-analysis is a random effects model. Under this model we assume that the estimated relative risk for each treatment came from a normal distribution with it's own mean and a common variance, and then each of these means came from another normal distribution with a common mean and variance. In other words, for stud...
Call for Volunteers: Rationalists with Non-Traditional Skills
by Jasen — 2010-10-28T21:38:26.737Z

SIAI's Fellows Program is looking for rationalists with skills. More specifically, we're looking for rationalists with skills outside our usual cluster who are interested in donating their time by teaching those skills and communicating the mindsets that lead to their development. If possible, we'd like to learn from specialists who "speak our language," or at least are practiced in resolving confusion and disagreement using reason and evidence. Broadly, we're interested in developing practical intuitions, doing practical things, and developing awareness and culture around detail-intensive technical subskills of emotional self-awareness and social fluency. More specifically:

We're interested learning how to "make stuff" in order to force ourselves down to object level from time to time, practice executing plans in the real world and to refine our intuitions about material phenomena. Examples:

Home Construction/repair contractor (We'll need to fix up the house we're trying to buy in Berkeley)

Auto-repair

We're interested in learning skills that require one to pay very close attention to the detail of the physical world - how things actually are instead of what our mental representation says about them. Examples:

Technical Drawing

Stage Magic

We'd like to get better at working with people, both inside the institute and outside. Examples:

Journalist

Science/engineering project manager

We want to become more aware and in control of our emotions. Emotional self-awareness seems very important for productivity, social success and understanding our tendencies toward motivated cognition. Aside from things that traditionally train emotional awareness like acting and meditation, we expect that certain formal systems of kinesthetic practice such as Iyengar yoga will also help because of the close association between emotional states and patterns of muscle tension. Examples:

Personal trainer

Dance instructor

Acting instructor (improv in particular)

Martial art instructor

Specialist in some developed, highly technical system of kinesthetic practice (e.g. Alexander technique, Feldenkrais, Iyengar yoga or kundalini yoga)

We obviously don't have the time for everyone to learn all of these skills right now, but we would like to get the ball rolling on what's available. Whether y...
V is for Value Maximizing Agent: London, November 5
by Scott Alexander — 2010-10-28T18:53:11.821Z

During the last London meetup, which I conveniently scheduled during Easter, I promised that I'd see if the next time, I could make it to London sometime that wasn't a national holiday.

The time has come to break that promise, so I will be in London for a day on Friday November 5th. If anyone wants to meet up, I'll be around that evening at 8 or so to discuss rationality-related issues, chat, or orchestrate a terrorist campaign to overthrow the government while wearing nifty masks. We can try the top floor of that same Waterstone's in Piccadilly Circus, and relocate to Starbucks if it doesn't work out. Does that work for anybody?
I'll be in NYC from Oct. 30 to Nov. 21
by SilasBarta — 2010-10-28T16:27:15.436Z

Sorry for the self-centered post, but I don’t get many chances to be where there are a lot of rationalists. (We’ve counted about four in all of Texas that go to this site.)

Thanks to the Cosmos’s noticing my need for a place to spend my vacation time this year, I will be staying in his NYC apartment while he’s gone. I’ll definitely be at the NYC meetups.

So, if you are anywhere near this area and were interested in meeting me, let me know (either on this thread or privately) and we can work something out.

I’ve informed the NYC OB Google group, but figured there would be good opportunities to meet some of you that aren’t on that list or are a bit further away from the city.
Art and Rationality
by soundchaser — 2010-10-28T13:56:01.396Z

What are your thoughts on the role of Art in rationality (personal or otherwise) and in the singularity?

If one wants to help in the efforts of SIAI (or other organizations) does it make sense to focus on an art form as more than a hobby?

Is it rational to pursue an art form that encourages people to contribute to a cause when there are more direct ways of contributing?

It seems difficult to receive much recognition for one's work in art related fields, but it also seems as though one big success (say, a musician whose music was primarily about the singularity and increasing rationality) would turn many people on to the ideas.