trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Why don't automobiles decelerate faster when necessary?
by Will_Newsome — 2011-07-10T14:18:33.277Z

When cara is trailing carb at 60ish MPH and carb suddenly brakes, cara traverses 150 feet or so before its driver notices danger and stamps on the brakes, and an additional 150 feet are traversed after the brakes are engaged. (It's more complicated than that and it's more complicated than that, too. If I'm oversimplifying too much at this phase please let me know.) So obviously the stopping power of the vehicle is important. Now, a huge amount of R&D has been done on automobile braking systems. Not only are modern braking systems automatic supersonic hypnotic funky fresh, modern cars can extract modern energy out of them, too. But... well, I'm having a lot of trouble finding credible statistics, but it looks like a large fraction of the victims of fatal car accidents are in vehicles that get rear-ended at high speeds.0 Not only do they cause a lot of immediate deaths, rear-ending accidents also cause a lot of damage to both vehicles and nervous systems (whip-lash), and it's hard to calculate how that compounds over the years, but you know it's a really huge amount of lost QALYs and moneys. What I don't understand is, it naively seems to me that there are many different ways you can get a tailing vehicle to stop faster, ways that don't involve completely hopeless public education drives or expensive 5% improvements on disc brakes. Like, having a special system specifically for applying high friction directly to the road surface in emergencies, either mechanically or via electromagnetism. Or an air brake0.08 or two. Combine those with existing automatic electronic sensor brake activator thingies and you can stop the vehicle almost immediately.1 Wham bam, way less crushed organs and needless suffering. But I never hear anyone talking about this. Is it because modern cars just don't crash into cars in front of them anymore? If so, would it be too expensive to equip older cars with a simple brake-pressure-remotely-activated dedicated stopping mechanism?14 E.g. a government or non-profit program that equipped them free-of-charge on the cars of inexperienced or risk-prone drivers. Or something? I can think of a lot of engineering point and counterpoint that would make it more or less difficult but it still seems feasible, life-saving, and money-saving. What am I missing? What hard steps did I triv...
Google search for "rationality" has HP:MoR as the 2nd hit.
by Wilka — 2011-07-10T13:38:48.072Z

I've just noticed when searching for "rationality" with Google, HP:MoR is the second hit. Wikipedia is top, which is both good and expected - but I was suprised to see HP:MoR so high up.

I think it's a good thing, anyone looking for info about rationality seems likly to be suprised by Harry Potter being mentioend, and then have a look at it.

The first mention of Less Wrong is on the second page of results, but I wouldn't expect "Less Wrong" to be as attention grabbing as "Harry Potter" when you've just searched for "rationality"
First LW-Meetup in Germany
by David Althaus — 2011-07-10T08:13:46.039Z

The surveys from my [first post](http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/5rz/lesswrongers_from_the_germanspeaking_world_unite/) indicate that
1. the favorite city is Munich,
2. around 3-10 people would attend, (?)
3. the favorite month is August.
Ok, ignoring [the usual advice](http://lesswrong.com/lw/ka/hold_off_on_proposing_solutions/), to get the ball rolling, here is my proposal:
(Let's meet in Munich in August 5th, maybe at a restaurant or a pub.)

ETA: Um, I changed my mind: Munich is still the place to be, but let's meet some time in September!
But if you disagree, please voice your opinion! I'm open to suggestions.
I will add surveys in the comment-section.
Oh, and everyone, including ultimate newbies, is welcome. Yes, *YOU* too!

ETA: [Here you can tell us your favorite date.](http://www.doodle.com/u49xxi6z4zqbihqa)
Prospect Theory: A Framework for Understanding Cognitive Biases
by Scott Alexander — 2011-07-10T05:20:26.365Z

Related to: Shane Legg on Prospect Theory and Computational Finance

This post is on prospect theory partly because it fits the theme of replacing simple utility functions with complicated reward functions, but mostly because somehow Less Wrong doesn't have any posts on prospect theory yet and that needs to change.
Kahneman and Tversky, the first researchers to identify and rigorously study cognitive biases, proved that a simple version of expected utility theory did not accurately describe human behavior. Their response was to develop prospect theory, a model of how people really make decisions. Although the math is less elegant than that of expected utility, and the shapes of the curves have to be experimentally derived, it is worth a look because it successfully predicts many of the standard biases.

(source: Wikipedia)

A prospect theory agent tasked with a decision first sets it within a frame with a convenient zero point, allowing em to classify the results of the decision as either losses or gains. Ey then computes a subjective expected utility, where the subjective expected utility equals the subjective value times the subjective probability. The subjective value is calculated from the real value using a value function similar to the one on the left-hand graph, and the subjective probability is calculated from the real probability using a weighting function similar to the one on the right-hand graph.

Clear as mud? Let's fill some numbers into the functions - the exact assignments don't really matter as long as we capture the spirit of where things change steeply versus slowly - and run through an example.
Imagine a prospect theory agent - let's call him Prospero - trying to decide whether or not to buy an hurricane insurance policy costing $5000/year. Prospero owns assets worth $10,000, and estimates a 50%/year chance of a hurricane destroying his assets; to make things simple, he will be moving in one year and so need not consider the future. Under expected utility theory, he should feel neutral about the policy.
Under prospect theory, he first sets a frame in which to consider the decision; his current state is a natural frame, so we'll go with that.
We see on the left-hand graph that an objective $10,000 loss feels like a $5,000 loss, and an objective $5000 loss feels like a $4000 loss. And we see on the right-hand graph that a 50% ...
Meetup : San Francisco & Tortuga Go Surfing
by Mass_Driver — 2011-07-10T01:36:07.802Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco & Tortuga Go Surfing

WHEN: 10 July 2011 06:39:31PM (-0700)

WHERE: Nor Cal Surf Shop, 5460 Pacific Coast Highway, Pacifica, CA

Low-key, afternoon fun at the beach for beginners & amateurs. I'll be offering rides from central San Francisco down to Pacifica, where the surf shop rents wetsuits & boogieboards or surfboards for about $20 total.

The surf shop has a free, suburban-style parking lot in a plaza with several good places to get lunch, and the back door opens right onto the beach. There are great views of the waves and the surrounding hills. Surf is usually light (2-6 ft waves), if a little choppy.

I'll be leaving San Francisco at 1 pm, arriving at Pacifica by 2 pm, and leaving around 6 pm. Everyone is welcome to join me for whatever part of that time they like; if you need a ride, please RSVP as soon as possible by e-mailing [redacted] or texting [redacted].

This event will be repeated several more times over the summer, but we'll all get better as time goes on, so join us now while we're still just as awkward as you are!

Discussion article for the meetup : San Francisco & Tortuga Go Surfing
Torchwood
by MatthewBaker — 2011-07-10T01:07:53.470Z

I don't know if anyone on LW watches DoctorWho/Torchwood but the american Torchwood remake's first episode just came out and the premise is that everyone on earth loses the ability to die: S04 EP1 the "Day of Miracles"

Enjoy, the reason i added it to discussion was because of the whole never die concept and one of the best quotes of all time :)

"And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star, they won't tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they're old enough to bear it; and when they learn they'll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed" [Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality)

-Matt
Wanting vs. Liking Revisited
by Scott Alexander — 2011-07-09T20:54:49.635Z

In Are Wireheads Happy? I discussed the difference between wanting something and liking something. More recently, Luke went deeper into some of the science in his post Not for the Sake of Pleasure Alone.
In the comments of the original post, cousin_it asked a good question: why implement a mind with two forms of motivation? What, exactly, are "wanting" and "liking" in mind design terms?
Tim Tyler and Furcas both gave interesting responses, but I think the problem has a clear answer in a reinforcement learning perspective (warning: formal research on the subject does not take this view and sticks to the "two different systems of different evolutionary design" theory). "Liking" is how positive reinforcement feels from the inside; "wanting" is how the motivation to do something feels from the inside. Things that are positively reinforced generally motivate you to do more of them, so liking and wanting often co-occur. With more knowledge of reinforcement, we can begin to explore why they might differ.

CONTEXT OF REINFORCEMENT
Reinforcement learning doesn't just connect single stimuli to responses. It connects stimuli in a context to responses. Munching popcorn at a movie might be pleasant; munching popcorn at a funeral will get you stern looks at best.
In fact, lots of people eat popcorn at a movie theater and almost nowhere else. Imagine them, walking into that movie theater and thinking "You know, I should have some popcorn now", maybe even having a strong desire for popcorn that overrides the diet they're on - and yet these same people could walk into, I don't know, a used car dealership and that urge would be completely gone.
These people have probably eaten popcorn at a movie theater before and liked it. Instead of generalizing to "eat popcorn", their brain learned the lesson "eat popcorn at movie theaters". Part of this no doubt has to do with the easy availability of popcorn there, but another part probably has to do with context-dependent reinforcement.

I like pizza. When I eat pizza, and get rewarded for eating pizza, it's usually after smelling the pizza first. The smell of pizza becomes a powerful stimulus for the behavior of eating pizza, and I want pizza much more after smelling it, even though how much I like pizza remains constant. I've never had pizza at breakfast, and in fact the context of breakfast is directly competing with my normal stimuli for eat...
Thinking without words?
by PhilGoetz — 2011-07-09T18:25:40.371Z

Before language, people must have thought without words. I often have the impression that I have a thought fully-formed in my head, yet I wait to listen to it unfold in words before moving on to the next thought. Perhaps I could think much faster if I weren't addicted to words.

Has anyone developed techniques for thinking without words?

This would have a little in common with Buddhist practices of emptying your mind, but wouldn't be the same thing. For one thing, Buddhists also try to empty their minds of images. More importantly, they are trying not to think, while I'm trying to think - just not unpack everything into words.
Guardian column on ugh fields, mentions LW
by Kaj_Sotala — 2011-07-09T12:34:05.651Z

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/08/change-your-life-ugh-fields

In 1920, in a jaw-droppingly unethical experiment that's mainly remembered today as an example of how not to conduct a psychological study, John B Watson set out to prove a point about fear – using, as his guinea pig, an eight-month-old boy in a Baltimore hospital. Little Albert, as he became known, was taught to associate a white rat with a terrifying sound – a steel bar was struck with a hammer behind his back whenever he reached towards the animal – until, the story goes, he was terrified of anything white and furry: dogs, a coat, Watson in a Santa Claus costume. (Watson, apparently, intended to reverse the effect, but Albert was removed from the hospital before he could do so.) It would be entertaining to propose something similar to a university ethics committee today: they'd spring from their seats in horror, like Little Albert seeing a sheepskin rug.

In fact, most of the details of Little Albert's "conditioning" have since been thrown into doubt. But something not too dissimilar afflicts many of us. When an experience gets associated with acute bad feelings, especially in childhood – being around dogs, say, or swimming pools, or moving house or money troubles – that category of thing can become fearsome for ever. But there's an additional twist I hadn't considered until I encountered it recently on the rationality blog lesswrong.com, where it's termed an "ugh field": what if one effect of finding some area of life particularly stress-inducing is that we get conditioned into not even thinking about it at all?

"A problem with the human mind is it's a horrific kludge that will fail when you most need it not to," writes one Less Wrong blogger, who argues that ugh fields are a case in point: "If a person receives constant negative conditioning via unhappy thoughts whenever their mind goes into a certain zone of thought, they will develop a psychological flinch mechanism around the thought."

Suppose, in early adulthood, you have a few bad experiences with missed credit card bills and penalty fees. A rational person might resolve to think more about bills in future, to avoid repeat problems. But a fear-conditioned mind, erecting an ugh field around the subject, might become more forgetful with money, to avoid experiencing the emotions associated wi

...
2011 Buhl Lecture, Scott Aaronson on Quantum Complexity
by  — 2011-07-09T04:43:46.010Z

I was planning to post this in the main area, but my thoughts are significantly less well-formed than I thought they were. Anyway, I hope that interested parties find it nonetheless.

In the Carnegie Mellon 2011 Buhl Lecture, Scott Aaronson gives a remarkably clear and concise review of P, NP, other fundamentals in complexity theory, and their quantum extensions. In particular, beginning around the 46 minute mark, a sequence of examples is given in which the intuition from computability theory would have accurately predicted physical results (and in some cases this actually happened, so it wasn't just hindsight bias).

In previous posts we have learned about Einstein's arrogance and Einstein's speed. This pattern of results flowing from computational complexity to physical predictions seems odd to me in that context. Here we are using physical computers to derive abstractions about the limits of computation, and from there we are successfully able to intuit limits of physical computation (e.g. brains computing abstractions of the fundamental limits of brains computing abstractions...) At what point do we hit the stage where individual scientists can rationally know that results from computational complexity theory are more fundamental than traditional physics? It seems like a paradox wholly different than Einstein rationally knowing (from examining bits of theory-space evidence rather than traditional-experiment-space evidence) that relativity would hold true. In what sort of evidence space can physical brain computation yielding complexity limits count as bits of evidence factoring into expected physical outcomes (such as the exponential smallness of the spectral gap of NP-hard-Hamiltonians from the quantum adiabatic theorem)?

Maybe some contributors more well-versed in complexity theory can steer this in a useful direction.
Can cryonically-frozen people *really* expect to be revived?
by InquilineKea — 2011-07-08T23:27:05.843Z

NOTE: I have no clue why some of the spaces are "screwy" - the formatting is totally fine when I was typing this post out.

===

I think it's a pretty MAJOR assumption that wealth can *really* transfer over numerous generations.

Say this: say 1 million people a year are cryonically frozen. okay. and they pay with their own money.

Then (assuming revival technologies don't come 100 years from now), then that's 100 million people. Sure, they paid with their own money, but we must remember that the value of wealth/money is psychological. Economics depends on contract enforcement (where there is a significant penalty if you don't comply), which is a subset of the set of incentives, which are all about motivating people to do shit.

And the thing is - it's quite possible that a disaster could hit, forcing people to move all the cryonically frozen bodies somewhere else (are most of the bodies stored in Phoenix,AZ - given that it's where Alcor is? I don't trust that place over the long run, given that it's experiencing unsustainable growth that's draining the Colorado River out, that the region is experiencing a massive growth in energy usage [especially from ACs that just dissipates the heat out and make the city even hotter], and that the effects of climate change are expected to be more severe in Arizona than they are in most other places [1], especially given that the Hadley Cell might expand northward). Solar power could save it, but I'm not sure if it will scale there in several decades

And if that happens (or if any relocation is needed), then resources+motivation is limited and no one wants to do it. Especially because that there are few negative consequences if the bodies are left to rot - simply because after a few generations, most cryonically frozen people may be almost completely forgotten - except for the ones who were as famous and respectable as Einstein/Jefferson/etc. Surprisingly, this could be a rational argument for having children, since having children and grandchildren might increase the chances that someone might actually care about trying to revive you once we have the technology for cryonic revival.

Obviously, it could be an incentive for others to unfreeze the body if the person who came back alive was SO grateful that he was willing to repay the favor

...
Meetup : Tortuga Rationalists Meetup
by divia — 2011-07-08T21:34:47.671Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Tortuga Rationalists Meetup

WHEN:
14 July 2011 02:34:01PM (-0700)

WHERE:
850 Williams Way, Mountain View, CA

We are a South Bay LessWrong Rationality group who meets every Thursday at the Tortuga (http://tortuga.coop) lounge in Mountain View for discussions, activities, and socializing.

Discussion article for the meetup : Tortuga Rationalists Meetup
Discussion: Counterintuitive ways of teaching knowledge
by Raw_Power — 2011-07-08T21:02:00.286Z

If Miss Frizzle could do it, why couldn't we? Do we really have to be rational all the time in order to teach rationality?breaking the rules of reality within the realm of a work of fiction and making the protagonists (or the audience if it's a videogame) figure the new rules out for themselves... Actually now that I think of it videogamers are very used to adapting themselves to entirely new sets of physics on a weekly basis... but no-one has ever made them stop and think about it for a while, AFAIK.

I think *Methods of Rationality* does this job pretty well, but it'd be nice if there were more fiction in this style, and not just *fan*fiction at that. Alicorn's *Luminosity* also goes through an itneresting route: it applies rationality to interpersonal relationships, character exploration, group dynamics, and *applied* powers, and a lot of this it does better than *Methods* (which relies quite a lot on archetypes, to the detriment of realism but also for great benefit of glorious awesomeness, and it's kind of a holdover from the source material). But *Luminosity* falls rather short of exploring the deeper theoretical implications of such a world.
Note how *none* of these books are for kids. Child psychology is noticeably different from that of a late teen or an adult. There are some concepts they can't even *grasp*. A series of works that would teach them the key rationalist virtues and some rational ways of looking at their environment and improving their lives would be great. I'm not talking about writing books intended towards geeky kids (awesome though such a thing may be), but about teaching rationality in a way that'd be appealing to *all* kids.
In that sense, *The Magic Bus* taught us a lot about valuing curiosity, not taking the first possible explanation, and generally having fun discovering the laws of reality... in incredibly unrealistic and science-breaking ways (which were dutifully pointed out in a special section after each episode, in which they generally managed to both make us understand that there was more to the stuff we saw than what they showed us, but that sometimes it was okay to take an Artistic License to get the point across... something people like Sheldon Cooper seem chronically unable to grasp, and I'm told there are people who share those opinions in Real Life...). *My Little Pony: Friendship*, on the .other hand, tau...
The Sequences in MP3 Format
by r_claypool — 2011-07-08T19:40:55.699Z

I can drive and listen, but I can't drive and read! The same is true for most kinds of exercise.

If you are in my situation - wanting to read the sequences without having enough time - feel free to download these audio files for your smart phone or MP3 player.

My vision is to build a podcast feed or downloadable MP3 repository of all the major sequences. The files I have now are not organized enough to scale out to hundreds of posts, and some of the artifacts of text-to-speech could be reduced with the right pre-processing. Before I spend more time on this, I want the right tools and process in place.

Any ideas on how to to proceed? Would you like to help? How should I publish these files?
Meetup : Seattle Regular Sunday Meetup
by jsalvatier — 2011-07-08T18:27:16.666Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Regular Sunday Meetup

WHEN:
10 July 2011 04:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
414 50th St NE, Seattle, WA

The biweekly meetup is happening at the regular place and time: We will be discussing procrastination. I will go over the basics of the academic research and we will do some exercises. The material comes from Lukeprog (see his procrastination literature survey). Since we'll be doing some anti-procrastination exercises, it will be helpful to think of some areas where you would like to procrastinate less. Examples: taxes, cleaning your house, sitting down to do necessary practice or reading etc. I think it would also be fun to watch the short cartoon To Be, which is about the philosophical difficulties of intuitive conceptions of identity. It's short and funny. We will be ordering take out again, so please bring some cash if you would like to eat. The official end of the meetup will be 6:30pm, but people are welcome to stay and hang out after that.

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Regular Sunday Meetup
What would a good article on Bayesian liberty look like?
by DataPacRat — 2011-07-08T15:01:57.992Z

Politics is the mind-killer; but rationality is the science of /winning/, even when dealing with political issues.

I've been trying to apply LessWrong and Bayesian methods to the premises and favored issues of a particular political group. (Their most basic premise is roughly equivalent to declaring that Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma programs should be 'nice'.) But, given how quickly my previous thread trying to explore this issue was downvoted into disappearing, and many of the comments I've received on similar threads, I may have a rather large blind spot preventing me from being able /to/ properly apply LW methods in this area.

So I'll try a different approach - instead of giving it a go myself again, I'll simply ask, what do /you/ think a good LW post about liberty, freedom, and fundamental human rights would look like?