trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Avoiding Failure: Fallacy Finding
by Patrick — 2009-07-03T17:59:38.239Z

When I was in high school, one of the exercises we did was to take a newspaper column, and find all of the fallacies it employed. It was a fun thing to do, and is good awareness raising for critical thinking, but it probably wouldn't be enough to stave off being deceived by an artful propagandist unless I did it until it was reflexive. To catch the fallacy being, I usually have to read a sentence three or four times to see the underlying logic behind it and remember why the logic is invalid, when I'm confronted by something as fallacy ridden as an ad for the Love Calculator, I just give up in exhaustion. Worse, when I'm watching television, I can't even rewind to see what they said (I suspect the fallacy count is higher too).

To counter this, (and to further hone my fallacy finding skills), I've extended the fallacy finding exercise to work on video. Take a video from a genre that generally has a high fallacy per minute ratio (e.g. Campaign ads, political debates, speeches, regular ads, Oprah) and edit the video to play a klaxon sound whenever someone commits a logical fallacy or gets a fact wrong, followed by the name of the fallacy they committed flashing on screen.

EDIT: I've made one of these and uploaded it to Youtube. Thank you Eliezer and CannibalSmith for the encouragement. You can find other debates at CNN, and youtube lets you do annotations so no editing software is technically required. I'll be posting further videos to this post as I make/find them.
The Fixed Sum Fallacy
by cousin_it — 2009-07-03T13:01:55.583Z

(Update: Patrick points out the subject of this post is already well-known as the gambler's fallacy. I really should have read Tversky and Kahneman before posting.)

You're flipping a coin 100 times, the first five throws came up heads, what do you expect on the next throw? If you believe the coin to be fair, you allocate 0.5 credence to each face coming up. If your Bayesian prior allowed for biased coins, you update and answer something like 0.6 to 0.4. So far it's all business as usual.

There exists, however, a truly bizarre third possibility that assigns reduced credence to heads. The reasoning goes like this: at the outset we expected about 50 heads and 50 tails. Your first five throws have used up some of the available heads, while all 50 tails are still waiting for us ahead. When presented so starkly, the reasoning sounds obviously invalid, but here's the catch: people use it a lot, especially when thinking about stuff that matters to them. Happy days viewed as payback for sad days, rich times for poor times, poor people suffering because rich people wallow, and of course all of that vice versa.

I initially wanted to dub this the "fallacy of fate" but decided to leave that lofty name available for some equally lofty concept. "Fallacy of scarcity", on the other hand, is actively used but doesn't quite cover all the scenarios I had in mind. So let's call this way of thinking the "fixed sum fallacy", or maybe "counterbalance bias".

Now contrarians would point out that some things in life are fixed-sum, e.g. highly positional values. But other things aren't. Your day-to-day happiness obviously resembles repeatedly throwing a biased coin more than it resembles withdrawing value from a fixed pool: being happy today doesn't decrease your average happiness over all future days. (I have no sources on that besides my common sense; if I'm wrong, call me out.) So we could naturally hypothesize that fixed-sum thinking, when it arises, serves as some kind of coping mechanism. Maybe the economists or psychologists among us could say more; sounds like a topic for Robin?
Who do we care about?
by KatjaGrace — 2009-07-03T07:18:00.000Z

Humans exercise compassion regarding:

family more than anyone

people they know more than strangers

geographically close people more than distant people

Visible people more than not visible people

culturally similar people more than culturally different people

few people more than many people (even one person more than two people, in total, if I recall)

people who can’t be helped by others more than people who aren’t being helped by others (bystander effect)

causing and stopping death more than stopping and causing birth

people who exist already more than potential people

actions more than inactions

those suffering more than those without as much pleasure as they could have

people who will recover health or wealth with our help more than those whose suffering will merely be reduced

high status people more than low status people

big animals more than small animals

women more than men

children more than adults

cute things more than ugly things

the innocent more than the guilty

Our moral feelings are not concerned for others’ wellbeing per se. They are very contingent. What’s the pattern? An obvious contender is whether we can be rewarded or punished by the beneficiary of our ‘compassion’. Distant, helpless, non-existent and low status people can’t easily return the favour or punish. Inaction and shared blame are hard to punish, as everyone is responsible. There are some things that don’t fit this, but most can be explained e.g. children are weak, but if they are ours we genetically benefit by caring and if they are not they probably have someone powerful caring about them for that reason. Got a better explanation?

I don’t decide what to do by guessing the pattern behind my moral emotions and trying to follow it better. If you do, perhaps try to care only for the powerful. If you don’t, notice that your moral feelings are probably fooling you into what’s tantamount to murder.
Harnessing Your Biases
by swestrup — 2009-07-02T20:45:28.821Z

Theoretically, my 'truth' function, the amount of evidence I need to cache something as 'probably true and reliable' should be a constant. I find, however, that it isn't. I read a large amount of scientific literature every day, and only have time to investigate a scant amount of it in practice. So, typically I rely upon science reporting that I've found to be accurate in the past, and only investigate the few things that have direct relevance to work I am doing (or may end up doing).

Today I noticed something about my habits. I saw an article on how string theory was making testable predictions in the realm of condensed matter physics, and specifically about room-temperature superconductors. While a pet interest of mine, this is not an area that I'm ever likely to be working in, but the article seemed sound and so I decided it was an interesting fact, and moved on, not even realizing that I had cached it as probably true.

A few minutes later it occurred to me that some of my friends might also be interested in the article. I have a Google RSS feed that I use to republish occasional articles that I think are worth reading. I have a known readership of all of 2. Suddenly, I discovered that what I had been willing to accept as 'probably true' on my own behalf was no longer good enough. Now I wanted to look at the original paper itself, and to see if I could find any learnéd refutations or comments.

This seems to be because my reputation was now, however tangentially, "on the line" since I have a reputation in my circle of friends as the science geek and would not want to damage it by steering someone wrong. Now, clearly this is wrong headed. My theory of truth should be my theory of truth, period.

One could argue, I suppose, that information that I store internally can only affect my own behavior while information that I disseminate can affect the behaviour of an arbitrarily large group of people, and so a more stringent standard should apply to things I tell others. In fact that was the first justification that sprang to mind when I noticed my double standard.

Its a bogus argument though, as none of my friends are likely to repeat the article or post it in their blogs and so the dissemination has only a tiny probability of propagating by that route. However, once its in my head and I'm treating it as true, I'm very likely to trot it out as an interesting fa...
Rationality Quotes - July 2009
by SilasBarta — 2009-07-02T18:35:19.802Z

(Last month's started a little late, I thought I'd bring it back to its original schedule.)

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

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

Do not quote yourself (or your sockpuppets).

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

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Fourth London Rationalist Meeting?
by Richard_Kennaway — 2009-07-02T09:56:03.799Z

It's been the first Sunday of the month so far, but I haven't seen any announcement for this month yet. There was a discussion, but no conclusion. Is anything happening?

ETA: This would have appeared a day and a half ago, but I did not notice that it had only been stored as a draft and not published. When logged in, it was impossible to notice that I was the only person seeing this. Feature request for this site: add a visual indication that something is only a draft, e.g. a "Publish" link, perhaps with the words somewhere, Unpublished draft.
Book Review: Complications
by Annoyance — 2009-07-01T18:39:03.138Z

Atul Gawande's Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science is a mixed bag for rationalists. Written as a series of essays organized into three sections entitled Fallibility, Mystery, and Uncertainty, the book as a whole is of questionable value, but the sections need to be considered individually for their worth to be accurately recognized.

Fallibility examines a number of issues involving error and how it can be avoided in medicine, including but not limited to: how computers are better than humans at making diagnoses, the factors that are known to negatively influence human reasoning when applied to diagnosis and treatment, how and why doctors make errors, what happens when doctors "go bad", and ways that the system fails and succeeds at curbing irresponsible physicians. The section dealing with the field of anesthesiology is especially interesting, as Gawande recounts the changes that made it possible for the death rate due to general anesthesia to be reduced to a twentieth of its previous value midway through this century.

What is distressing is that Mystery and Uncertainty do not represent good examples of the principles that Gawande demonstrates he understands in Fallibility, supporting his assertions with vivid anecdotes instead of reasoning from principles. One story is especially obnoxious, as Gawande recounts how a "gut feeling" about a case of infection causes him to persuade a patient to undergo an extensive biopsy which reveals she has life-threatening necrotizing fasciitis, caused by the popularly-known "flesh-eating bacteria". He explicitly acknowledges that he had no logical reason for regarding the case as unusual, that all appearances indicated a routine cellulitis which was approximately three thousand times more likely than necrotizing fasciitis was - and that he had recently taken care of a patient who had died agonizingly from a massive infection of the flesh-eating bacteria. And yet the story is presented as an example of how to deal with uncertainty.

If a normal infection had been present, the incident would likely not have been recounted and possibly not even remembered with clarity by Gawande. We don't know - and likely Gawande doesn't know either - whether his hunches are more likely than not to be accurate. As he discusses himself earlier in the book, such hunches are known...
Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-07-01T02:19:18.764Z

One occasionally sees such remarks as, "What good does it do to go around being angry about the nonexistence of God?" (on the one hand) or "Babies are natural atheists" (on the other). It seems to me that such remarks, and the rather silly discussions that get started around them, show that the concept "Atheism" is really made up of two distinct components, which one might call "untheism" and "antitheism".

A pure "untheist" would be someone who grew up in a society where the concept of God had simply never been invented - where writing was invented before agriculture, say, and the first plants and animals were domesticated by early scientists. In this world, superstition never got past the hunter-gatherer stage - a world seemingly haunted by mostly amoral spirits - before coming into conflict with Science and getting slapped down.

Hunter-gatherer superstition isn't much like what we think of as "religion". Early Westerners often derided it as not really being religion at all, and they were right, in my opinion. In the hunter-gatherer stage the supernatural agents aren't particularly moral, or charged with enforcing any rules; they may be placated with ceremonies, but not worshipped. But above all - they haven't yet split their epistemology. Hunter-gatherer cultures don't have special rules for reasoning about "supernatural" entities, or indeed an explicit distinction between supernatural entities and natural ones; the thunder spirits are just out there in the world, as evidenced by lightning, and the rain dance is supposed to manipulate them - it may not be perfect but it's the best rain dance developed so far, there was that famous time when it worked...

If you could show hunter-gatherers a raindance that called on a different spirit and worked with perfect reliability, or, equivalently, a desalination plant, they'd probably chuck the old spirit right out the window. Because there are no special rules for reasoning about it - nothing that denies the validity of the Elijah Test that the previous rain-dance just failed. Faith is a post-agricultural concept. Before you have chiefdoms where the priests are a branch of government, the gods aren't good, they don't enforce the chiefdom's rules, and there's no penalty for questioning them.

And so the Untheist culture, when it invents science, simply concludes in a v...
What's In A Name?
by Scott Alexander — 2009-06-29T12:54:11.922Z

Marge: You changed your name without consulting me?
Homer: That's the way Max Power is, Marge. Decisive.
--The Simpsons

In honor of Will Powers and his theories about self-control, today I would like to talk about my favorite bias ever, the name letter effect. The name letter effect doesn't cause global existential risk or stock market crashes, and it's pretty far down on the list of things to compensate for. But it's a good example of just how insidious biases can be and of the egoism that permeates every level of the mind.

The name letter effect is your subconscious preference for things that sound like your own name. This might be expected to mostly apply to small choices like product brand names, but it's been observed in choices of spouse, city of residence, and even career. Some evidence comes from Pelham et al's Why Susie Sells Seashells By The Seashore:

The paper's first few studies investigate the relationship between a person's name and where they live. People named Phil were found more frequently than usual in Philadelphia, people named Jack in Jacksonville, people named George in Georgia, and so on with p < .001. To eliminate the possibility of the familiarity effect causing parents to subconsciously name their children after their place of residence, further studies were done with surnames and with people who moved later in life, both with the same results. The results held across US and Canadian city names as well as US state names, and were significant both for first name and surname.

In case that wasn't implausible enough, the researchers also looked at association between birth date and city of residence: that is, were people born on 2/02 more likely to live in the town of Two Harbors, and 3/03 babies more likely to live in Three Forks? With p = .003, yes, they are.

The researchers then moved on to career choices. They combed the records of the American Dental Association and the American Bar association looking for people named either Dennis, Denice, Dena, Denver, et cetera, or Lawrence, Larry, Laura, Lauren, et cetera. That is: were there more dentists named Dennis and lawyers named Lawrence than vice versa? Of the various statistical analyses they performed, most said yes, some at < .001 level. Other studies determined that there was a suspicious surplus of geologists...
Controlling your inner control circuits
by Kaj_Sotala — 2009-06-26T17:57:56.343Z

On the topic of: Control theory

Yesterday, PJ Eby sent the subscribers of his mailing list a link to an article describing a control theory/mindhacking insight he'd had. With his permission, here's a summary of that article. I found it potentially life-changing. The article seeks to answer the question, "why is it that people often stumble upon great self-help techniques or productivity tips, find that they work great, and then after a short while the techniques either become ineffectual or the people just plain stop using them anyway?", but I found it to have far greater applicability than just that.

Richard Kennaway already mentioned the case of driving a car as an example where the human brain uses control systems, and Eby mentioned another: ask a friend to hold their arm out straight, and tell them that when you push down on their hand, they should lower their arm. And what you’ll generally find is that when you push down on their hand, the arm will spring back up before they lower it... and the harder you push down on the hand, the harder the arm will pop back up! That's because the control system in charge of maintaining the arm's position will try to keep up the old position, until one consciously realizes that the arm has been pushed and changes the setting.

Control circuits aren't used just for guiding physical sequences of actions, they also regulate the workings of our mind. A few hours before typing out a previous version of this post, I was starting to feel restless because I hadn't accomplished any work that morning. This has often happened to me in the past - if, at some point during the day, I haven't yet gotten started on doing anything, I begin to feel anxious and restless. In other words, in my brain there's a control circuit monitoring some estimate of "accomplishments today". If that value isn't high enough, it starts sending an error signal - creating a feeling of anxiety - in an attempt to bring that value into the desired range.

The problem with this is that more often than not, that anxiety doesn't push me into action. Instead I become paralyzed and incapable of getting anything started. Eby proposes that this is because of two things: one, the control circuits are dumb and don't actually realize what they're doing, so they may actually take counter-productive action. Two, there may be several control circuits in the brain whi...
The Great Brain is Located Externally
by Alicorn — 2009-06-25T22:29:32.820Z

How many of the things you "know" do you have memorized?

Do you remember how to spell all of those words you let the spellcheck catch? Do you remember what fraction of a teaspoon of salt goes into that one recipe, or would you look at the list of ingredients to be sure? Do you remember what kinds of plastic they recycle in your neighborhood, or do you delegate that task to a list attached with a magnet to the fridge?

If I asked you what day of the month it is today, would you know, or would you look at your watch/computer clock/the posting date of this post?

Before I lost my Palm Pilot, I called it my "external brain". It didn't really fit the description; with no Internet access, it mostly held my contact list, class schedule, and grocery list. And a knockoff of Minesweeper. Still, in a real enough sense, it remembered things for me.The vast arena of knowledge at our fingertips in the era of constant computing has, ironically, brought it farther away. It seems nearer: after all, now, if you are curious about Zanzibar, Wikipedia is a few keystrokes away. Before the Internet, you'd probably have been looking at a trip to the library and a while wrestling with the card catalog; and that would be if you lived in an affluent, literate society. If you didn't, good luck knowing Zanzibar exists in the first place!

But if you were an illiterate random peasant farmer in some historical venue, and you needed to know the growing season of taro or barley or insert-your-favorite-staple-crop-here, Wikipedia would have been superfluous: you would already know it. It would be unlikely that you would find a song lyrics website of any use, because all of the songs you'd care about would be ones you really knew, in the sense of having heard them sung by real people who could clarify the words on request, as opposed to the "I think I heard half of this on the radio at the dentist's office last month" sense.

Everything you would need to know would be important enough to warrant - and keep - a spot in your memory.

So in a sense, propositional knowledge is being gradually supplanted by the procedural. You need only know how to find information, to be able to use it after a trivial delay. This requires some snippet of propositional data - to find a song lyric, you need a long enough string that you won't turn up 99% noise ...
Coming Out
by cousin_it — 2009-06-25T16:16:47.650Z

It's 11 p.m. on a Friday night and I'm heading home from work, shivering in the cold wind. My mind's divided on what to do after getting home: practice my guitar stuff and go to sleep, or head to a nightclub and get the fatigue out of my system? Given two nearly identical emotional assessments and honestly not knowing in advance which to pick, I suddenly recall LessWrong and decide to use logic. Trying to apply logic in real life is an unfamiliar sensation but I prime my mind for recognizing accurate arguments and drift away for a moment, a proven technique from my mathematician days...

By the time I reach my front door, the solution for discriminating between two outcomes of equal utility has arrived and it's a logical slam dunk. Tonight is Friday night. There will be ample opportunity to practice music tomorrow and the day after that. So get dressed and go dance now.

It worked.

You might be tempted to dismiss my little exercise as rationalization and I can't really convince you otherwise. But the specific tool used for rationalization does matter. What if I'd made that decision based on some general ethical principle or a pithy quotation I'd heard somewhere? Success or failure would have prompted an equally ill-specified update of my held beliefs, the same way they have meandered aimlessly all my life. A single human lifetime sees a precious few belief-changing events — definitely not enough bits to select an adequate emotional framework, unless you started out with a good one. Not so with logic. Any vague verbal principle, however much you admire it, is always allowed to give way under you if you base your decisions on it... but logic is the ground floor.

The above episode has hit me hard for reasons I can't quite verbalize. For the past few days I've been obsessively going over Eliezer's old posts. No longer viewing them in the mindset of "articulate dissent": this time I went searching for useful stuff. Turns out that most of his concrete recommendations are either way beyond my current abilities, or solving problems I haven't reached yet. Forget expected utility calculations, I don't even have the basics down!

Logic is the ground floor. Disregard the defense of biases. If you find yourself falling, use logic.

I remember a quote from functional programming researcher Frank Atanassow about his formal semantics enlightenment, similar in sp...