trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[link] Are All Dictator Game Results Artifacts?
by Kaj_Sotala — 2013-05-23T07:08:46.116Z

http://www.epjournal.net/blog/2013/05/are-all-dictator-game-results-artifacts/

You walk into a laboratory, and you read a set of instructions that tell you that your task is to decide how much of a $10 pie you want to give to an anonymous other person who signed up for the experimental session.

This describes, more or less, the Dictator Game, a staple of behavioral economics with a history dating back more than a quarter of a century. The Dictator Game (DG) might not be the drosophila melanogaster of behavioral economics – the Prisoner’s Dilemma can lay plausible claim to that prized analogy – but it could reasonably aspire to an only slightly more modest title, perhaps the e. coli of the discipline. Since the original work, more than 20,000 observations in the DG have been reported.

[...]

How much would participants in a Dictator Game give to the other person if they did not know they were in a Dictator Game study? Simply following me around during the day and recording how much cash I dispense won’t answer this question because in the DG, the money is provided by the experimenter. So, to build a parallel design, the method used must move money to subjects as a windfall so that we can observe how much of this “house money” they choose to give away.

And that is what Winking and Mizer did in a paper now in press and available online (paywall) in Evolution and Human Behavior, using participants, fittingly enough, in Las Vegas. Here’s what they did. Two confederates were needed. The first, destined to become the “recipient,” was occupied on a phone call near a bus stop in Vegas. The second confederate approached lone individuals at the bus stop, indicated that they were late for a ride to the airport, and asked the subject if they wanted the $20 in casino chips still in the confederate’s possession, scamming people into, rather than out of money, in sharp contradiction of the deep traditions of Las Vegas. The question was how many chips the fortunate subject transferred to the nearby confederate.

[...]

In a second condition, the confederate with the chips added a comment to the effect that the subject could “split it with that guy however you want,” indicating the first confederate. This condition brings the study a bit closer, but not much closer, to lab con

...
Preparing for a Rational Financial Planning Sequence
by elharo — 2013-05-22T11:48:38.291Z

What follows is a rough outline for a possible rational financial planning sequence that was inspired by some other recent discussion here. I'm not sure how useful this would be to how many people. I know there are some LessWrongers who would enjoy and learn from this; but I don't know if there are 5, 50, or 500. If you'd like to read it, let me know. If 500 people tell me they can't wait for this, I'll probably write it. If 5 people say maybe they'll glance at it, then probably not.

Part I: Preliminaries:
Financial Rationality
Multiplying uncertainties
The inside and outside views
Interpolation is reliable; extrapolation isn't
Part II: This is important:

Why to save for retirement

Dying alone in a hole: the story of Jane.

Why compound interest is cool

65-year old you will not want to live like a grad student

65-year old you will not want to work like 35-year old you

Existential risk does not defeat personal risk

Existential success does not defeat personal risk

Part III: Analyzing Your Life
(This section needs a lot more fleshing out, and thought)
Personal satisfaction and happiness: do what you love, and adjust your financial expectations accordingly
How much do you need to retire?
When do you want to retire?
How much do you need to live on today?
Big expenses you need to plan for
Increasing Income
College the best financial decision you'll ever make or the worst?
Choosing a career: what is your comparative advantage?
Switching careers
Career Decisions
equity vs salary; steady singles or home run hitter
employee or owner
Career Tactics
Salary negotiation
promotion
when to change jobs
Cutting Expenses
Save more tomorrow
Inheritance
Part IV: The Practical How-to Advice:

Emergency Cash
Credit cards: the good, the bad, and the criminal
Banking
Where to save (tax advantaged accounts)
The impo...
Potential Impacts of Climate Change
by JonahS — 2013-05-22T07:22:20.482Z

According to a recent press release from UC Berkeley’s School of Law:

Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change predicts a grim future for billions of people in this century. It is a factual account of a staggering toll, based on hard data […] “Climate change is the most important problem facing the international community in the 21st century,” Guzman said.

Guzman's view is shared by many.

While I have not read Guzman’s book, I have read GiveWell’s summary of the IPCC, as well as notes on GiveWell’s conversations with climate change experts. Based on these, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that while climate change is an important issue, it’s unlikely to be the most important issue, though there is uncertainty, owing to poorly understood tail risk.

Potential Impacts according to the IPCC

GiveWell recently wrote up a summary and review of some of the impacts of unmitigated climate change, as described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. GiveWell writes:

The report suggests that unmitigated climate change would have extraordinarily negative humanitarian impacts across all of the outcomes we looked at: hunger, water stress, flooding, extreme weather, health, biodiversity, and the economy. Successfully mitigating these negative impacts would carry vast humanitarian benefits.
When looking at the range of possible futures outlined in the report, the bulk of the variation (in humanitarian terms) comes from variation in the level of assumed economic growth and adaptation, rather than variation in the amount of climate change. Of the outcomes we examined, only biodiversity is expected to be unambiguously worse off in the future as a result of both climate change and economic growth.

The most succinc

...
Meetup : Berkeley: To-do lists and other systems
by Nisan — 2013-05-22T01:09:51.917Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: To-do lists and other systems

WHEN:
22 May 2013 07:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Berkeley, CA

Dear all, the topic of tomorrow's meetup is to-do lists, Getting Things Done, and other systems for managing time and tasks. I used to think of this as a mundane topic, but then I realized it's only as mundane as your goals are! I will be especially interested in learning about the systems or habits you employ, if you'd like to share.

The meetup will begin on Wednesday at 7:30pm. For directions to Zendo, see the mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/bayarealesswrong

or call me at:

http://i.imgur.com/Vcafy.png

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: To-do lists and other systems
[LINK] Soylent crowdfunding
by Qiaochu_Yuan — 2013-05-21T19:09:31.034Z

Rob Rhinehart's food replacement Soylent now has a crowdfunding campaign.

Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health, and vastly reduces your environmental impact by eliminating much of the waste and harm coming from agriculture, livestock, and food-related trash.

If you're interested in one or more of these benefits, send in some money! There is also a new blog post.
Meetup : Munich Meetup
by cadac — 2013-05-21T18:31:34.516Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup

WHEN:
01 June 2013 03:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Café "Le copain", Gasteig, Rosenheimer Straße 5, 81667 Munich

The next meetup in Munich will be on Saturday, June 1st. At the last meetup, we decided that we would read the first three posts of the new Epistemology sequence until June, so we can try a more focused discussion the next time. Of course, if you haven’t read them, or if you are new to LessWrong, you are welcome, too. If you have any suggestions for discussion topics or activities, it would be great if you could post them as a comment here.

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup
[LINK]s: Who says Watson is only a narrow AI?
by Shmi — 2013-05-21T18:04:12.240Z

OK, so it covers only a few human occupations:

Trivia games (we all know about that one)

Clinical diagnosis

Banking advisor

and now a call center grunt

But the list is steadily growing.

Now, connect it with a self-driving AI, and your cab e-driver can make small talk, advise on a suspicious skin lesion, evaluate your investment portfolio and help you fix an issue with your smartphone, all while cheaply and efficiently getting you to your destination.

How long until it can evaluate verbal or written customer requirements and write better routine software than your average programmer?
General intelligence test: no domains of stupidity
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-05-21T16:04:59.806Z

It's been a productive conversation on my post criticising the Turing test. I claimed that I wouldn't take the Turing test as definitive evidence of general intelligence if the agent was specifically optimised on the test. I was challenged as to whether I had a different definition of thinking than "able to pass the Turing test". As a consequence of that exchange, I think I do.

Truly general intelligence is impossible, because of various "no free lunch" theorems, that demonstrate that no algorithm can perform well in every environment (intuitively, this makes sense: a smarter being could always design an environment that specifically penalises a particular algorithm). Nevertheless, we have the intuitive definition of a general intelligence as one that performs well in most (or almost all) environments.

I'd like to reverse that definition, and define a general intelligence as one that doesn't perform stupidly in a novel environment. A small change of emphasis, but it gets to the heart of what the Turing test is meant to do, and why I questioned it. The idea of the Turing test is to catch the (putative) AGI performing stupidly. Since we can't test the AGI on every environment, the idea is to have the Turing test be as general as possible in potential. If you give me the questions in advance, I can certainly craft an algorithm that aces that test; similarly, you can construct an AGI that would ace any given Turing test. But since the space of reasonable conversations is combinatorially huge, and since the judge could potentially pick any element from within that, the AGI could not just have a narrow list of responses: it would have to be genuinely generally intelligent, so that it would not end up being stupid on the particular conversation it was in.

That's the theory, anyway. But maybe the space of conversations isn't as vast as all that, especially if the AGI has some simple classification algorithms. Maybe the data on the internet today, combined with some reasonably cunning algorithms, can carry a conversation as well as a human. After all, we are generating examples of conversations by the millions every hour of every day.

Which is why I emphasised testing from outside the domain of competence of the AGI. You need to introduce it to a novel environment, and give it the possibility of being stupid. If the space of human&...
Meetup : Fermi Estimates in Chicago
by Nic_Smith — 2013-05-21T13:47:11.736Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Fermi Estimates in Chicago

WHEN:
25 May 2013 03:00:59PM (-0500)

WHERE:
1 S Franklin, Chicago, IL

We'll be meeting at Argo Tea to discuss and practice Fermi estimates. When should they be used, and what considerations go into them? How many piano tuners ARE in Chicago?

Discussion article for the meetup : Fermi Estimates in Chicago
High yield information sources for Software Development
by rationalnoob — 2013-05-21T06:59:10.779Z

Software developers have to repeatedly and continually learn massive number of new concepts, procedures and techniques related to the latest languages, frameworks and technologies up and down the stack.

The best way to learn would of course be to continuously read books in the spare time one isn't solving problems on the job and apply that knowledge.

I personally find reading books too time consuming for me. Books are presented in a depth first fashion, delving into multiple areas in depth one by one. This is not ideal for becoming productive quickly. There is no explicit ordering of how necessary / frequent a particular concept / technique is either.

What other sources of information / classes of sources are highest yield for picking up new technologies quickly [In the sense of getting productive fast].

An example of a high yield resources are well made slide decks. As an example, a slide deck on a language(e.g. javascript) made for experienced developers new to the language is much faster to process than a book. I can absorb the major features of the language, the syntax etc from a good slide deck in a fraction of the time it would take to read the introductory chapter of a book.

Any general comments (or specific sources) on how one would go about learning a new tech stack quickly would help too.

My current stack is linux, apache, python, django, dynamo, js, backbone
[TED Talk] Peter Singer on Effective Altruism
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-05-21T04:06:28.371Z

http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_singer_the_why_and_how_of_effective_altruism.html

If you're lucky enough to live without want, it's a natural impulse to be altruistic to others. But, asks philosopher Peter Singer, what's the most effective way to give? He talks through some surprising thought experiments to help you balance emotion and practicality -- and make the biggest impact with whatever you can share. Sometimes controversial, always practical ethicist Peter Singer stirs public debate about morality, from animal welfare to global poverty.
Meetup : RTLW Meetup: Contra Dance!
by therufs — 2013-05-20T17:56:59.904Z

Discussion article for the meetup : RTLW Meetup: Contra Dance!

WHEN:
23 May 2013 06:50:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
100 N Greensboro St, Carrboro NC 27510

In lieu of our regular coffee and discussion, this week's meetup will be held at the Century Center in Carrboro, where A GREAT DANCE will be taking place.

If you're a new dancer, there will be an intro lesson at 7 that will cover much of what you'll need to know. Try to arrive by about 6:50.

If you can't arrive in time for the lesson or find you are running late, please come dance anyway! Ruthan, David, Evan, or any other experienced dancer will be happy to help you.

You will need:

* $10 for admission

* Your dancing feet, in smooth-soled shoes, flat or low-heeled. (A few brave people do dance barefoot.)

You might also like to have:

* A water bottle

* An extra shirt or two if you're given to sweating profusely

* A twirly skirt

* A brace or wrap for any problematic joints (if only to signal to other dancers that they should make a point of being gentle)

The dance will run til 10:30, but staying the whole time isn't a requirement. Dancers often partake of potables and comestibles at a local establishment afterwards, though this will be subject to what's open late on a Thursday.

Requisite link to RTLW listserv: http://groups.google.com/group/rtlw Comment here or there if you're interested in a carpool!

Discussion article for the meetup : RTLW Meetup: Contra Dance!
Meetup : Buffalo LW Thursday meetup
by StonesOnCanvas — 2013-05-20T14:35:36.863Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo LW Thursday meetup

WHEN:
23 May 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
University at Buffalo- North Campus 31 Capen Hall

Buffalo-area Less Wrong meetups on the first Sunday and Third Thursday of every month, in 31 Capen Hall at the University at Buffalo - North Campus.

Hey all,
We're going to be talking about inferential distance. We'll have a few articles to demonstrate the idea and how it effects arguments (and perhaps what you could do if you notice its happening to you). As always, don't worry if you haven't read the article, we'll either read it beforehand or give a short cliff notes version of it.

PS. James is doing a lot of the organizing for this one, so we should all give him major brownie points for it!

Discussion article for the meetup : Buffalo LW Thursday meetup
Meetup : West LA Meetup - Probabilistic Graphical Models, Take 2!
by  — 2013-05-19T16:39:29.354Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Probabilistic Graphical Models, Take 2!

WHEN:
22 May 2013 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7:00pm Wednesday, May 22nd.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Lecture/Discussion: Graphs can make understanding causality very intuitive and easy. They are also a powerful tool for doing more complicated modeling. I will introduce PGMs as a concept, and show a few examples where they can be useful.

No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible and useful to everyone who values thinking for themselves. There will be open general conversation until 7:30, and that's always a lot of good, fun, intelligent discussion!

I will bring a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Probabilistic Graphical Models, Take 2!
Terminology suggestion: Say "degrees utility" instead of "utils" to prompt affine thinking
by Sniffnoy — 2013-05-19T08:03:05.421Z

A common mistake people make with utility functions is taking individual utility numbers as meaningful, and performing operations such as adding them or doubling them. But utility functions are only defined up to positive affine transformation.

Talking about "utils" seems like it would encourage this sort of mistake; it makes it sound like some sort of quantity of stuff, that can be meaningfully added, scaled, etc. Now the use of a unit -- "utils" -- instead of bare real numbers does remind us that the scale we've picked is arbitrary, but it doesn't remind us that the zero we've picked is also arbitrary, and encourages such illegal operations as addition and scaling. It suggests linear, not affine.

But there is a common everyday quantity which we ordinarily measure with an affine scale, and that's temperature. Now, in fact, temperatures really do have an absolute zero (and if you make sufficient use natural units, they have an absolute scale, as well), but generally we measure temperature with scales that were invented before that fact was recognized. And so while we may have Kelvins, we have "degrees Fahrenheit" or "degrees Celsius".

If you've used these scales long enough you recognize that it is meaningless to e.g. add things measured on these scales, or to multiply them by scalars. So I think it would be a helpful cognitive reminder to say something like "degrees utility" instead of "utils", to suggest an affine scale like we use for temperature, rather than a linear scale like we use for length or time or mass.

The analogy isn't entirely perfect, because as I've mentioned above, temperature actually can be measured on a linear scale (and with sufficient use of natural units, an absolute scale); but the point is just to prompt the right style of thinking, and in everyday life we usually think of temperature as an (ordered) affine thing, like utility.

As such I recommend saying "degrees utility" instead of "utils". If there is some other familiar quantity we also tend to use an affine scale for, perhaps an analogy with that could be used instead or as well.
Epistemic and Instrumental Tradeoffs
by katydee — 2013-05-19T07:49:00.825Z

Related: What Do We Mean By "Rationality?"

Epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality are both useful. However, some things may benefit one form of rationality yet detract from another. These tradeoffs are often not obvious, but can have serious consequences.

For instance, take the example of learning debate skills. While involved in debate in high school, I learned how to argue a position quite convincingly, muster strong supporting evidence, prepare rebuttals for counterarguments, prepare deflections for counterarguments that are difficult to rebut, and so on.

I also learned how to do so regardless of what side of a topic I was assigned to.

My debate experience has made me a more convincing and more charismatic person, improved my public speaking skills, and bolstered my ability to win arguments. Instrumentally speaking, this can be a very useful skillset. Epistemically speaking, this sort of preparation is very dangerous, and I later had to unlearn many of these thought patterns in order to become better at finding the truth.

For example, when writing research papers, the type of motivated cognition used when searching for evidence to bolster a position in a debate is often counterproductive. Similarly, when discussing what the best move for my business to make is, the ability to argue convincingly for a position regardless of whether it is right is outright dangerous, and lessons learned from debate may actually decrease the odds of making the correct decision-- if I'm wrong but convincing and my colleagues are right but unconvincing, we could very well end up going down the wrong path!

Epistemic and instrumental goals may also conflict in other ways. For instance, Kelly (2003)[1] points out that, from an epistemic rationality perspective, learning movie spoilers is desirable, since they will improve your model of the world. Nevertheless, many people consider spoilers to be instrumentally negative, since they prefer the tension of not knowing what will happen while they watch a movie.

Bostrom (2011)[2] describes many more situations where having a more accurate model of the world can be hazardous to various instrumental objectives. For instance, knowing where the best parties are held on campus can be a very useful piece of knowledge to have in many contexts, but can become a distracting temptation when you're writing your thesis. Knowing that one of yo...
[LINK] Evidence-based giving by Laura and John Arnold Foundation
by brilee — 2013-05-18T19:47:43.270Z

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323372504578466992305986654.html

Apparently a hedge fundie made 4 billion and is giving most of it away to what the WSJ describes as a "moneyball" approach to giving.
[Paper] On the 'Simulation Argument' and Selective Scepticism
by Pablo — 2013-05-18T18:31:10.901Z

Jonathan Birch recently published an interesting critique of Bostrom's simulation argument. Here's the abstract:

Nick Bostrom’s ‘Simulation Argument’ purports to show that, unless we are confident that advanced ‘posthuman’ civilizations are either extremely rare or extremely rarely interested in running simulations of their own ancestors, we should assign significant credence to the hypothesis that we are simulated. I argue that Bostrom does not succeed in grounding this constraint on credence. I first show that the Simulation Argument requires a curious form of selective scepticism, for it presupposes that we possess good evidence for claims about the physical limits of computation and yet lack good evidence for claims about our own physical constitution. I then show that two ways of modifying the argument so as to remove the need for this presupposition fail to preserve the original conclusion. Finally, I argue that, while there are unusual circumstances in which Bostrom’s selective scepticism might be reasonable, we do not currently find ourselves in such circumstances. There is no good reason to uphold the selective scepticism the Simulation Argument presupposes. There is thus no good reason to believe its conclusion.

The paper is behind a paywall, but I have uploaded it to my shared Dropbox folder, here.

EDIT: I emailed the author and am glad to see that he's decided to participate in the discussion below.