trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Scooby Doo and Secular Humanism [link]
by Dreaded_Anomaly — 2011-12-03T04:58:30.013Z

A great column by Chris Sims at the Comics Alliance.

Excerpt:

Because that's the thing about Scooby-Doo: The bad guys in every episode aren't monsters, they're liars.

I can't imagine how scandalized those critics who were relieved to have something that was mild enough to not excite their kids would've been if they'd stopped for a second and realized what was actually going on. The very first rule of Scooby-Doo, the single premise that sits at the heart of their adventures, is that the world is full of grown-ups who lie to kids, and that it's up to those kids to figure out what those lies are and call them on it, even if there are other adults who believe those lies with every fiber of their being. And the way that you win isn't through supernatural powers, or even through fighting. The way that you win is by doing the most dangerous thing that any person being lied to by someone in power can do: You think.

Tim Minchin fans may recall him mentioning Scooby Doo in a similar light in his beat poem Storm, and it's been brought up on Less Wrong before.

When viewed in this light, Scooby Doo really is like an elementary version of Methods of Rationality.
[SEQ RERUN] Zen and the Art of Rationality
by MinibearRex — 2011-12-03T04:21:14.927Z

Today's post, Zen and the Art of Rationality was originally published on 24 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Rationality is very different in its propositional statements from Eastern religions, like Taoism or Buddhism. But, it is sometimes easier to express ideas in rationality using the language of Zen or the Tao.

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 Effortless Technique, 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.
Does Hyperbolic Discounting Really Exist?
by gwern — 2011-12-03T03:07:14.269Z

“Beware of WEIRD psychological samples” because results derived from them may reflect the specific sample more than any kind of generalized truth. And LessWrong has generalized hyperbolic discounting out the wazoo. (See the tags akrasia and discounting.) Hyperbolic discounting is bad, of course, because among other things it leaves on vulnerable to preference reversals and inconsistencies and hence money-pumping.

But isn’t it odd that for a fundamental fact of human psychology, a huge bias we have spent a ton of collective time discussing and fighting, that it doesn’t seem to lead to much actual money-pumping? The obvious examples like the dieting or gambling industries are pretty small, all things considered. And online services like BeeMinder specifically devised on a hyperbolic discounting/picoeconomics basis are, as far as I know, useful but no dramatic breakthrough or silver bullet; again, not quite what one would expect. Like many other heuristics and biases, perhaps hyperbolic discounting isn’t so bad after all, in practice.

Ainslie mentions in Breakdown of Will somewhere that financial incentives can cause people to begin discounting exponentially. What if… hyperbolic discounting doesn’t really exist, in practice? If it may reflect a failure of self-control, a kind of teenager trait, one we find in younger (but not older) populations - like university students?

The following quotes are extracted from the paper “Discounting Behavior: A Reconsideration” (102 pages) by Steffen Andersen, Glenn W. Harrison, Morten Lau & E. Elisabet Rutström, January 2011:

The implied econometrics calls for structural estimation of the theoretical models, allowing for joint estimation of utility functions and discounting functions. Using data collected from a representative sample of 413 adult Danes in 2009, we draw striking conclusions. Assuming an exponential discounting model we estimate discount rates to be 5.6% on average: this is significantly lower than all previous estimates using controlled experiments. We also find no evidence to support quasi-hyperbolic discounting or “fixed cost” discounting, and only modest evidence to support other specifications of non-constant discounting. Furthermore, the evidence for non-constant discounting, while statistically significant, is not economically sign

...
"Ray Kurzweil and Uploading: Just Say No!", Nick Agar
by gwern — 2011-12-02T21:42:48.608Z

A new paper has gone up in the November 2011 JET: "Ray Kurzweil and Uploading: Just Say No!" (videos) by Nick Agar (Wikipedia); abstract:

There is a debate about the possibility of mind-uploading – a process that purportedly transfers human minds and therefore human identities into computers. This paper bypasses the debate about the metaphysics of mind-uploading to address the rationality of submitting yourself to it. I argue that an ineliminable risk that mind-uploading will fail makes it prudentially irrational for humans to undergo it.

The argument is a variant of Pascal's wager he calls Searle's wager. As far as I can tell, the paper contains mostly ideas he has already written on in his book; from Michael Hauskeller's review of Agar's Humanity's End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement

Starting with Kurzweil, he gives a detailed account of the latter’s “Law of Accelerating Returns” and the ensuing techno-optimism, which leads Kurzweil to believe that we will eventually be able to get rid of our messy bodies and gain virtual immortality by uploading ourselves into a computer. The whole idea is ludicrous, of course, but Agar takes it quite seriously and tries hard to convince us that “it may take longer than Kurzweil thinks for us to know enough about the human brain to successfully upload it” (45) – as if this lack of knowledge was the main obstacle to mind-uploading. Agar’s principal objection, however, is that it will always be irrational for us to upload our minds onto computers, because we will never be able to completely rule out the possibility that, instead of continuing to live, we will simply die and be replaced by something that may be conscious or unconscious, but in any case is not identical with us. While this is certainly a reasonable objection, the way Agar presents it is rather odd. He takes Pascal’s ‘Wager’ (which was designed to convince us that believing in God is always the rational thing to do, because by doing so we have little to lose and a lot to win) and refashions it so that it appears irrational to upload one’s mind, because the procedure might end in death, whereas refusing to upload will keep us alive and is hence always a safe bet. The latter conclusion does not work, of course, since the whole point of mind-uploading is to es

...
Good interview with Kahneman [link]
by Dr_Manhattan — 2011-12-02T15:04:24.480Z

http://uctv.ucsd.edu/search-details.aspx?showID=12295

Direct audio link:

http://podcast.uctv.tv/mp3/12295.mp3

One thing that I found fascinating is the way he describes his collaboration with Tversky; he basically said that he had a "common mind" with his collaborator that was significantly better than their separate minds. This seems interesting and under explored/utilized area of Intelligence Augmentation (with some credit due to Vinge for his exploration of mind combinations in Tines world).

Possibly relevant:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/6j1/find_yourself_a_worthy_opponent_a_chavruta/
Weekly LW Meetups: Oakville ON, Atlanta, Berkeley, Melbourne, London
by FrankAdamek — 2011-12-02T14:02:30.262Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Sheridan College - Oakville, ON: 25 November 2011 08:30PM
Next Atlanta Less Wrong Meetup: 10 December 2011 06:00PM

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:

Monthly Bay Area meetup: 26 November 2011 07:00PM
Melbourne practical rationality meetup: 02 December 2011 07:00PM
London, 04 December 2011 02:00PM. (Details the same as in the link, just with a a different date.)

The Mountain View meetup is now every other week, rather than weekly.

Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Irvine, London, Madison, WI, Marin, CA (uses the Bay Area List), Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ottawa, Oxford, San Francisco, Toronto, Washington, DC, 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, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver.
Rationality Quotes December 2011
by Jayson_Virissimo — 2011-12-02T06:01:27.343Z

Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Announcing the Quantified Health Prize
by Zvi — 2011-12-02T06:01:13.230Z

We are giving away a $5000 prize for well-researched, well-reasoned presentations that answer the following question:

What are the best recommendations for what quantities adults (ages 20-60) should take the important dietary minerals in, and what are the costs and benefits of various amounts?

Part of the question is figuring out which ones are important. You may exclude any minerals for which an otherwise reasonable diet will always fall into the right range, or any minerals whose effects are relatively trivial.

If you have an excellent entry, even if you don’t win the grand prize, you can still win one of four additional cash prizes, you’ll be under consideration for a job as a researcher with our company Personalized Medicine, and you’ll get a leg up in the larger contest we plan to run after this one. You also get to help people get better nutrition and stay healthier.

Proposal:

Most of us spend a good portion of our time and money trying to figure out what would be best for our health, and then trying to implement those findings. We ask ourselves how to eat, how to exercise, what drugs and supplements to take and what treatments to seek, but everywhere we turn we find different opinions. Even if one reads the primary research, one finds studies riddled with problems. Most studies have an agenda to sell a product or prove a pet theory. They are then filtered by publication bias. When results are presented, many authors use framing to steer us to the conclusions they want us to draw.

We can and must do better.

We hereby challenge this community to do better. We're always saying how great and effective rationality is. This is our chance to prove it, and put those skills to the test. These problems badly need proper application of Less Wrong's favorite techniques, from Bayes' Theorem itself to the correction of a whole host of cognitive biases.

This contest is also a pilot for a larger contest; before we go and put a lot more money on the line and ask more questions, we want a chance to work the kinks out.

Entries are due by the end of day on January 15, 2012. This is a change of the original deadline, but it will not change again and it will be strictly enforced.

Final judgment will be made by Personalized Medicine’s Chief Science Officer, based on finalists chosen by our expert reviewers.

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[SEQ RERUN] Effortless Technique
by MinibearRex — 2011-12-02T05:58:49.605Z

Today's post, Effortless Technique was originally published on 23 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Things like the amount of effort put into a project, or the number of lines in a computer program, are positive things to maximize. But this is silly. Surely it is better to accomplish the same task with fewer lines of code.

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 False Laughter, 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.
Probability puzzle: Coins in envelopes
by HonoreDB — 2011-12-02T05:58:02.986Z

This went over well in the xkcd logic puzzle forum (my hand was not removed), so I thought I'd try it here. It came to me in a dream, so by solving it you may be helping to summon an elder god or something.

You're spying on Alice and Bob, both of whom are perfect mathematicians. Alice shows Bob a set of m envelopes. "Each of these envelopes contains either a dollar coin or nothing," she says. "I chose how many envelopes to fill randomly. What is the expected monetary value of the contents of a random envelope?"
Bob replies, "That depends on what random function you used to choose how many envelopes to fill. If you, say, flipped m coins and put each one that came up heads in an envelope, the expected value is $.50."
Alice explains what her random function was, and Bob calculates the expected value. For kicks, he pays her that amount, and she lets him pick a random envelope. It has a coin in it! Bob pockets the coin. Alice then takes the now-empty envelope back, and shuffles it into the others. "Congratulations," she says. "So, what's the expected value of playing the game again, now that there's one fewer coin?"
"Same as before," Bob replies.
Problem 1: Give a value for m and a random function for which this makes sense (there are many).

Problem 2: Suppose Alice chose the number of envelopes to fill by selecting an integer from 0 to m uniformly at random, and distributing that many coins among the envelopes. What is m?
The Gift We Give Tomorrow, Spoken Word [Finished?]
by Raemon — 2011-12-02T03:20:58.176Z

For reasons that shall remain temporarily mysterious, I wanted a version of the Gift We Give Tomorrow that was designed to be spoken, rather than read. In particular, spoken in a relatively short period of time. It's one of my favorite sequence posts, but when I tried to read aloud, I found the words did not flow very well and it goes on for longer than I expect an audience to listen without getting bored. I also wanted certain phrasings to tie in with other sequence posts (hence a reference to Azathoth, and Beyond the Reach of God).

The following is the first draft of my efforts. It's about half as long as the original. It cuts out the section about the Shadowy Figure, which I'm slightly upset about, in particular because it would make the "beyond the reach of God" line stronger. But I felt like if I tried to include it at all, I had to include several paragraphs that took a little too long.

I attempted at first to convert to a "true" poem, (not rhyming, but going for a particular meter). I later decided that too much of it needed to have a conversational quality so it's more of a short play than a poem. Lines are broken up in a particular way to suggest timing and make it easier to read out loud.

I wanted a) to share the results with people on the chance that someone else might want to perform a little six minute dialog (my test run clocked in at 6:42), and b) get feedback on how I chose to abridge things. Do you think there were important sections that can be tied in without making it too long? Do you think some sections that I reworded could be reworded better, or that I missed some?

Edit: I've addressed most of the concerns people had. I think I'm happy with it, at least for my purposes. If people are still concerned by the ending I'll revise it, but I think I've set it up better now.

The Gift We Give Tomorrow

How, oh how could the universe,
itself unloving, and mindless,
cough up creatures capable of love?

No mystery in that.
It's just a matter
of natural selection.

But natural selection is cruel. Bloody.
And bloody stupid!

Even when organisms aren't directly tearing at each other's throats…
…there's a deeper competition, going on between the genes.
A species could evolve to extinction,
if the winning genes were playing negative sum games

How could a process,
Cruel as Azathoth,
Create minds that were capable of love?

No mystery.

Mystery is a

...
Google AI challenge - status?
by D_Alex — 2011-12-02T02:18:41.971Z

About one month ago there was some discussion regarding entering an LW team in the Google AI challenge.

Has anyone actually entered? If so, what was the result? I scanned carefully the leaderboard, but could not find any familiar names.

Links:

(http://aichallenge.org/)

(http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8ay/ai_challenge_ants/)
Online Course in Evidence-Based Medicine
by Normal_Anomaly — 2011-12-02T00:22:54.456Z

The Foundation for Blood Research has created an online course in Evidence-Based Medicine, aimed at "advanced high school science students, college students, nursing students, and 1st or 2nd year medical students." It focuses on evaluating research papers and applying statistics to medical diagnosis. I have taken this course, and it was useful practice in Bayesian reasoning.

The course involves working through a couple case studies of ER patients. Students will observe the patient, review research on relevant diagnostic tests, and calculate posterior probabilities given the available information. For instance: once case involves a woman who may have bacterial meningitis, but her spinal fluid test results are mixed. Students then read parts of a paper describing the success of different components of the spinal fluid test as predictors of meningitis.

The course is self-paced and highly modular, alternating between videos, multiple choice or calculation questions, and short written submissions. There is no in-course interaction between students taking the same course, but it is divided into "class sections" for the convenience of teachers who want to observe their students. It works well with Firefox and Safari, and slightly less well (but still easily usable) with Internet Explorer.

Anyone who is interested or wants more information, look at their website or ask me in the comments. Once a decent number of people have shown some interest, I will contact one of the site administrators and he'll set up an official class section for us.

EDIT: I have contacted the site administrator, we should have a class section available soon. Section name and info on how to log in will be posted shortly.

EDIT2: The course section is up: go to the http://evidenceworksremote.com/courses/ and then find the Less Wrong Community course. When you click on the course listing you will be asked to register. Once you receive the acknowledging email return to the course and enter the "enrollment" key: LW101 . I will be able to see your responses to the questions and possibly able to provide feedback. Once you have completed the course, Dr. Allan, who is one of the developers, would appreciate feedback by email.
5 Axioms of Decision Making
by Vaniver — 2011-12-01T22:22:50.504Z

This is part of a sequence on decision analysis; the first post is a primer on Uncertainty.

Decision analysis has two main parts: abstracting a real situation to math, and then cranking through the math to get an answer. We started by talking a bit about how probabilities work, and I'll finish up the inner math in this post. We're working from the inside out because it's easier to understand the shell once you understand the kernel. I'll provide an example of prospects and deals to demonstrate the math, but first we should talk about axioms. In order to be comfortable with using this method, there are five axioms1 you have to agree with, and if you agree with those axioms, then this method flows naturally. They are: Probability, Order, Equivalence, Substitution, and Choice.

Probability

You must be willing to assign a probability to quantify any uncertainty important to your decision. You must have consistent probabilities.

Order

You must be willing to order outcomes without any cycles. This can be called transitivity of preferences: if you prefer A to B, and B to C, you must prefer A to C.

Equivalence

If you prefer A to B to C, then there must exist a p where you are indifferent between a deal where you receive B with certainty and a deal where you receive A with probability p and C otherwise.

Substitution

You must be willing to substitute an uncertain deal for a certain deal or vice versa if you are indifferent between them by the previous rule. Also called "do you really mean it?"

Choice

If you have a choice between two deals, both of which offer A or C, and you prefer A to C, then you must pick the deal with the higher probability of A.

These five axioms correspond to five actions you'll take in solving a decision problem. You assign probabilities, then you order outcomes, then you determine equivalence so you can substitute complicated deals for simple deals, until you're finally left with one obvious choice.

You might be uncomfortable with some of these axioms. You might say that your preferences genuinely cycle, or you're not willing to assign numbers to uncertain events, or you want there to be an additional value for certainty beyond the prospects involved. I can only respond that these axioms are prescriptive, not descriptive: you will be better off if you behave this way, but you must choose to.

Let's look at an example:

My Little Decision

Suppose I en

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Meetup : Seattle biweekly meetup: problem solving
by jsalvatier — 2011-12-01T16:37:43.873Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle biweekly meetup: problem solving

WHEN:
04 December 2011 04:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
5523 University Way NE, #501, seattle, wa

I'd like to try a problem solving meetup. Here's is roughly what I'm thinking:

The idea is to have everyone come to the meetup with an area of their life they would like help improving. The problem can be general ("I'm dissatisfied with my job") or specific ("I'm having trouble motivating myself to do my homework"). We will split up into small groups and try to come up with productive strategies to eachother's issues then perhaps have a larger discussion. In one or two weeks we'll review how successful these strategies were.

Afterwards we'll have dinner and chat.

Ben has graciously agreed to host us this week (ring the buzzer to get let in). Thanks Ben :)

See you guys there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle biweekly meetup: problem solving