trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Ongoing Ohio Meetup
by daenerys — 2012-01-23T03:38:53.703Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Ongoing Ohio Meetup

WHEN:
19 February 2012 04:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Max & Erma's Restaurant, 123 Gano Road, Wilmington, OH 45177-8848

Ohio just had its first-ever LessWrong meet-up! It was such a success, with 13 amazing people showing, that we decided to make it a monthly shindig.

The Ohio LessWrong group will be holding a meet-up every third Sunday of the month, at the Max&Erma's off I-71. This is less than an hour from Cincinnati, Columbus, and Dayton.

Cincinnati and Columbus will also be holding smaller meet-ups on a more frequent basis.

Please PM me with your email address if you would like to join the Ohio LessWrong discussion group, and receive information on the city-specific meet-ups (which will probably not be posted here).

Discussion article for the meetup : Ongoing Ohio Meetup
Question Regarding Motorcycling
by Costanza — 2012-01-22T21:42:32.145Z

A recent [discussion thread](http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/9j2/the_singularity_institute_is_hiring_an_executive/) seems to have devolved into a discussion of the relative merits and demerits of motorcycling. I wonder what the LessWrong community at large would say about motorcycling in a modern urban or suburban environment after some considered thought on the issue, particularly with regard to safety, and the practicality of cryonics, and with further consideration of local conditions.
For instance, here in Southern California, I'm under the impression that a lot of people use motorcycles the way runners at Pamplona use the bulls: to display fearlessness. I'm under the impression that motorcycling in (for instance) Britain is dominated by more practical concerns. Is this wrong? More generally, is motorcycling an unjustifiable risk for a rationalist?
Startups as a Rationality Test Bed?
by beoShaffer — 2012-01-22T20:50:10.137Z

What attributes make a task useful for rationality verification?

After thinking it over I believe I have identified three main components. The first is that the task should be as grounded in the real world as is possible. The second is that the task should be involve a wide variety of subtasks, preferably ones that involve decision making and/or forecasting. This will help insure that the effect is from general rationality, rather than from the rationality training helping with domain specific skills. The third is that there should be clear measure of successes for the task.

As I am not personally involved with the field I could be missing something important, but it seems like founding a successful startup would fulfill all three components. I propose that investigating the effect of giving startup founders rationality training would be a good basis for an experiment. Unfortunately, I do not know if it would be feasible to run such an experiment in real life. Thus, I am turning to the LW community to see if the people reading this have any suggestions.

-addendum

I didn't go into details about exact exprimental methods for a couple of reasons. Partially because I assumed, apparently incorrectly, that it was obvious that any experiment for testing rationality would be conducted with the best experimental protocols that we could manage. But mostly, because I thought that it would be good to get feed back on the basic idea of rationally verification + startups ?= good before spending time going into detail about things like control groups, random assignment ect.

I welcome suggestions along those lines, and given the attention this has received will try to go back and add some of my own ideas when I have time, but wanted to make cleat that I wasn't intending this post as a detailed experimental design.

Also does anyone have any idea why the first part of this post has different spacing from the second? It's not intentional on my part.
Study Hacks on Convenience as Anti-Productivity
by billswift — 2012-01-22T19:50:56.262Z

Distraction is a Symptom of a Deeper Problem: The Convenience Principle and the Destruction of American Productivity is a good article on distractions versus getting things done. With extra emphasis on how many of our distractions are the result of a desire for convenience rather than something more substantial.

Due to its ubiquity, it’s easy to see the convenience principle as self-evident. I argue that it’s actually contrived and harmful.

To understand this perspective, let’s contrast it to an alternative. The goal of any knowledge work organization (or student, which is really just a one-person knowledge work firm) is to produce information that is rare and valuable. With this in mind, consider the net value principle of selecting work habits. This principle says that the adoption of a work habit should be based solely on its net effect on the value produced by the organization.

This principle also sounds obvious, but when you dive deeper into its implications you’ll find that it often conflicts with the conclusions of the convenience principle. The reason for this conflict is that convenience often has nothing to do with value.
AI Box Role Plays 
by lessdazed — 2012-01-22T19:11:13.975Z

This page is to centralize discussion for the AI Box Role Plays I will be doing as the AI.

Rules are as here. In accordance with "Regardless of the result, neither party shall ever reveal anything of what goes on within the AI-Box experiment except the outcome. Exceptions to this rule may occur only with the consent of both parties," I ask that if I break free multiple times I am permitted to say if I think it was the same or different arguments that persuaded my Gatekeepers.

In the first trial, with Normal_Anomaly, the wager was 50 karma. The AI remained in the box, upvote Normal_Anomay here, downvote lessdazed here. It was agreed to halve the wager from 50 karma to 25 due to the specific circumstances concluding the role-play in which that the outcome depended on variables that hadn't been specified, but if that sounds contemptible to you downvote all the way to -50.

Also below are brief statements of intent by Gatekeepers to not let the AI out of the box, submitted before the role play, as well as before and after statements of approximately how effective they think both a) a human and b) a superintelligence would be at convincing them to let it out of a box.
Neurological reality of human thought and decision making; implications for rationalism.
by Dmytry — 2012-01-22T14:39:32.255Z

The human brain is a massively parallel system. The best such system can do for doing anything efficiently and quickly is to have different small portions of brain compute and submit their partial answers and progressively reduce, combine and cherrypick - a process of which we seem to have almost no direct awareness of, and can only conjecture indirectly as it is the only way thought can possibly work on such slow clocked (~100..200hz) such extremely parallel hardware which uses up a good fraction of body's nutrient supply.

Yet it is immensely difficult for us to think in terms of parallel processes. We have very little access to how the parallel processing works in our heads, and we have very limited ability of considering a parallel process in parallel in our heads. We are only aware of some serial-looking self model within ourselves - a model that we can most easily consider - and we misperceive this model as self; believing ourselves to be self aware when we are only aware of that model which we equated to self.

People aren't, for the most part, discussing how to structure the parallel processing for maximum efficiency or rationality, and applying that to their lives. It's mostly the serial processes that are being discussed. The necessary, inescapable reality of how mind works is entirely sealed from us, and we are not directly aware of it, nor are we discussing and sharing how that works. Whatever little is available, we are not trained to think in those terms - the culture trains us to think in terms of serial, semantic process that would utter things like "I think, therefore I am".

This is in a way depressing to realize.

But at same time this realization brings hope - there may be a lot of low hanging fruit left if the approach has not been very well considered. I personally have been trying to think of myself as of parallel system with some agreement mechanism for a long while now. It does seem to be a more realistic way to think of oneself, in terms of understanding why you make mistakes and how they can be improved, but at same time as with any complex approach where you 'explain' existing phenomena there's a risk of being able to 'explain' anything while understanding nothing.

I propose that we should try to overcome the long standing philosophical model of mind as singular serial computing entity, but instead try approaching it from the parallel comp...
The Singularity Institute is hiring an executive assistant near Berkeley
by Louie — 2012-01-22T07:47:30.432Z

The Singularity Institute is hiring an executive assistant for Executive Director Luke Muehlhauser.

Right now his limiter (besides the need for some sleep and recreation) is not (1) cognitive exhaustion after a certain number of hours or (2) akrasia, but instead (3) needing to spend lots of time doing things that don't need to be him: e.g. hunting down the best product for X and buying it, shopping for food, finding names and email addresses for the top 30 researchers in field X, finding motorcycle classes and a motorcycle so he can stop paying so much for cabs when he doesn't have time for public transport, scheduling meetings with dozens of donors and collaborators, finding a good location for activity X, preparing an itinerary and buying plane tickets, and hundreds of other small things. (Some of these are 'life' things, some of these are SI things, but hours are hours.) Luke may also ask his executive assistant to handle certain tasks for other SI staffers.

Benefits:

Work directly with some of the central figures of Less Wrong, especially Luke(prog)

Work from home most of the time, with a somewhat self-determined schedule

Trial period at $15/hr for 20 hrs/week; if all goes well then get hired full-time at SI's standard starting salary of $3k/month

Responsibilities:

Represent our organization in a professional manner at all times

Manage scheduling and appointments for Luke

Prepare and manage correspondence professionally and accurately

Coordinate travel arrangements for Luke

Online and local shopping and transport

Internet research

Whatever else Luke needs done

Job requirements:

Good interpersonal skills and strong team-player attitude

Capable of clean, professional written communication with proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar

Positive, friendly and helpful attitude

Ability to handle sensitive and/or confidential material and information

Must pay strong attention to detail

Professional demeanor, dedicated and reliable, conscientious

Computer & internet literate

Own a car

Live in or near Berkeley, CA

Bonus points if you...

...have read the Core Sequences

...have experience as a personal or executive assistant

...have even better creative non-fiction writing skills than is required for professional correspondance

...are handy with Google Scholar

...know a good amount of math, statistics, computer science, or cognitive science

...have so

...
[SEQ RERUN] Empty Labels
by MinibearRex — 2012-01-22T04:36:34.396Z

Today's post, Empty Labels was originally published on 14 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You use complex renamings to create the illusion of inference. Is a "human" defined as a "mortal featherless biped"? Then write: "All [mortal featherless bipeds] are mortal; Socrates is a [mortal featherless biped]; therefore, Socrates is mortal." Looks less impressive that way, doesn't it?

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Argument from Common Usage, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
[Link] The Hyborian Age
by GLaDOS — 2012-01-21T19:00:34.010Z

Yay a new cool post is up on West Hunters blog! It is written by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending with whom most LWers are probably already familiar with (particularly this awesome entry). It raises some interesting points on biases in academia.

I was contemplating Conan the Barbarian, and remembered the essay that Robert E. Howard wrote about the background of those stories – The Hyborian Age. I think that the flavor of Howard’s pseudo-history is a lot more realistic than the picture of the human past academics preferred over the past few decades.

In Conan’s world, it’s never surprising to find a people that once mixed with some ancient prehuman race. Happens all the time. Until very recently, the vast majority of workers in human genetics and paleontology were sure that this never occurred – and only changed their minds when presented with evidence that was both strong (ancient DNA) and too mathematically sophisticated for them to understand or challenge (D-statistics).

Conan’s history was shaped by the occasional catastrophe. Most academics (particularly geologists) don’t like catastrophes, but they have grudgingly come to admit their importance – things like the Thera and Toba eruptions, or the K/T asteroid strike and the Permo-Triassic crisis.

Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, evolution seems to have run pretty briskly, but without any pronounced direction. Men devolved into ape-men when the environment pushed in that direction (Flores ?) and shifted right back when the environment favored speech and tools. Culture shaped evolution, and evolution shaped culture. An endogamous caste of snake-worshiping priests evolved in a strange direction. Although their IQs were considerably higher than average, they remained surprisingly vulnerable to sword-bearing barbarians.

In this world, evolution could happen on a time scale of thousands of years, and there was no magic rule that ensured that the outcome would be the same in every group. It may not be PC to say it, but Cimmerians were smarter than Picts.

The basic idea of their book "The 10 000 Year Explosion" (LessWrong review, Amazon).

Above all, people in Conan’s world fought. They migrated: they invaded. There was war be

...
The hundred-room problem
by APMason — 2012-01-21T18:12:29.719Z

This thought-experiment has been on my mind for a couple of days, and no doubt it's a special case of a more general problem identified somewhere by some philosopher that I haven't heard of yet. It goes like this:

You are blindfolded, and then scanned, and ninety-nine atom-for-atom copies of you are made, each blindfolded, meaning a hundred in all. To each one is explained (and for the sake of the thought experiment, you can take this explanation as true (p is approx. 1)) that earlier, a fair-coin was flipped. If it came down heads, ninety-nine out of a hundred small rooms were painted red, and the remaining one was painted blue. If it came down tails, ninety-nine out of a hundred small rooms were painted blue, and the remaining one was painted red. Now, put yourself in the shoes of just one of these copies. When asked what the probability is that the coin came down tails, you of course answer “.5”. It is now explained to you that each of the hundred copies is to be inserted into one of the hundred rooms, and will then be allowed to remove their blindfolds. You feel yourself being moved, and then hear a voice telling you you can take your blindfold off. The room you are in is blue. The voice then asks you for your revised probability estimate that the coin came down tails.

It seems at first (or maybe at second, depending on how your mind works) that the answer ought to be .99 – ninety-nine out of the hundred copies will, if they follow the rule “if red, then heads, if blue then tails”, get the answer right.

However, it also seems like the answer ought to be .5, because you have no new information to update on. You already knew that at least one copy of you would, at this time, remove their blindfold and find themselves in a blue room. What have you discovered that should allow you to revise your probability of .5 to .99?

And the answer, of course, cannot be both .5 and .99. Something has to give.

Is there something basically quite obvious that I'm missing that will resolve this problem, or is it really the mean sonofabitch it appears to be? As it goes, I'm inclined to say the probability is .5 – I'm just not quite sure why. Thoughts?
New x-risk organizations
by lukeprog — 2012-01-21T16:52:05.281Z

Of course: FHI, FutureTech, the Singularity Institute, and Leverage Research.

New: the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (Seth Baum & Tony Barrett).

I've also heard that the following people are working to set up x-risk departments/organizations:

Huw Price at Cambridge

Newton Howard at MIT

Jeffrey Epstein
Politicians' family as signalling
by Stabilizer — 2012-01-21T09:31:49.034Z

In the US, if you look at political candidates in public view, they often appear with family in tow. A candidate's family plays an important role in the election campaigns. I'm from India. There, the politicians' family play little role in election campaigns (unless the family member herself is actively involved in the party and politics, which is often). But, the relative importance of family (relative to other aspects like money, education) in the cultural value system of India is significantly greater than its relative importance in the cultural value system of the US. So why the inverse relation?

I think it may have to do with signalling (inspired by Hanson, Zahavi). Maintaining a stable family is considered to be less of a status quo situation in the US, when compared to India. So in the US, maintaining a stable family is a signal of your management skills at the level of family, because you had to spend effort to obtain that signal. But in India, the family does not have signalling value, because it is much more common to have a stable family. So having a stable family did not require an 'extra' effort (extra compared to society's default).

What would this imply? How would one test such a theory?
The Dark Arts: A Beginner's Guide
by faul_sname — 2012-01-21T07:05:05.264Z

The Dark Arts

So you've been reading this site and learning many valuable tools for becoming more rational. You're beginning to become irritated at the irrational behavior of the average person. You've noticed that many people refuse to accept even highly compelling arguments, even as they drink up the doctrine of their favorite religion/political party. What are you doing wrong?

As it turns out, it's less about what you're doing wrong than about what these highly influential groups are doing right. This is a brief intro to the Dark Arts, ranging from relatively harmless or even helpful techniques to truly dangerous ones. In this set of guidelines, I have used the example of Solar Suzy, a contractor for a company that sells solar panels, and Business Owner Bob, who runs an organic food store. You will quickly notice that Solar Suzy is not very ethical. This is not an accident: these techniques can very easily be used unethically. They're called the Dark Arts for a reason, and this example will make sure that's kept in mind.

The fact that a technique can be used to do bad things, however, doesn't mean we shouldn't learn the technique. These methods can be used when you don't have time to wait for someone to slowly change their mind, fighting every step of the way. Even if you plan to never use them, it is probably a good idea to be aware of what they look like.

The Rules

Be simple.

Use simple words. We're lazy. We don't like having to put in effort to understand something.

Be brief. Try to say your idea in 30 words or less.

Compare:

Bob: "I've run the numbers. It would take over 30 years for the solar panels to pay for themselves."

Suzy: "Despite the inherent economic disadvantage in the utilization of photovoltaic cells in preference to petroleum and coal, it may under particular circumstances benefit corporate entities insofar as the collective ethical standard of society values such a demonstration of conservationism."

Bob [baffled and a little annoyed]: ... Uhhhhh... Sure... I think I'm fine with what I have. Bye.

-----

Bob: "I've run the numbers. It would take over 30 years for the solar panels to pay for themselves."

Suzy: "Solar panels don't look cost-effective compared to fossil fuels, but sometimes the extra business a company gets for being 'green' makes them worthwhile."

Bob [interested, but skeptical]: Hmm. I hadn't thought...
Some potential dangers of rationality training
by lukeprog — 2012-01-21T04:50:58.907Z

Taylor & Brown (1988) argued that several kinds of irrationality are good for you — for example that overconfidence, including the planning fallacy, protects you from depression and gives you greater motivation because your expectancy of success is higher.

One can imagine other examples. Perhaps the sunk cost fallacy is useful because without it you're prone to switch projects as soon as a higher-value project comes along, leaving an ever-growing heap of abandoned projects behind you.

This may be one reason that many people's lives aren't much improved by rationality training. Perhaps the benefits of having more accurate models of the world and making better decisions are swamped by the negative effects of losing out on the benefits of overconfidence and the sunk costs fallacy and other "positive illusions." Yes, I read "Less Wrong Probably Doesn't Cause Akrasia," but there were too many methodological weaknesses to give that study much weight, I think.

Others have argued against Taylor & Brown's conclusion, and at least one recent study suggests that biases are not inherently positive or negative for mental health and motivation because the effect depends on the context in which they occur. There seems to be no expert consensus on the matter.

(Inspired by a conversation with Louie.)
[SEQ RERUN] The Argument from Common Usage
by MinibearRex — 2012-01-21T02:40:30.691Z

Today's post, The Argument from Common Usage was originally published on 13 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You argue over the meanings of a word, even after all sides understand perfectly well what the other sides are trying to say. The human ability to associate labels to concepts is a tool for communication. When people want to communicate, we're hard to stop; if we have no common language, we'll draw pictures in sand. When you each understand what is in the other's mind, you are done.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Feel the Meaning, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.