trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Wiki: Standard Reference or Original Research?
by wedrifid — 2011-05-25T13:13:09.250Z

My understanding of the purpose of the lesswrong wiki has been that it is a collection of well established concepts and local jargon that we can use as a reference and an easy way to communicate across inferential distance. The material on the wiki (I assumed) was to be summarised from prominent and uncontroversial blog posts that are already referenced to from time to time. Yet on several occasions I have seen pages edited with new content straight from the author's creativity.

A stark example was brought to my attention recently by User: bogus.

Please read the Less Wrong wiki page on Mind-killer, which summarizes the arguments for not doing politics at LessWrong better than any 'sequence' or blog post could.

What? I certainly hope not. If it the content isn't straight from a post then get it off the wiki and make it a post! And if the meaning of a concept differs in emphasis from that used in a sequence then so much the worse for your wiki comment.

Looking at the aforementioned mind-killer page the kind of thing I do not expect to see on the wiki is this:

many of these political virtues were identified by Bernard Crick in his work In Defense of Politics.

Huh? Bernard Crick? Since when was Bernard Crick part of an uncontroversial well established concept of 'mind killing' on lesswrong? The only reference to that author is in one comment by bogus in a post that is itself obscure. I've got nothing against Bernard Crick but I think the way to go about sharing the good news about his work is by making a post on him not injecting references into the wiki. Because then the new content has a chance to be vetted, commented on and voted on by the users.

Less obvious but to my mind more important is the distorted emphasis the article places on the subject, such as in the opening "politics is a mind killer" paragraph:

Political disputes are not limited to standard disagreements about factual matters, nor to disputes of personality or perspective or even faction: they involve matters that people physically fight over in the real world—or at least, matters that are to be enforced by the government's monopoly of violence.

That is kind of true. At least it isn't quite misleading enough that I would outright downvote it if it were a comment in a thread. But it certainly distracts from the core of the issue. On the other hand the related Politics is the Mind-Killer...
So how much utility is it?
by  — 2011-05-25T12:56:16.897Z

I would like to know what value of utility you would give to certain kinds of pleasure in order to see how much the perceived ratios are differing between people. Of course, you can object that the real amount of pleasure someone experiences may be different from the pleasure she will recall; furthermore, pleasure is not a scalar, and it is a question of definition of someones' utility function how much she would want to have different kinds of pleasure; furthermore, there are effects of diminishing returns. However, you probably can get some orders of magnitude out of this.

Let's define your favorite meal, one time, when you are hungry but not "starving to death" as one hundred utilium (You see this is pretty heuristical).

You can include painful experiences, too.
Pancritical Rationalism Can Apply to Preferences and Behavior
by TimFreeman — 2011-05-25T12:06:11.700Z

ETA: As stated below, criticizing beliefs is trivial in principle, either they were arrived at with an approximation to Bayes' rule starting with a reasonable prior and then updated with actual observations, or they weren't. Subsequent conversation made it clear that criticizing behavior is also trivial in principle, since someone is either taking the action that they believe will best suit their preferences, or not. Finally, criticizing preferences became trivial too -- the relevant question is "Does/will agent X behave as though they have preferences Y", and that's a belief, so go back to Bayes' rule and a reasonable prior. So the entire issue that this post was meant to solve has evaporated, in my opinion. Here's the original article, in case anyone is still interested:

Pancritical rationalism is a fundamental value in Extropianism that has only been mentioned in passing on LessWrong. I think it deserves more attention here. It's an approach to epistemology, that is, the question of "How do we know what we know?", that avoids the contradictions inherent in some of the alternative approaches.

The fundamental source document for it is William Bartley's Retreat to Commitment. He describes three approaches to epistemology, along with the dissatisfying aspects of the other two:

Nihilism. Nothing matters, so it doesn't matter what you believe. This path is self-consistent, but it gives no guidance.

Justificationlism. Your belief is justified because it is a consequence of other beliefs. This path is self-contradictory. Eventually you'll go in circles trying to justify the other beliefs, or you'll find beliefs you can't jutify. Justificationalism itself cannot be justified.

Pancritical rationalism. You have taken the available criticisms for the belief into account and still feel comfortable with the belief. This path gives guidance about what to believe, although it does not uniquely determine one's beliefs. Pancritical rationalism can be criticized, so it is self-consistent in that sense.

Read on for a discussion about emotional consequences and extending this to include preferences and behaviors as well as beliefs.

"Criticism" here basically means philosophical discussion. Keep in mind that "criticism" as a hostile verbal interaction is a typical cause of failed relationships. If you do nothing but criticize a person, the other person will event...
Lightswitches
by Alicorn — 2011-05-25T04:43:27.988Z

There is probably some obvious solution to this puzzle, but it eludes me. I'm not sure how to plug it into the equation for Bayes' Theorem. And the situation described happened last August, so I'm probably not going to figure it out on my own.

There are two lightswitches next to each other, and they control two lights (which have no other switches connected to them). I have used the switches a few times before, but don't occurrently recall which switch goes to which light, or whether the up or down position is the one that signifies off-ness. One light is on, one light is off, and the switches are in different positions. I want both lights off. So I guess a switch, and I'm right. What should be my credence be that my previous experience with this set of lightswitches helped me guess correctly, given that I felt like I was guessing at random (and would have had a 50% shot at being right were that the case)? How much would this be different if I'd guessed wrong the first time?
LW Biology 101 Introduction: Constraining Anticipation
by virtualAdept — 2011-05-25T00:32:25.088Z

Since the responses to my recent inquiry were positive, I've rolled up my sleeves and gotten started. Special thanks to badger for eir comment in that thread, as it inspired the framework used here.

My intent in the upcoming posts is to offer a practical overview of biological topics of both broad-scale importance and particular interest to the Less Wrong community. This will by no means be exhaustive (else I’d be writing a textbook instead, or more likely, you’d be reading one); instead I am going to attempt to sketch what amounts to a map of several parts of the discipline – where they stand in relation to other fields, where we are in the progress of their development, and their boundaries and frontiers. I’d like this to be a continually improving project as well, so I would very much welcome input on content relevance and clarity for any and all posts.

I will list relevant/useful references for more in-depth reading at the end of each post. The majority of in-text links will be used to provide a quick explanation of terms that may not be familiar or phenomena that may not be obvious. If the terms are familiar to you, you probably do not need to worry about those links. A significant minority of in-text links may or may not be purely for amusement.

It is a popular half-joke that biology is applied chemistry is applied physics is applied math. While it’s certainly necessary to apply all the usual considerations for a chemical system to a biological system or problem, there are some overall complications and themes that specifically (though not uniquely) apply to biological problems, and it is useful to keep them in mind.

1. Biological processes are stochastic.

Cellular-scale chemistry is an event-dense environment, but the abundance of most reactants is generally quite low. (Exceptions typically include oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, and small ions.) Beyond the basic consideration of abundance, there are other layers of regulation that determine whether a given entity, usually a protein, can actually react at any given time, and complicated geometries involved that further decrease the frequency of a given reaction. We therefore must consider the majority of reactions as discrete, and model them stochastically.

If we take a st...
Self-programming through spaced repetition
by  — 2011-05-25T00:02:56.858Z

Spaced repetition software is a flashcard memorization technology based on the spacing effect. Personally, I think of it as a way of engineering dispositions, a form of self-programming. More concretely, I find that spaced repetition is helpful for

internalizing knowledge

compressing recent experiences

conditioning specific future behaviors

making analogies

laying the groundwork for future insights

confusion identification

concept clarification

reconciling models

creating new representations

creating examples

Below I give some principles, tips, and examples that aim at helping you get the most out of SRS. This post is compact, and I think it will be helpful to re-read it periodically as you use SRS more.

Principles

SR strengthens connections between mental representations.

There a variety of ways this can happen, seeing as there is both a variety of mental representations and connections between them. For example, the two mental representations could be of a context and a behavior, and strengthening the connection would mean making the behavior more likely in that context.

Mental representations precisely condition behavior.

The point of doing SR is to change behavior (whether mental or physical) and I think it helps to keep the chain of causality in mind. It gives me a framework to think about the different things SR does for me, and how those things are achieved.

SR establishes a personal language of thought.

Cards about situations or concepts give you a canonical handle/representation for thinking about them (like Eliezer's clever post titles). This can have positive effects (consistency of thought and building potential) as well as negative effects (potential ridigity of thought).

Tips

Be very specific when conditioning behaviors.

Make cards that follow the form "Do actionable_behavior_x in specific_situation_y under condition_z." This will limit confusion about whether you should execute the behavior and also make it more likely that you'll remember. For example, "If you're eating when not hungry, reflect on what you're suffering from."

Use one unit of meaning per card.

This is similar to Piotr Wozniak's minimum information principle, which is one of his 20 rules for formulating knowledge (totally recommended). I almost entirely use cloze-deletion car

...
Free Stats Textbook: Principles of Uncertainty
by badger — 2011-05-24T19:45:16.079Z

Joseph Kadane, emeritus at Carnegie Mellon, released his new statistics textbook Principles of Uncertainty as a free pdf. The book is written from a Bayesian perspective, covering basic probability, decision theory, conjugate distribution analysis, hierarchical modeling, MCMC simulation, and game theory. The focus is mathematical, but computation with R is touched on. A solid understanding of calculus seems sufficient to use the book. Curiously, the author devotes a fair number of pages to developing the McShane integral, which is equivalent to Lebesgue integration on the real line. There are lots of other unusual topics you don't normally see in an intermediate statistics textbook.

Having came across this today, I can't say whether it is actually very good or not, but the range of topics seems perfectly suited to Less Wrong readers.
LessWrong Power Reader (Greasemonkey script, updated)
by Wei Dai — 2011-05-24T19:00:21.968Z

I posted this script previously to Open Thread, but it got broken by the discussion/main split-up and also didn't work in Firefox 4. It's now updated and fixed for Firefox 4. The original description follows. See the previous thread for some additional questions and answers. (ETA: Firefox 4 seems to have made the script much faster, so try it again if you were previously put off by the slowness.)

For those who may be having trouble keeping up with "Recent Comments" or finding the interface a bit plain, I've written a Greasemonkey script to make it easier/prettier. Here is a screenshot.

Explanation of features:

loads and threads up to 400 most recent comments on one screen

use [↑] and [↓] to mark favored/disfavored authors

comments are color coded based on author/points (pink) and recency (yellow)

replies to you are outlined in red

hover over [+] to view single collapsed comment

hover over/click [^] to highlight/scroll to parent comment

marks comments read (grey) based on scrolling

shows only new/unread comments upon refresh

date/time are converted to your local time zone

click comment date/time for permalink

To install, first get Greasemonkey, then click here. Once that's done, use this link to get to the reader interface.

I've placed the script is in the public domain. EDIT: Chrome is supported as of version 1.0.5 of the script.

On a related note, here is a way to view all posts and comments of a particular LW user as a single HTML page.

EDIT - Version History:

1.0.5

loads comments directly from LW instead of through another server

added Chrome support

auto checking/notification of new versions

can specify a starting point to load comments from (if you want, you can read all LW comments, 400 at a time, by starting at comment ID 1)

can collapse all comments under a post

1.0.6 (10/4/2011)

misc bug fixes

number of comments loaded changed to 800

tested on Firefox 7.0 and Chrome 14.0

1.0.7 (11/10/2011)

bug fixes

number of comments loaded changed to 800 on Chrome

1.0.8 (7/16/2012)

fixed broken parsing (pengvado)

tested on Firefox 13.0.1 and Chrome 20.0
[SEQ RERUN] Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People
by badger — 2011-05-24T12:54:31.986Z

Today's post, Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People was originally published on April 4, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

Learning common biases won't help you obtain truth if you only use this knowledge to attack beliefs you don't like. Discussions about biases need to first do no harm by emphasizing motivated cognition, the sophistication effect, and dysrationalia, although even knowledge of these can backfire.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments of the original post).
This post is part of a series rerunning Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts so those interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Majority is Always Wrong, 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, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki, or creating exercises. Go here for more details, or to discuss the Sequence Reruns.
Dissolution of free will as a call to action
by Dr_Manhattan — 2011-05-24T12:41:40.354Z

Accepting determinism and the insuing dissolution of free will is often feared as something that would lead to loss of will and fatalism. Gary Drescher and Eliezer spend considerable effort explaining this as a fallacy.

The one thing I don't remember mentioned is the opposite effect (but maybe I missed it) - if you experienced a failure to accomplish something, the free will explanation is likely to make you stop investigating the root cause, leaving it as a mystery. Once you accept determinism you know that a failure is determined by your mental algorithms, and should be much more motivated to push the investigation further, making yourself stronger.
Official Less Wrong Redesign: Nearly there
by matt — 2011-05-24T07:20:23.418Z

Design sketches

1. Notes on differences between these images and what we're planning on implementing:

2. Meetup widget in sidebar, listing the 5 nearest meetups occurring in the next 2 weeks, linking to:
(something like right-click & "Open Image in new tab" will help here)

3. New headers:
Inferring Our Desires
by lukeprog — 2011-05-24T05:33:22.595Z

Related: Cached Selves, The Neuroscience of Desire

You don't know your own mind.
- Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation

Researchers showed subjects two female faces for a few seconds and asked which face was more attractive. Researchers then placed the photos face down and handed subjects the face they had chosen, asking them to explain the motives behind their choice. But sometimes, researchers used a sleight-of-hand trick to switch the photos, showing viewers the face they had not chosen. Very few subjects noticed the face they were given was not the one they had chosen. Moreover, they happily explained why they preferred the face they had actually rejected, inventing reasons like "I like her smile" even though they had actually chosen the solemn-faced picture.1

The idea that we lack good introspective access to our own desires - that we often have no idea what we want2 - is a key lemma in naturalistic metaethics, so it seems worth a post to collect the science by which we know that.

Early warnings came from split-brain research, which identified an 'interpreter' in the left hemisphere that invents reasons for beliefs and actions. When the command 'walk' was flashed to split-brain subjects' right hemispheres, they got up from their chairs and start walking away. When asked why they suddenly started walking away, they replied (for example) that they got up because they wanted a Coke.3

The overjustification effect

Common sense suggests that we infer others' feelings from their appearance and actions, but we have a different, more direct route to our own feelings: direct perception or introspection.4 In contrast, self-perception theory5 suggests that our knowledge of ourselves is exactly like our knowledge of others.6 One famous result explained by self-perception theory is the overjustification effect.

In a famous 1973 study,

nursery school children drew pictures with a magic marker, a presumably intrinsically interesting activity, under one of three reward conditions. In the first condition the children expected to receive a reward (a fancy 'good player' award) for drawing, in the second they received the reward unexpectedly, and children in a third group received no reward. Only the expected reward produced a decrement in performance, during a later 'free p

...
Signaling for a cause
by KatjaGrace — 2011-05-24T03:42:40.000Z

Suppose you have come to agree with an outlandish seeming cause, and wish to promote it. Should you:

a) Join the cause with gusto, affiliating with its other members, wearing its T-shirts, working on its projects, speaking its lingo, taking up the culture and other causes of its followers

b) Be as ordinary as you can in every way, apart from speaking and acting in favour of the cause in a modest fashion

c) Don’t even mention that you support the cause. Engage its supporters in serious debate.

If you saw that a cause had another radical follower, another ordinary person with sympathies for it, or another skeptic who thought it worth engaging, which of these would make you more likely to look into their claims?

What do people usually do when they come to accept a radical cause?
[REVIEW] Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis
by badger — 2011-05-24T02:25:04.801Z

Neuroeconomics is the application of advances in neuroscience to the fundamentals of economics: choice and valuation. Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analyis by Paul Glimcher, an active researcher in this area, presents a summary of this relatively new field to psychologists and economists. Although written as a serious work, the presentation is made across disciplines, so it should be accessible to anyone interested without much background knowledge in either area. Although the writing is so-so, the book covers multiple Less Wrong-relevant themes, from reductionism to neuroscience to decision theory. If nothing else, the results discussed provide a wonderful example of how no one knows what science doesn't know. I doubt many economists are aware researchers can point to something very similar to utility on a brain scanner and would scoff at the very notion.

Because of the book's wide target audience, there is not enough detail for specialists, but possibly a little too much for non-specialists. If you are interested in this topic, the best reason to pick up the book would be to track down further references. I hope the following summary does the book justice for everyone else.

Are book summaries of this sort useful? The recent review/summary of Predictably Irrational appears to have gone over well. Any suggestions to improve possible future reviews?

Introduction

Many economists think economics is fundamentally separate from psychology and neuroscience; since they take choices as primitives, little if any knowledge would be gained from understanding the mechanisms underlying choice. However, science steadily brings reduction and linkages between previously unrelated disciplines. A striking amount has already been discovered about the exact processes in the brain governing choice and valuation. On the other side, neuroscientists and psychologist underestimate the ability of economists to say whether claims about the brain are logically coherent or not.

Section I: The Challenge of Neuroeconomics

Consider a man and woman who have an affair with each other at a professional conference, which they later consider a mistake. An economist looking at this situation would treat their choice to sleep together as revealing a preference, regardless of their verbal claims. A psychologist would consider how mental states mediated this decision, and would be more willing to con...
Minneapolis Meetup: Saturday May 28, 3:00PM
by JustinShovelain — 2011-05-23T23:55:22.132Z

Saturday May 28th, 3PM

Starbucks

Coffman Memorial Union

300 Washington Avenue SE,

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455

Goals:

To meet and network with likeminded Minnesotans.

I'll do my best to answer any questions people have about SIAI, rationality, x-risk strategy, and intelligence amplification (I spent about 2 years as a fellow).

To find ways we can help reduce existential risks. I'll design a list of projects, roles, and organizations.

Directions:

The Minneapolis meetup will take place this Saturday the 28th at 3:00 PM in Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota. We'll be meeting inside at Starbucks, next to the northwest entrance to the bookstore, and underneath the northwest entrance to the Union. That entrance is a separate glass-sided structure right next to Washington Avenue, not the multistory brick building, but you can get to Starbucks from either entrance.

RSVP and I'll keep an eye out for you and add you to the Google group. You can contact me at jshovelainsiai@gmail.com.