trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3
by OpenThreadGuy — 2012-07-07T17:16:15.592Z

From the last thread:

From Costanza's original thread (entire text):

"This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant."

Meta:

How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.

Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.

Meta:

I still haven't figured out a satisfactory answer to the previous meta question, how often these should be made. It was requested that I make a new one, so I did.

I promise I won't quote the entire previous threads from now on. Blockquoting in articles only goes one level deep, anyway.
[SEQ RERUN] Existential Angst Factory
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-07T05:00:59.138Z

Today's post, Existential Angst Factory was originally published on 19 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

As a general rule, if you find yourself suffering from existential angst, check and see if you're not just feeling unhappy because of something else going on in your life. An awful lot of existential angst comes from people trying to solve the wrong problem.

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 Could Anything Be Right?, 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.
Interlude for Behavioral Economics
by Scott Alexander — 2012-07-06T20:12:51.125Z

The so-called “rational” solutions to the Prisoners' Dilemma and Ultimatum Game are suboptimal to say the least. Humans have various kludges added by both nature or nurture to do better, but they're not perfect and they're certainly not simple. They leave entirely open the question of what real people will actually do in these situations, a question which can only be addressed by hard data.

As in so many other areas, our most important information comes from reality television. The Art of Strategy discusses a US game show “Friend or Foe” where a team of two contestants earned money by answering trivia questions. At the end of the show, the team used a sort-of Prisoner's Dilemma to split their winnings: each team member chose “Friend” (cooperate) or “Foe” (defect). If one player cooperated and the other defected, the defector kept 100% of the pot. If both cooperated, each kept 50%. And if both defected, neither kept anything (this is a significant difference from the standard dilemma, where a player is a little better off defecting than cooperating if her opponent defects).
Players chose “Friend” about 45% of the time. Significantly, this number remained constant despite the size of the pot: they were no more likely to cooperate when splitting small amounts of money than large.
Players seemed to want to play “Friend” if and only if they expected their opponents to do so. This is not rational, but it accords with the “Tit-for-Tat” strategy hypothesized to be the evolutionary solution to Prisoner's Dilemma. This played out on the show in a surprising way: players' choices started off random, but as the show went on and contestants began participating who had seen previous episodes, they began to base their decision on observable characteristics about their opponents. For example, in the first season women cooperated more often than men, so by the second season a player was cooperating more often if their opponent was a woman - whether or not that player was a man or woman themselves.
Among the superficial characteristics used, the only one to reach statistical significance according to the study was age: players below the median age of 27 played “Foe” more often than those over it (65% vs. 39%, p < .001). Other nonsignificant tendencies were for men to defect more ...
Transparency in Insurance (Edit: Solution found)
by  — 2012-07-06T18:01:51.400Z

EDIT: shminux has found a tool that instantly delivers term life insurance quotes. Most everything I've written below is now irrelevant and can now be ignored.

Here is what seems to be the standard for acquiring insurance (of most kinds, though here I'll be focusing on life insurance):

1. You contact a salesperson (agent) who is incentivized to sell you insurance policies which earn them more money.

2. You provide a basic set of data regarding your health and general medical status.

3. The agent takes this information and <MYSTERIOUS BLACK BOX HERE>, and then sends you the quote.

You don't know how this quote was generated exactly. Presumably actuarial tables were involved at some point. Maybe it was marked up or down based on how confident you sounded to the agent. Or the agent divined the quote based on tea leaves.

And if you want to comparison shop - you'll have to go to other agents, fill out more forms containing the same information over and over. Even getting quotes on different plans _from the same company_ often requires specifically requesting each one through an agent.

This is insane.

If there exists a way to easily get many life insurance quotes at once, please tell me about it. If the general algorithms to generate these plans are well known, please link to a thorough description or implementation so at least people have a means of determining whether or not they're being ripped off.

But if those things truly do not exist - I think we should fix this system.

Crowdsourcing the acquisition and publication of life insurance rates could go a long way towards bringing some transparency to what seems to be a very, very broken marketplace.

So this is what I propose. If we systematically divide up the work of getting quotes, I think we can amass a considerable amount of data fairly quickly.

(This should obviously be of particular interest to would-be test-subject/cryonics-enthusiasts.)

Does this sound feasible? Does this information already exist in a form which renders this data raid unnecessary? Can it be improved?
Weekly LW Meetups: Cali, Columbia; Melbourne; Pittsburgh; St. Petersburg
by FrankAdamek — 2012-07-06T14:39:16.209Z

Note: This weekly summary was posted to LW Main on the 29th of June. It has been moved to discussion, and the most recent summary post is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Pittsburgh: Belief in Belief: 30 June 2012 11:30AM
First Cali, Colombia meetup: 02 July 2012 07:00PM
St. Peterburg meetup: 05 July 2012 07:00PM
Hyderabad Meetup: 08 July 2012 03:00PM
Brussels meetup: 14 July 2012 12:00PM

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:

Melbourne, practical rationality: 06 July 2012 07:00PM
(NYC) A Game of Nomic: 07 July 2012 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Chicago, 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, 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, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here, or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know!

Want to help out the common good? If one of the meetups listed as regular has become inactive, let...
Meetup : Berkeley meta-meetup
by Nisan — 2012-07-06T08:02:11.372Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meta-meetup

WHEN: 11 July 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE: Berkeley, CA

The next Berkeley meetup will be a Mountain View-style meta-meetup. The idea is that there are lots of rewarding things we can do if we know that we want to do them and if we have a plan for them. So on Wednesday, July 11, we'll gather at Zendo and discuss what topics and activities we want for future meetups, and plan out the next several weeks of meetups.

For directions to Zendo, see the mailing list, or call me at .

EDIT: Michael Smith of the Center for Applied Rationality has volunteered to run interested parties through an experimental rationality training unit at the meetup. Here's his description:

The topic is fudoshin — literally "imperturbable mind." It's related to Julia's combat reflexes material, but it's more directly targeted at the feeling of againstness that can arise when feeling defensive or when wanting to push for a particular result. I've worked out some mental hacks that, when paired with some physiological tricks, seem to work really well for practicing this state of mind. I originally developed these tools as a method of teaching people to be effective at mentally challenging parts of aikido but I've found it gives me a very strong impression of being more open to listening to criticism and taking ideas seriously. It's also just a pleasant state to be in. :-)

The agenda for Wednesday is as follows:

7:00pm: Doors open.
7:15pm: Meta-meetup: Plan the next several meetups.
8:15pm: Michael's fudoshin session. (This should take 1-2 hours.)
Meetup : Madison: Probability Calibration
by fiddlemath — 2012-07-06T03:59:00.000Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Madison: Probability Calibration

WHEN:
08 July 2012 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Michelangelo's: 114 State St., Madison, WI

I'll run a probability calibration exercise. How confident are you? How confident should you be?

I'll bring my Zendo pieces too, if folks would like to play, or maybe just build stuff with pyramids.

Discussion article for the meetup : Madison: Probability Calibration
Negative and Positive Selection
by alyssavance — 2012-07-06T01:34:25.968Z

(Originally posted to my blog, The Rationalist Conspiracy; cross-posted here on request of Lukeprog.)

You’re the captain of a team, and you want to select really good players. How do you do it?

One way is through what I call positive selection. You devise a test – say, who can run the fastest – and pick the people who do best. If you want to be really strict, like if you’re selecting for the Olympics, you only pick the top fraction of a percent. If you’re a player, and you want to get selected, you have to train to do better on the test.

The opposite method is negative selection. Instead of one test to pick out winners, you design many tests to pick out losers. You test, say, who can’t run very well when it’s hot out, and get rid of them. Then you test who can’t run very well when it’s cold out, and get rid of them. Then you test running in the rain, and get rid of the losers there. And so on and so forth. When you’re strict with negative selection, you have lots and lots of tests, so that it’s very hard for any one person to pass through all the filters.

I think a big part of where American society’s gone wrong over the last hundred years is the ubiquitous use of negative selection over positive selection. (Athletics is one of the only exceptions. It’s apparently so important that people really care about performance – as opposed to, say, in medicine, where we exclude brilliant doctors if they don’t have the stamina to work ninety hours a week.) A single test can always be flawed; for example, IQ tests and SATs have many flaws. However, with negative selection, how badly you do is determined by the failure rate of every test combined. If you have twenty tests, and even one of them is so flawed it excludes good players, then your team will suck.

Elite college admissions is an example of a negative selection test. There’s no one way you can do really, really well, and thereby be admitted to Harvard. Instead, you have to pass a bunch of different selection filters: Are your SATs good enough? Are your grades good enough? Is your essay good enough? Are your extracurriculars good enough? Are your recommendations good enough? Failure on any one step usually means not getting admitted. And as competition has intensified, colleges have added more and more filters, like the sup...
[SEQ RERUN] Could Anything Be Right?
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-05T22:29:25.980Z

Today's post, Could Anything Be Right? was originally published on 18 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You do know quite a bit about morality. It's not perfect information, surely, or absolutely reliable, but you have someplace to start. If you didn't, you'd have a much harder time thinking about morality than you do.

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 Gift We Give To Tomorrow, 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.
On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists -- Revisited[Draft] [Request for Feedback]
by MBlume — 2012-07-05T19:12:57.774Z

Planned top-level post -- any feedback very much welcome.

Obviously a followup to: On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists
My very first top-level post on LW was a solicitation for advice/feedback/discussion on the topic of rationalist parenting. I'd like to revisit the topic now.

Goals

First of all, let's talk about goals. I can think of four.

Produce thriving, intelligent, rational, happy, good-hearted children who become thriving, intelligent, rational, happy, good-hearted adults.

Have your children enjoy their childhoods

Enjoy raising your children.

Closely tied to 2 and 3 -- actually have a good relationship with your children. Like them and have them like you.

What We Know

To speak to goal 1 first, Bryan Caplan claims flat outcomes for goal #1 under commonly tried parenting interventions, which seems counter-intuitive. More explanation of what exactly the studies in question proved would be welcome.
As Luke helpfully taught us, negative reinforcement doesn't seem to work as well as positive. Spanking, in particular, is right out. This is in large part because reinforcement reinforces everything about what the subject's doing at the time it occurs. This means, in particular, that you're reinforcing both the target behavior and being caught at it. In the case of positive behavior/reinforcement, there's nothing particularly problematic about this, but for the negative case, you're also punishing being caught/noticed/seen, which can be problematic.

Nutrition in early childhood does seem to influence life outcomes, mostly on the low end: serious malnutrition depresses IQ -- try to avoid it.

Praise seems to be important, first of all because it is often a powerful positive reinforcer in children. Research has shown that the target of the praise is important. Praising a child for having worked hard to understand a concept seems to lead to more future efforts of the same kind than praising their intelligence.

Simply talking to children, well before they've developed language skills, seems to be important for goals 1 and 4. I plan to use mine as rubber ducks=).

Defaults to Notice and Perhaps Reject

There are some idiosyncrasies of the default in modern American childrearing that don't seem to do anyone any favors.

Segregation by age:

Outside of their siblings, American six-year-olds are socialized almost entirely with o...
Less Wrong views on morality?
by hankx7787 — 2012-07-05T17:04:21.187Z

Do you believe in an objective morality capable of being scientifically investigated (a la Sam Harris *or others*), or are you a moral nihilist/relativist? There seems to be some division on this point. I would have thought Less Wrong to be well in the former camp.

Edit: There seems to be some confusion - when I say "an objective morality capable of being scientifically investigated (a la Sam Harris *or others*)" - I do NOT mean something like a "one true, universal, metaphysical morality for all mind-designs" like the Socratic/Platonic Form of Good or any such nonsense. I just mean something in reality that's mind-independent - in the sense that it is hard-wired, e.g. by evolution, and thus independent/prior to any later knowledge or cognitive content - and thus can be investigated scientifically. It is a definite "is" from which we can make true "ought" statements relative to that "is". See drethelin's comment and my analysis of Clippy.
Meetup : First New Jersey Meetup
by  — 2012-07-05T16:11:16.545Z

Discussion article for the meetup : First New Jersey Meetup

WHEN: 12 July 2012 01:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: Raritan Valley Community College

It's time for the first New Jersey meetup!

My name is Chris. I'm a college student and I've been involved with LessWrong for 1-2 years. I'd like to meet fellow LWers, as I want to know more people with similar values and interests.

My plan for the afternoon is minimalistic. Just some good "get to know you" conversation, possibly over coffee and a board game. If we all have a good time, we can also dedicate some time toward the end for making future plans.

If this interests you, I encourage you to come by Raritan Valley Community College from 1:30 - 3:30 pm on Thursday, July 12. I chose RVCC because it is a public place and easily accessible from major highways.

Depending on how many people are coming, the meetup may be held at the campus coffee shop or in a classroom close by. Either way, I will have a sign posted on the table or at the door. I'll likely be working on my laptop.

If you're interested in attending this event or a future NJ meetup, leave a comment or PM me. Be sure to include your email address so I can contact you with any updates.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I look forward to meeting you!

Discussion article for the meetup : First New Jersey Meetup
Should you try to do good work on LW?
by cousin_it — 2012-07-05T12:36:41.277Z

I used to advocate trying to do good work on LW. Now I'm not sure, let me explain why.

It's certainly true that good work stays valuable no matter where you're doing it. Unfortunately, the standards of "good work" are largely defined by where you're doing it. If you're in academia, your work is good or bad by scientific standards. If you're on LW, your work is good or bad compared to other LW posts. Internalizing that standard may harm you if you're capable of more.

When you come to a place like Project Euler and solve some problems, or come to OpenStreetMap and upload some GPS tracks, or come to academia and publish a paper, that makes you a participant and you know exactly where you stand, relative to others. But LW is not a task-focused community and is unlikely to ever become one. LW evolved from the basic activity "let's comment on something Eliezer wrote". We inherited our standard of quality from that. As a result, when someone posts their work here, that doesn't necessarily help them improve.

For example, Yvain is a great contributor to LW and has the potential to be a star writer, but it seems to me that writing on LW doesn't test his limits, compared to trying new audiences. Likewise, my own work on decision theory math would've been held to a higher standard if the primary audience were mathematicians (though I hope to remedy that). Of course there have been many examples of seemingly good work posted to LW. Homestuck fandom also has a lot of nice-looking art, but it doesn't get fandoms of its own.

In conclusion, if you want to do important work, cross-post it if you must, but don't do it for LW exclusively. Big fish in a small pond always looks kinda sad.
What have you recently tried, and failed at?
by Emile — 2012-07-05T09:52:54.317Z

Kaj Sotala said:

[I]f you punish yourself for trying and failing, you stop wanting to try in the first place, as it becomes associated with the negative emotions. Also, accepting and being okay with the occasional failure makes you treat it as a genuine choice where you have agency, not something that you're forced to do against your will.

So maybe we should celebrate failed attempts more often ... I for one can't think of anything I've failed at recently, which is probably a sign that I'm not trying enough new things.

So, what specific things have you failed at recently?