trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Could risk aversion be from friend thresholds?
by KatjaGrace — 2013-04-06T05:40:51.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

If you are going for a job that almost nobody is going to get, it’s worth trying to be unusual. Better that one in a hundred employers loves you and the rest hate you than all of them think you’re mediocre.

On the other hand, if you are going for a job that almost everybody who applies is going to get, best to be as close to normal as possible.

In general, if you expect to fall on the bad side of some important threshold, it’s good to increase your variance and maybe make it over. If you expect to fall on the good side, it’s good to decrease your variance and stay there. This is assuming you can change your variance without changing your mean too much.

This suggests people should be risk seeking sometimes, and risk averse other times, depending on where the closest or most important thresholds are for them.

Prospect theory and its collected evidence says that people are generally risk averse for gains, and risk seeking for losses. That is, if you offer them fifty dollars for sure or half a chance of a hundred, they’ll take the sure fifty. If you offer them minus fifty dollars for sure, or half a chance of minus one hundred, they’ll take the gamble. The proposed value function looks something like this:

The zero point is a ‘reference point’, usually thought to be something like expectations or the status quo. This means people feel differently about gaining fifty dollars vs. a fifty percent of one hundred, and being given one hundred then later offered minus fifty or a fifty percent chance of minus one hundred, even though these things are equivalent in payoffs.

Risk aversion in gains and risk seeking in losses is what you would expect if people were usually sitting right near an important threshold, regardless of how much they had gained or lost in the past. What important threshold might people always be sitting on top of, regardless of their movement?

One that occurs to me is their friends’ and acquaintances’ willingness to associate with them. Which I will explain in a minute.

Robin has suggested that people should have high variance when they are getting to know someone, to make it over the friend threshold. Then they should tone it down if they make it over, so they don’t fall back under again.

This was in terms of how much information a person should reveal. But suppose people take into account how ...
Why underestimate acceptable partners?
by KatjaGrace — 2013-04-06T05:32:30.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

The romantic view of romance in Western culture says a very small fraction of people would make a great partner for you, customarily one.

Some clues suggest that in fact quite a large fraction of people would make a suitable spouse for a given person. Arranged marriages apparently go pretty well rather than terribly. Relationships are often formed between the only available people in a small group, forced together. ‘If I didn’t have you‘ by Tim Minchin is funny. It could be that relationships chosen in constrained circumstances are a lot worse than others, though I haven’t heard that. But they are at least common enough that people find them worthwhile. And the fraction of very good mates must be at least a lot greater than suggested by the romantic view, as evidenced by people ever finding them.

So it seems we overstate the rarity of good matches. Why would we do that? One motive would be to look like you have high standards, which suggests that you are good enough yourself to support such standards.

But does this really make sense? In practice, most of the ways a person could be especially unusual such that it is hard for them to find a suitable mate are not in the direction of greatness. Most of them are just in various arbitrary directions of weirdness.

If I merely sought mates with higher mate value than me, they wouldn’t be that hard to find. They are mostly hard to find because I just don’t really get on well with people unless they are on some kind of audacious quest to save the world, in the top percentile of ‘overthinking things’ and being explicit, don’t much mind an above average degree of neuroticism on my part, and so on.

The romantic view is much closer to the truth for weird people than normal people. So while endorsing the romantic view should make you look more elite, by this argument it should much more make you look weird. In most cases – especially during romance – people go to a lot of trouble to not look weird. So it seems this is probably not how it is interpreted.

Most of anyone’s difficulty in finding mates should be due to them being weird, not awesome. So why does considering a very small fraction of people suitable make you seem good rather than weird?
Meetup : Toronto: Our guest: Cat Lavigne from the Center for Applied Rationality
by Giles — 2013-04-06T04:46:38.709Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Toronto: Our guest: Cat Lavigne from the Center for Applied Rationality

WHEN:
09 April 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
20 Edward Street, Toronto, ON

Sorry, new location again! We're at the World's Biggest Bookstore in the Second Floor Meeting Room (at the back of the bookstore, up the stairs. Look for the paperclip sign).

This is our first guest event so let's all be friendly and welcoming to Cat, who's in Toronto just for the day! Cat volunteers for the Center for Applied Rationality, which you've no doubt heard a lot about already.

I don't want to set a fixed agenda for the discussion (since we're trying out a new format here with the invited guest) but let's just say I have a hunch this meeting's going to go well. :D

Discussion article for the meetup : Toronto: Our guest: Cat Lavigne from the Center for Applied Rationality
[SEQ RERUN] Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes
by MinibearRex — 2013-04-06T04:24:24.498Z

Today's post, Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes was originally published on 29 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Many causes benefit particularly from the spread of rationality - because it takes a little more rationality than usual to see their case, as a supporter, or even just a supportive bystander. Not just the obvious causes like atheism, but things like marijuana legalization. In the case of my own work this effect was strong enough that after years of bogging down I threw up my hands and explicitly recursed on creating rationalists. If such causes can come to terms with not individually capturing all the rationalists they create, then they can mutually benefit from mutual effort on creating rationalists. This cooperation may require learning to shut up about disagreements between such causes, and not fight over priorities, except in specialized venues clearly marked.

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 Church vs. Taskforce, 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.
How do you interpret your "% positive"?
by PhilGoetz — 2013-04-06T00:16:35.798Z

I just noticed that if I hover my mouse over the big green dot with my total karma, it says, "81% positive". Presumably 81% of the votes on my posts and/or comments have been positive.

I checked out the % positive for everyone on the all-time top 15 list:

Eliezer_Yudkowsky (223304) 94%

Yvain (68331) 97%

lukeprog (52586) 92%

Alicorn (34512) 86%

Kaj_Sotala (30919) 94%

wedrifid (26242) 83%

gwern (25567) 92%

PhilGoetz (22008) 81%

Wei_Dai (19049) 94%

AnnaSalamon (18625) 97%

Vladimir_Nesov (18232) 86%

cousin_it (17073) 90%

NancyLebovitz (14436) 92%

orthonormal (12781) 94%

Konkvistador (11887) 87%

Average = 90.6%, Standard deviation = 4.93%

So I'm 1.95 standard deviations below average for the top 15. Not only am I at the bottom of the list, we would expect me to be at the bottom of the list of the top 39 users. (Assuming these numbers are representative of the top 39 LessWrong users, which is dubious, and that LessWrong users are "normal", which sounds even more dubious, 97.44% of them have a higher upvote/downvote ratio than me.) I've gotten about 6744 down-votes, a bit more than Alicorn's 6711, but still second to Eliezer's 15225.

How should I interpret this? I could say that I'm the most-controversial poster on the top 15 list, and be proud of that. But if I'd had the highest %positive score, I'm sure I'd be proud of that, too. As long as I'm extreme in some way. Or if I were closest to the average, I suppose I could also be proud of that.

Before checking, would you guess that the top 15 have higher, or lower, % positive scores than most users?
CFAR is hiring a logistics manager
by AnnaSalamon — 2013-04-05T22:32:52.108Z

CFAR is hiring an additional logistics manager. Please click on our form for more information, or to fill out an application:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ACTvM1oYsw1zzHMumrLzffCVVak3eA5A-5uJzyIYOKM/viewform

We hope to choose a candidate within the next week or so, so if you're interested, do apply ASAP.
I need help: Device of imaginary results by I J Good
by BT_Uytya — 2013-04-05T19:49:27.066Z

In the chapter 5 of the Probability Theory: Logic of Science you can read about so-called device of imaginary results which seems to go back to the book of I J Good named Probability and the Weighing of Evidence.

The idea is simple and fascinating:

1) You want to estimate your probability of something, and you know that this probability is very, very far from 0.5. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that it's some hypothesis A and P(A|X) << 0.5

2) You imagine the situation where the A and some well-posed alternative ~A are the only possibilities.

(For example, A = "Mr Smith has extrasensory perception and can guess the number you've written down" and ~A = "Mr Smith can guess your number purely by luck". Maybe Omega told you that the room where the experiment is located makes it's impossible for Smith to secretly look at your paper, and you are totally safe from every other form of deception.)

3) You imagine the evidence which would convince you otherwise: P(E|A,X) ~ 1 and P(E|~A,X) is small (you should select E and ~A that way that it's possible to evaluate P(E|~A,X) )

4) After a while, you feel that you are truly in doubt about A: P(A|E1,E2,..., X) ~ 0.5

5) And now you can backtrack everything back to your prior P(A|X) since you know every P(E|A) and P(E|~A).

After this explanation with the example about Mr Smith's telepathic powers, Jaynes gives reader the following exercise:

Exercise 5.1. By applying the device of imaginary results, find your own strength of
belief in any three of the following propositions: (1) Julius Caesar is a real historical
person (i.e. not a myth invented by later writers); (2) Achilles is a real historical person;
(3) the Earth is more than a million years old; (4) dinosaurs did not die out; they are
still living in remote places; (5) owls can see in total darkness; (6) the configuration of
the planets influences our destiny; (7) automobile seat belts do more harm than good;
(8) high interest rates combat inflation; (9) high interest rates cause inflation.

I have trouble tackling the first two propositions and would be glad to hear your thoughts about another seven. Anybody care to help me?

(I decided not to share details of my attempt to solve this exercise unless asked. I don't think that my perspective is so valuable and anchoring would be bad.)

UPD: here is my attempt to solve the Julius Caesar problem.
Weekly LW Meetups: Atlanta, Brussels, London, Melbourne, Moscow, Munich, Paderborn, Tucson, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2013-04-05T15:43:17.324Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on March 29th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Atlanta: ATLessWrong Meetup: 29 March 2013 07:00PM
Moscow, Beliefs: 30 March 2013 04:00PM
Brussels Biased Boardgaming: 30 March 2013 01:00PM
Tucson LW Meetup 0: 30 March 2013 03:00PM
London Meetup, 31st March: 31 March 2013 01:00PM
Washington DC Social meetup+ Birthday party!: 31 March 2013 03:00PM
Munich Meetup (updated): 01 April 2013 03:00PM
Padeborn Meetup April 3th: 03 April 2013 06:00PM
Vancouver Rationality Habits and Friendship: 06 April 2013 03:00AM
Vienna Meetup #2 - : 13 April 2013 07:06PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Melbourne, practical rationality: 05 April 2013 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

Whet...
Weekly LW Meetups: Berlin, Buffalo, Durham (2), Moscow, Mountain View, Vancouver
by FrankAdamek — 2013-04-05T15:42:25.049Z

Special Note: There's now an online study group at http://tinychat.com/lesswrong, where LessWrongers are meeting 24 hours a day. Check it out!

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Berlin, practical rationality: 05 April 2013 07:30PM
Vancouver Rationality Habits and Friendship: 06 April 2013 03:00AM
Durham HPMoR Discussion, chapters 51-55: 06 April 2013 12:00PM
Buffalo Meetup at UB: 07 April 2013 04:00PM
Moscow, Applied Rationality for beginners: 10 April 2013 07:00PM
Durham: Luminosity (New location!): 11 April 2013 07:00PM
Vienna Meetup #2 - : 13 April 2013 07:06PM
Moscow, Applied Rationality, take two: 14 April 2013 04:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Mountain View: Board Game Night: 09 April 2013 07:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

Whether or not t...
Group Rationality Diary, April 5-14
by therufs — 2013-04-05T15:21:16.601Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for April 5-14.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!

Rationality Diaries archive

Next post: 4/15-29
Call for help: volunteers needed to proofread MIRI's publications
by alexvermeer — 2013-04-05T13:43:29.563Z

MIRI needs volunteers to proofread our soon-to-be-released publications, such as Eliezer's "Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics." Some reasons to get involved:

Get a sneak peek at our publications before they become publicly available.

Earn points at MIRIvolunteers.org, our online volunteer system that runs on Youtopia. (Even if you're not interested in the points, tracking your time through Youtopia helps us manage and quantify the volunteer proofreading effort.)

Having polished and well-written publications is of high-value to MIRI.

Help speed up our publication process. Proofreading is currently our biggest bottle-neck.

Some of the papers that are sitting in the pipeline and ready for proofreading right now (or will be very soon):

"Avoiding Unintended AI Behaviors" by Bill Hibbard

"Decision Support for Safe AI Design" by Bill Hibbard

"A Comparison of Decision Algorithms on Newcomblike Problems" by Alex Altair

"Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics" by Eliezer Yudkowsky

How proofreading works:

Youtopia, with the help of some shared Google Docs, is used to manage and track the available documents and who's proofread what.

Proofreading entails checking for basic grammar, spelling, punctuation, and formatting errors; pointing out areas of confusion or concern; and making general style and flow suggestions.

Don't worry, you don't have to proofread entire documents, just as many individual pages as you like.

(This is explained in more detail once you've joined the MIRI Proofreaders group.)

How to join Youtopia and specifically the MIRI Proofreaders group:

Go go MIRIvolunteers.org.

In the right sidebar click on Register as a Volunteer and fill out your info.

Once your Youtopia account is created (this could take a day or two), head here and click on "Join Organization.”

Once your membership is approved you will have have access to detailed proofreading instructions and draft versions of our publications.

Questions can be directed to alexv@intelligence.org.
[SEQ RERUN] Church vs. Taskforce
by MinibearRex — 2013-04-05T04:43:13.572Z

Today's post, Church vs. Taskforce was originally published on 28 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Churches serve a role of providing community - but they aren't explicitly optimized for this, because their nominal role is different. If we desire community without church, can we go one better in the course of deleting religion? There's a great deal of work to be done in the world; rationalist communities might potentially organize themselves around good causes, while explicitly optimizing for community.

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 Can Humanism Match Religion's Output?, 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.
Anybody want to join a Math Club?
by smoofra — 2013-04-05T04:36:56.570Z

I've found it's hard to teach myself math without an objective. If I don't have a specific question I'm trying to answer, my eyes just start to skip over equations, trying to get to the "good part". Pretty soon I've left the boring parts I know far behind. I've also skipped the less boring parts that i sorta know, and now I'm skipping forward even faster because I only understand half of what I'm reading. I wind up skimming the whole book, but not really absorbing much of it. I think I'd do better if I was planning on discussing what I'm reading with others.

So here's my idea: a math club. We pick a book, and we read it together. Every (week | two weeks | month) we read the next chapter in the book, and then we meet up and discuss it. Anything we can't figure out on our own, we discuss with the other members of the math club until we get it. The impending deadline of having to actually explain the material to other humans servs to focus and motive the reading.

Anybody interested?

Possible topics:

Probability Theory.

Lecture Notes on the Curry Howard Isomorphism

Proof Theory: The First Step into Impredicativity

The Geometry of Ordinary Variational Equations

or anything else. math is fun!

EDIT: Benito made a facebook group so we can get organized and do this! see: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/h5y/lw_study_group_facebook_page/
April 2013 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2013-04-04T22:55:02.889Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.

If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.