trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Calibrate your self-assessments
by Scott Alexander — 2011-10-09T23:26:01.432Z

When I moved to Ireland, I knew that their school system, and in particular their examinations, would be different from the ones I was used to. I educated myself on them and by the time I took my first exam I thought I was reasonably prepared.
I walked out of my first examination almost certain I had failed. I remember emailing my parents, apologizing to them for my failure and promising I would do better when I repeated the class.
Then I got my results back, and learned I had passed with honors.
This situation repeated itself with depressing regularity over the next few semesters. Took exam, walked out in tears certain I had failed, made angsty complaints and apologies, got results back, celebrated. Eventually I decided that I might as well skip steps two to five and go straight to the celebrations.
This was harder than I expected. Just knowing that my feelings of abject failure usually ended out all right did not change those feelings of abject failure. I still walked out of each exam with the same gut certainty of disaster I had always had. What I did learn to do was ignore it: to force myself to walk home with a smile on my face and refuse to let myself dwell on the feelings of failure or take them seriously. And in this I was successful, and now the feelings of abject failure produce only a tiny twinge of stress.

In LW terminology, I am calibrating my self-assessment of examination success1.

We appreciate objective measurements, like a percent score on an examination, or the running time of a marathon in minutes and seconds. But in the absence of such measurements, we use subjective mental estimates: how I feel I did on this exam, or how plausible that theory sounds.

The rationality literature has especially focused on one particular subjective mental estimate: our feelings of probability. For example, someone may say they feel 80% certain that Germany is larger than France. However, if they consistently answer questions like this with 80% confidence, and only get 60% right, then we say they are mis-calibrated: their subjective mental estimate of probability has a consistent mismatch with a more normatively correct probability. Calibration means revising your subjective mental estimate until it matches the objective value it tries to estimate; so that when you estimate something with 80% confidence, you get it right 80% of the time.

My story about exam scores i...
Motivated skepticism: it's harder to avoid than I'd think
by Klao — 2011-10-09T18:35:20.833Z

(I am relatively new here. Allow me to introduce myself with this anecdote, which could not have happened to me before I started reading LW.)

Yesterday I caught myself on rationalizing. It's the first time I caught myself on rationalizing before I finished (verbalizing) the thought. But, I finished the thought, and even though I knew it was rationalizing from the very start, I ended up believing it.

The original question is not very interesting, but here it is to illustrate the issue: I was talking with a friend about US TV series. And he mentioned that his wife insist on watching movies/shows in English without subtitles; to improve their English skills. (I also started watching American shows many-many years ago with the purpose of improving language skills. In English with English subtitles. And it did help immensely, but I never got rid of the subtitles even though originally I was planning to.)

So, my though answer was the following: "How does she know that this helps more than watching with subtitles? Did she measure it somehow? Watching without subtitles mainly helps with listening comprehension. And I'm already good enough with that. Using subtitles on the other hand is always an opportunity to improve on the more obscure part of English vocabulary. In almost every episode there is one or two very rarely used words, English vocabulary is just so enormous, and without subtitles you'd just skip over it..." Fully verbalized it was something like this.

Now, the first part of that argument is a "fully general counterargument". And the rest of it, though might be plausible, should be treated with great suspicion since I know that the roots for it are in motivated skepticism. At least, my realization that this is rationalization stopped me from using this argument. But, it is still quite hard to "unbelieve" it. Maybe I should have tried to stop myself from finishing the thought once I realized its nature? Or you just have to pay even more attention, and it will come with practice? Of course, this is a trivial issue, completely unimportant. But why would I think that it will be easier if the issue is important?
First, they must be convinced to play the game
by lavalamp — 2011-10-09T16:52:21.519Z

I recall seeing, in one of the AI-boxing discussion threads, a comment to the effect that the first step for EY to get out was to convince the other party to even play the game at all.

It has since then occurred to me that this applies to a lot of my interactions. Many people who know me IRL and know a belief of mine which they do not agree with and do not want to be convinced of often adopt the strategy of not talking with me about it at all. For me to convince one of these people of something, first I have to convince them to talk about it at all.

(Note, I don't think this is because I'm an unpleasant person to converse with. Excuses given are along the lines of "I never win an argument with you" and "you've studied it a lot more than I have, it's an unfair discussion". I don't think I'm claiming anything too outlandish here; average humans are really bad at putting rational arguments together.)

I suppose the general form is: in order to convince someone of a sufficiently alien (to them) P, first you must convince them to seriously think about P. This rule may need to be applied recursively (e.g., "seriously think about P" may require one or more LW rationality techniques).

As a practical example, my parents are very religious. I'd like to convince them to sign up for cryonics. I haven't (yet) come up with an approach that I expect to have a non-negligible chance of success. But the realization that the first goalpost along the way is to get them to seriously engage in the conversation at all simplifies the search space. (Deconversion and training in LW rationality has, of course, the best chance of success--but still a high chance of failing and I judge a failure would probably have a large negative impact on my relationship with my parents in their remaining years. That's why I'd like to convince them of just this one thing.)

I realize that this is a fairly obvious point (an application of this--raising the sanity waterline--is the point behind this entire site!), but I haven't seen this explicitly noted as being a general pattern and now that I note it, I see it everywhere--hence this post.
A few analogies to illustrate key rationality points
by kilobug — 2011-10-09T13:00:00.084Z

Introduction

Due to long inferential distances it's often very difficult to use knowledge or understanding given by rationality in a discussion with someone who isn't versed in the Art (like, a poor folk who didn't read the Sequences, or maybe even not the Goedel, Escher, Bach !). So I find myself often forced to use analogies, that will necessary be more-or-less surface analogies, which don't prove anything nor give any technical understanding, but allow someone to have a grasp on a complicated issue in a few minutes.

A tale of chess and politics

Once upon a time, a boat sank and a group of people found themselves isolated in an island. None of them knew the rules of the game "chess", but there was a solar-powered portable chess computer on the boat. A very simple one, with no AI, but which would enforce the rules. Quickly, the survivors discovered the joy of chess, deducing the rules by trying moves, and seeing the computer saying "illegal move" or "legal move", seeing it proclaiming victory, defeat or draw game.

So they learned the rules of chess, movement of the pieces, what "chess" and "chessmate" is, how you can promote pawns, ... And they understood the planning and strategy skills required to win the game. So chess became linked to politics, it was the Game, with a capital letter, and every year, they would organize a chess tournament, and the winner, the smartest of the community, would become the leader for one year.

One sunny day, a young fellow named Hari playing with his brother Salvor (yes, I'm an Asimov fan), discovered a new move of chess : he discovered he could castle. In one move, he could liberate his rook, and protect his king. They kept the discovery secret, and used it on the tournament. Winning his games, Hari became the leader.

Soon after, people started to use the power of castling as much as they could. They even sacrificed pieces, even their queen, just to be able to castle fast. But everyone was trying to castle as fast as they could, and they were losing sight of the final goal : winning, for the intermediate goal : castling.

After a few years, another young fellow, who always hated Hari and Salvor, Wienis, realized how mad people had become with castling. So he decides to never castle anymore, and managed to win the tournament.

Starting from this day, the community split in two : the Castlers and the anti-Castlers. The first would a...
[SEQ RERUN] Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK?
by MinibearRex — 2011-10-09T03:07:57.819Z

Today's post, Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? was originally published on 26 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

People act as though it is perfectly fine and normal for individuals to have differing levels of intelligence, but that it is absolutely horrible for one racial group to be more intelligent than another. Why should the two be considered any differently?

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 No One Knows What Science Doesn't Know, 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.
What to do after college?
by mtaran — 2011-10-09T03:00:59.893Z

My friend is looking for some advice on what he should do after graduating from Harvey Mudd College. Some relevant bits of information about him are that he

is not a US citizen, so he'd only be able to stay in the US if he's working or at a grad school. He's open to suggestions for other countries.

is great at math and computer science, including doing real-world programming

wants to help the world

He's currently looking for a grad school where he could tackle interesting problems with possible high benefits in the future. I've made my own suggestions, but I'd like to get a (somewhat) independent set of opinions from the LW community.

So please suggest away!
The Outside View Of Human Complexity
by Andy_McKenzie — 2011-10-08T18:12:03.504Z

One common question: how complex is some aspect of the human body? In addition to directly evaluating the available evidence for that aspect, one fruitful tactic in making this kind of prediction is to analyze past predictions about similar phenomena and assume that the outcome will be similar. This is called reference class forecasting, and is often referred to on this site as "taking the outside view."

First, how do we define complexity? Loosely, I will consider a more complex situation to be one with more components, either in total number or type, which allows for more degrees of freedom in the system considered. Using this loose definition for now, how do our predictions about human complexity tend to fare?

Point: Predictions about concrete things have tended to overestimate our complexity

Once we know about their theoretical existence of phenomenon but before they are systematically measured, our predictions about measurable traits of the human body tend to err on the side of being more complex (i.e., more extensive or variable) than reality.

1) Although scholars throughout history have tended to think that human brains must be vastly differently from those of other animals, on the molecular and cellular level there have turned out to be few differences. As Eric Kandel relates in his autobiography (p. 236), "because human mental processes have long been thought to be unique, some early students of the brain expected to find many new classes of proteins lurking in our gray matter. Instead, science has found surprisingly few proteins that are truly unique to the human brain and no signaling systems that are unique to it."

2) There turned out to be fewer protein-coding genes in human body than most people expected. We have data on this by way of an informal betting market in the early 2000's, described here ($) and here (OA). The predictions ranged from 26,000 - 150,000, and that lower bound prediction won, even though it probably wasn't low enough! As of 2008, the predicted number by Ensembl was in the 23,000s. (As an aside, humans don't have the largest genome in terms of number of nucleotides either, by far. That title currently belongs to the canopy plant, pictured below (thanks to kodamatic for the photo, and to Pellicer et al. for the sequencing effort).)

3) Intro neuro te...
1001 PredictionBook Nights
by gwern — 2011-10-08T16:04:53.708Z

I explain what I've learned from creating and judging thousands of predictions on personal and real-world matters: the challenges of maintenance, the limitations of prediction markets, the interesting applications to my other essays, skepticism about pundits and unreflective persons' opinions, my own biases like optimism & planning fallacy, 3 very useful heuristics/approaches, and the costs of these activities in general.

Plus an extremely geeky parody of Fate/Stay Night.

This essay exists as a large section of my page on predictions markets on gwern.net: http://www.gwern.net/Prediction%20markets#1001-predictionbook-nights
Mike Darwin on Kurzweil, Techno-Optimism, and Delusional Stances on Cryonics
by Synaptic — 2011-10-08T14:45:59.707Z

In a comment on his skeptical post about Ray Kurzweil, he writes,

Unfortunately, [Kurzweil's] technological forecasting is naive, and I believe it will also prove erroneous (and in that, he is in excellent company). That would be of no consequence to me, or to others in cryonics, were it not for the fact that it has had, and continues to have, a corrosive effect on cryonics and immortalist activists and activism. His idea of the Singularity has created an expectation of entitlement and inevitability that are wholly unjustified, both on the basis of history, and on on the basis of events that are playing out now in the world markets, and on the geopolitical stage....

The IEET poll [link; Sep 7, 2011] found that the majority of their readers aged 35 or older said that they expect to “die within a normal human lifespan;” no surprises there.

This was in contrast to to an overwhelming majority (69%) of their readers under the age of 35 who believe that radical life extension will enable them to stay alive indefinitely, or “for centuries, at least.”

Where the data gets really interesting is when you look at the breakdown of just how these folks think they are going to be GIVEN practical immortality:

36% believe they will stay alive for centuries (at least) in their own (biological) bodies

26% expect that they will continue to survive by having their “minds uploaded to a computer”

7% expect to “die” but to eventually be resurrected by cryonics.

Only 7% think cryonics will be necessary? That simply delusional and it is a huge problem....

Nor are the 7% who anticipate survival via cryonics likely to be signed up. In fact, I’d wager not more than one or two of them is. And why should they bestir themselves in any way to this end? After all, the Singularity is coming, it is INEVITABLE, and all they have to do is to sit back and wait for it to arrive – presumably wrapped up in in pretty paper and with bows on.

Young people anticipating practical immortality look at me like some kind of raving mad Luddite when I try to convince them that if they are to have any meaningful chance at truly long term survival, they are going to have to act, work very hard, and have a hell of a lot of luck in the bargain....

Kurzweil has been, without doubt or argument, THE great enabler of this madness by providing a scenario and a na

...
Weekly LW Meetups: Baltimore, Houston, Chicago, Melbourne, and Penn State
by FrankAdamek — 2011-10-08T14:12:05.999Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Baltimore meetup: 01 October 2011 02:00PM
Houston Meetup - Saturday, October 1: 01 October 2011 03:00PM
Chicago Meetup: 02 October 2011 03:00PM
Pittsburgh Meetup: 05 October 2011 05:45PM
Melbourne, practical rationality, Friday 7th October, 7pm: 07 October 2011 06:00PM
Penn State University: NEW Meetup starting!: 22 October 2011 02:00PM

The Ottawa meetups are now occurring regularly and weekly! The meetups take place at 7:30 pm on Mondays, and the location varies. Join the google group or contact XFrequentist for more information.

Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: New York, Berkeley, Mountain View, Cambridge, MA, Toronto, Seattle, San Francisco, Irvine, Austin, Washington, DC, London, Oxford, Ottawa, 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!

Despite the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, we've decided to continue posting an overview of upcoming meetups 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: London, Chicago, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Helsinki, Melbourne, Vancouver, Madison, WI.
Guardian article highlights observational biases in Knox investigators
by machrider — 2011-10-08T07:41:26.164Z

Amanda Knox: What's in a face?

Some choice quotes:

The eyes are not windows to the soul. They are organs for converting light into electro-magnetic impulses.

"We were able to establish guilt," said Edgardo Giobbi, the lead investigator, "by closely observing the suspect's psychological and behavioural reaction during the interrogation."

There are several good insights throughout the article, many of which will probably seem familiar to readers of Less Wrong. The few that stood out to me:

Fundamental attribution error and the general tendency to create grossly oversimplified mental models of others (while simultaneously overestimating our model's accuracy).

Various observational biases, especially egregious on the part of police and investigators. They were so satisfied with the "evidence" of her facial expressions, which is readily available (under the proverbial streetlight), that they felt this obviated the need for additional investigation. It appears that this led them to seek only evidence that further confirmed Knox's guilt (confirmation bias), rather than considering ways to disprove the hypothesis.

Not sure what to call this other than the (not-too-well-established) Dunning-Kruger Effect: the tendency of nearly everyone involved to overestimate their ability to judge someone's guilt based on expression reading techniques in which they may or may not be skilled.
Mike Darwin on Steve Jobs's hypocritical stance towards death
by Synaptic — 2011-10-08T03:32:17.937Z

First, Darwin describes Jobs's (far mode) stance towards death:

As Aschwin points out Jobs is on record (his Stanford Commencement Speech) as saying that death is the best thing that ever happened to life - that it clears out the old, and makes way for the new.

But these are Jobs's actual (near mode) actions regarding his own death:

The really big story, so far largely unexploited by the media, is that Jobs got a liver transplant and got it here in the US. This just does not happen in patients with his Dx and prognosis - not since Mickey Mantle, anyway. And his outcome was exactly as was predicted. This infuriates those 'in the know' in the transplant community, because you have only to look to guys like Jim Neighbors, Larry Hagman, or even Larry Kramer who got livers many years or even a decade or two ago, and who continue not only to survive, but to do well. To put the liver of a 25-year old into a ~54 year old man with metastatic neuroendocrine pancreatic cancer violates the established protocols of just about every transplant center in the US.

The conclusion:

I find it more than a little hypocritical that Jobs, who spoke so glowingly of the utility of death for others, used every bit of medical technology AND his considerable wealth and influence, to postpone it for it himself, including the expedient of taking a GIFT, given with the sole intention of its being used to provide genuinely life saving benefit (not a futile exercise in medical care) and squandering it on a doomed attempt to save his own life. If you have the temerity to stand before the entire population of this planet and proclaim the goodness of death, then you should have the balls to accept it - especially when your own warped, erroneous and IRRATIONAL decision making was the proximate cause of your own dying. Instead, Jobs chose to grasp at straws, take a gift from a dead man and his family, given in good faith, and squander it on his own lust for more of the very thing (life) that he has publicly proclaimed it is a second best to "Death (which) is very likely the single best invention of life."