trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[SEQ RERUN] Explain/Worship/Ignore?
by MinibearRex — 2011-08-16T03:52:43.398Z

Today's post, Explain/Worship/Ignore? was originally published on 02 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When you encounter something you don't understand, you have three options: to seek an explanation, knowing that that explanation will itself require an explanation; to avoid thinking about the mystery at all; or to embrace the mysteriousness of the world and worship your confusion.

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 Stranger Than History, 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.
Cached Phrases
by curiousepic — 2011-08-15T23:50:23.032Z

Recently I've noticed that, while introspecting, my internal monologue will state an opinion on a preceding thought, and I will feel an immediate repulsion towards that phrase as something disingenuous or alien. I will then recognize it as what I've come to term a "cached phrase". A variation/subset of cached thought, it is usually a string of words or that one might hear in a movie or something a friend or coworker would say, but comes to mind when you yourself are thinking about a domain associated with the conversation from the movie or friend.

Some (half fabricated) examples:

"Fred should really cut back on drinking; he just started seeing someone too; *like that's going to last*... wait, I don't actually have any reason to think that it wouldn't..."

A few days after watching an episode of Peep Show, and sympathizing with Mark, who is comically socially inept, I go to eat at a local market/cafeteria, and often hear Mark's internal monologue narrate my own situation, self-conscious about how others judge my actions.

I wonder if it correlates positively to the OCD spectrum. I notice it quite frequently in myself (I'm not diagnosed OCD but suspect a slightly higher than average presence), and sometimes struggle to determine whether it's an opinion I truly hold, or if my hypothesis is an actual explanation for its appearance, or to what degree one of the two is true. Do I really feel what I think? It is too often ambiguous to myself.

Perhaps it is related to the concept of mentally modeling other people. We have our models of what other people would say in certain situations, but in this case, a random model's opinion is invoked involuntarily.

Does anyone else experience this? Do you agree with my hypothesis, or are these actually genuine thoughts; subconcious-level emotional reactions? Is there, or can we develop, a heuristic for determining where a certain thought or opinion lies on the spectrum between the two?
[link] Friendly AI and Utilitarianism
by lukeprog — 2011-08-15T23:34:20.585Z

I've begun an online discussion with Alan Dawrst (Brian Tomasik) of utilitarian-essays.com concerning Friendly AI and utilitarianism. Interested parties may wish to follow along or participate.

The forum thread now contains many overlapping discussions. For clarity, here's an index of the narrow, core discussion between Alan and I:

Luke #1

Alan #1

Luke #2

Alan #2

Luke #3

Alan #3

Luke #4

Alan #4

Luke #5

Alan #5

Luke #6

Alan #6

Luke #7

Alan #7
[Link] Scott Aaronson on Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity
by DanielVarga — 2011-08-15T22:51:43.075Z

Scott Aaronson has published a preliminary version of his long essay titled 'Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity'. His announcement blog post has some interesting comments, and he welcomes suggestions there. I am not sure I like the organization of the paper. (I know most of the CS stuff discussed, so it is hard for me to decide how readable it is for people who don't.) But it is full of interesting ideas, and some of these are new even for those of us who follow Scott's writings.
Nozick's fluff, or Omega the trickster.
by Shmi — 2011-08-15T22:08:36.830Z

"OK, so here is the plan: You and I bet on whether Nozick one-boxes or not, and then I tell him that I can predict what he chooses and set up the opaque box accordingly ahead of time." Hermes looked extremely pleased with his new idea.

"You can't seriously expect even someone as stupid as a mortal to two-box, when you all but promised them that one-boxing gives them so many more of those green paper thingies they use as a surrogate of happiness?" Iris was still incredulous.

"You underestimate how gullible people are, my lovely Iris, they get stuck in simple logical fallacies all the time. Remember the time I made a centipede ponder the order it moves its legs and the poor creature froze in place? Humans are just like that."

"But, but... a centipede doesn't even have a brain, just a bunch of gangia! A Homo Sapiens' brain has some 20 billion neurons, all highly interconnected! Surely they will figure it out in an instant. What can you possibly say to Bob that would make him doubt one-boxing for even a second?"

"As I said, all I have to do is a small misdirection, and they are stuck like that centipede". "But Hermie, you are not going to waste Predictor's time to actually try to figure out what a human will decide, will you?"

"Of course not, there is no point, why bother Cassandra if there is no way to tell the difference. Ever since Apollo's curse was lifted from her after her death, she has been quite busy predicting which of the many worlds we will end up in after each split." "All of them, of course, no?" Hermes just smirked. "Wait, what was that?" Iris looked at the divine trickster with more than a mild suspicion. "Did you have a hand in that, too?" "I will neither confirm, nor deny..." intoned Hermes.

"Anyway, this is just a simple prank, not point wasting extra energy on it. If they two-box, they get $1000, if they one-box they get $1,000,000. But adding the magic incantation "I have accurately predicted your choice before you made it!" will throw a large number of them into a loop, to the degree that they will two-box, justifying it with counterfactuals, such as "Since the prediction has already been made, two-boxing gives you a larger expected payout". They will use words like "rationality", "causality", "universality" and even, believe it or not, "I have free will, so I had no choice."

"But they do have Occam's razor to shave your fluff away, won't the...
The Whistleblower
by MatthewBaker — 2011-08-15T21:13:00.651Z

I recently saw this movie about the UN Scandal involving sex trafficking and was surprised by the conclusion. Instead of a neat little bow on the issue it left me with a ton of questions about what was being done to change things in the other parts of the world and how I could best contribute to that. I wanted to make this discussion post to ask for any of your opinions on the movie and perhaps some guidance for my upcoming top level post on the subject

-Matt

I thought more about my feelings on this subject and re-summarized them here.

I read it and I thought it was amazingly similar to a lot of the thoughts and feelings I've had going through my head recently. Maybe this is just the emotion and fallow of youth but I feel like the world as a whole is very apathetic towards the suffering that exists outside of the bubble of the First World that LW exists in. How can you honestly choose cryonics over the utility of an organization built to protect human life until the singularity along with Eliezer's group which works to ensure a positive singularity.

I recently saw a movie about government corruption and the UN dealing with it in Europe when it comes to fighting the sex trafficking industry, the courage it takes to fight oppression around the world is rare and expensive to come by but its definitely something we need more of. Once I master the art of willpower I intend to devote even more time to this pursuit, and I hope others will do the same.
What are you working on?
by jsalvatier — 2011-08-15T14:43:48.314Z

This is the fourth bimonthly What Are You Working On? thread. Thanks to atucker for reminding me to make this post. Click here to see previous threads. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started, those are for a different thread.

Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).

Talk about your goals for the project.

Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.

Link to your work if it's linkable.
Help! All this new found rationality and room for improvement is causing me to burn out
by tetsuo55 — 2011-08-15T14:23:05.705Z

I have been on the quest for winning at life for a long time. But nothing could prepare me for a run-in with a lesswrongian.

My life has been turned upside-down, it turns out that every aspect of my life can be considerably improved or upgraded, but there is so much to do that I'm completely overwhelmed by all there is to do.

The improvement to-do list is a mile long and I've currently reached the point where I'd rather wallow in self-pity than actually get up and do something...

I have trouble sleeping because I worry about all the things I'm not doing, and then when I'm awake I'm stuck on sites like lesswrong pressing F5 all day long in the hopes that a new post will save me...

Help,Please.
[Link] Study on Group Intelligence
by atucker — 2011-08-15T08:56:40.889Z

Full disclosure: This has already been discussed here, but I see utility in bringing it up again. Mostly because I only heard about it offline.

The Paper:

Some researchers were interested if, in the same way that there's a general intelligence g that seems to predict competence in a wide variety of tasks, there is a group intelligence c that could do the same. You can read their paper here.

Their abstract:

Psychologists have repeatedly shown that a single statistical factor—often called “general intelligence”—emerges from the correlations among people’s performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. But no one has systematically examined whether a similar kind of “collective intelligence” exists for groups of people. In two studies with 699 people, working in groups of two to five, we find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks. This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.

Basically, groups with higher social sensitivity, equality in conversational turn-taking, and proportion of females are collectively more intelligent. On top of that, those effects trump out things like average IQ or even max IQ.

I theorize that proportion of females mostly works as a proxy for social sensitivity and turn-taking, and the authors speculate the same.

Some thoughts:

What does this mean for Less Wrong?

The most important part of the study, IMO, is that "social sensitivity" (measured by a test where you try and discern emotional states from someone's eyes) is such a stronger predictor of group intelligence. It probably helps people to gauge other people's comprehension, but based on the fact that people sharing talking time more equally also helps, I would speculate that another chunk of its usefulness comes from being able to tell if other people want to talk, or think that there's something relevant to be said.

One thing that I find interesting in the meatspace meetups is how in new groups, conversation tends to be dominated by the people who talk the loudest and most insistently....
Remind Physicalists They're Physicalists
by lukeprog — 2011-08-15T04:36:29.438Z

Weisberg et al. (2008) presented subjects with two explanations for psychological phenomena (e.g. attentional blink). Some subjects got the regular explanation, and other subjects got the 'with neuroscience' explanation that included purposely irrelevant verbiage saying that "brain scans indicate" some part of the brain already known to be involved in that psychological process caused the process to occur.

And yet, Yale cognitive science students rated the 'with neuroscience' explanations as more satisfying than the regular explanations.

Why? The purposely irrelevant neuroscience verbiage could only be important to the explanation if somebody thought that perhaps it's not the brain that was producing certain psychological phenomena. But these are Yale cognitive science students. Somehow I suspect people who chose to study cognition as information processing are less likely than average to believe the mind runs on magic. But then, why would they be additionally persuaded by information suggesting only that the brain causes psychological phenomena?

In another study, McCabe & Castel (2008) showed subjects fictional articles summarizing scientific results and including either no image, a brain scan image, or a bar graph. Subjects were asked to rate the soundness of scientific reasoning in the article, and they gave the highest ratings when the article included a brain scan image. But why should this be?

I remember talking to a friend about free will. She was a long-time physicalist who liked reading about physics and neuroscience for fun, but she didn't read Less Wrong and she thought she had contra-causal (libertarian) free will.

"Okay," I said. "So the brain is made of atoms, and atoms move according to deterministic physical law, right?"

"Right," she said.

"Okay. Now, think about the physical state of the entire universe one moment before you decided to say "Right" instead of something else, or instead of just nodding your head. If all those atoms, including the atoms in your brain, have to move to their next spot according to physical law, then could you have said anything else than what you did say in the next moment?" (Neither of us understood many-worlds yet, so you can assume we're talking about a single Everett branch.)

She paused. "Huh. I'll have to think about that."

"Also, have you heard about those studies where brain scans told researchers wha...
[SEQ RERUN] Stranger Than History
by MinibearRex — 2011-08-15T03:21:27.695Z

Today's post, Stranger Than History was originally published on 01 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Imagine trying to explain quantum physics, the internet, or any other aspect of modern society to people from 1900. Technology and culture change so quickly that our civilization would be unrecognizable to people 100 years ago; what will the world look like 100 years from now?

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 Making History Available, 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.
Judgment Under Uncertainty summaries, Part 1: Representativeness
by Tesseract — 2011-08-15T00:05:21.815Z

Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases is one of the foundational works on the flaws of human reasoning, and as such gets cited a lot on Less Wrong — but it's also rather long and esoteric, which makes it inaccessible to most Less Wrong users. Over the next few months, I'm going to attempt to distill the essence of the studies that make up the collection, in an attempt to convey the many interesting bits without forcing you to slog through the 500 or so pages of the volume itself. This post summarizes sections I (Introduction) and II (Representativeness).

By way of background: Judgment Under Uncertainty is a collection of 35 scientific papers and articles on how people make decisions with limited information, edited by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Paul Slovic. Kahneman and Tversky are the most recognizable figures in the area and the names most associated with the book, but only 12 of the studies are their work. It was first published in 1982 (my version is from 1986), and most studies were performed in the '70s — so note that this is not up-to-date research, and I can't say for sure what the current scientific consensus on the topic is. Judgement Under Uncertainty focuses on the divergence of human intuition from optimal reasoning, so it uses a lot of statistics and probability to define what's optimal. The details are actually pretty fascinating if you have the time and inclination (and it's also something of an education in study design and statistics), and this series of posts by no means replaces the book, but I intend to provide something of a shorthand version.

That said, on to the summaries! Title of the chapter/paper in quotes, sections organized as in the book and in bold. (Incomplete preview here, if you want to follow along.)

Introduction

"Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases", Tversky and Kahneman (1974)

This is the most important paper in the book, and it's short and publicly available (PDF), so I'd encourage you to just go read it now. It reviews the representativeness and availability heuristics and the various errors in reasoning they produce, and introduces the idea of anchoring. Since it reviews some of the material contained in Judgment Under Uncertainty, there's overlap between the material it covers and the material I'm going to cover in this and the other posts. As it's already a boiled-down version...
The Doomsday Argument and Self-Sampling Assumption are wrong, but induction is alive and well.
by RonPisaturo — 2011-08-14T18:15:46.747Z

Since the Doomsday Argument still is discussed often on Less Wrong, I would like to call attention to my new, short, self-published e-book, The Longevity Argument, which is a much-revised and much-expanded work that began with my paper, “Past Longevity as Evidence for the Future,” in the January 2009 issue of Philosophy of Science. In my judgment, my work provides a definitive refutation of the Doomsday Argument, identifying two elementary errors in the argument.

The first elementary error is that the Doomsday Argument conflates total duration and future duration. Although the Doomsday Argument’s Bayesian formalism is stated in terms of total duration, all attempted real-life applications of the argument—with one exception, a derivation by Gott (1994, 108) of his delta t argument introduced in Gott 1993—actually plug in prior probabilities for future duration.

For example, Leslie (1996, 198–200) presents a Bayesian equation stated in terms of prior probabilities of total instances. But then Leslie (1996, 201–203) plugs into this equation prior probabilities for future instances: humans being born for the next 150 years vs. humans being born for the next many thousands of centuries. Bostrom (2002, 94–96) recounts Leslie’s general argument in terms of births instead of durations of time, using 200 billion total births vs. 200 trillion total births. (A closer parallel to Leslie 1996 would be 80 billion total births vs. 80 trillion total births.) But the error persists: the actual prior probabilities that are plugged in to Leslie’s Bayesian equation, based on all of the real-life risks actually considered by Leslie (1996, 1–153) and Bostrom (2002, 95), are of future births, not total births.

In other words, Leslie supposes a prior probability of doom within the next 150 years or roughly 20 billion births. (The prior probabilities supposed in the Doomsday Argument are prior to knowledge of one’s birth rank.) Leslie then assumes that—since there have already been, say, 60 billion births—this prior probability is equal to the prior probability that the total number of births will have been 80 billion births. However, in the absence of knowledge of one’s birth rank, this assumption is absurd.

The second elementary error is the Doomsday Argument&rsq

...
Cryonics is Quantum Suicide (minus the suicide)
by KPier — 2011-08-14T18:08:21.066Z

EDIT: I was confused. Confusion now resolved. Disregard this (I don't think it's possible to retract it, and I don't want to delete it in case I wasn't the only confused person).

The frequently discussed quantum lottery thought experiment proposes that a group of people pool their money and arrange for a quantum-random process to determine the winner and kill all the losers. By the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum physics and the anthropic principle, every person will experience waking up extremely wealthy.

There are lots of reasons not to participate in a quantum lottery, of course, but it seems to me that the general principle is sound. If you go to sleep in a situation where there is only an extremely small chance of waking up, you can anticipate with near-certainty that you will in fact wake up, as long as you survive in at least one of the (virtually infinite) universes in which you exist.

If this is right, then the implications for cryonics are obvious: you can anticipate with near-certainty that it will work. As long as there is a positive Singularity or the technologies needed to make cryonics work are developed without a Singularity in at least one world, you are all set.

(Related: If civilization finds itself in a position to revive some but not all of the people cryonically suspended, we should use a quantum-random process to choose who we wake up, so that everyone gets woken up somewhere)

It seems to me there are a few ways to disagree with this:

1) Disbelieve in Many Worlds.

2) Argue that cryonics is literally impossible, to the extent that absolutely no future world could possibly revive people. I haven't seen this argued much by anyone who has reviewed the literature on cryonics, and wouldn't personally consider it probable, but it is possible.

3) Argue that this also means a few copies of you are likely to find themselves revived in an unpleasant situation, no matter how improbable that is, and that it isn't worth the risk.

Any other objections? As I misunderstanding something obvious?
How good an emulation is required?
by  — 2011-08-14T13:15:34.255Z

Reading this article on requiring lots of processing power to emulate the snes accurately, made me think that we will likely have similar issues when emulating humans.

I'd imagine weird timing and chemical interactions being used by the brain as it is an adaptable system and might be able adapt to use them if they turn out to be helpful.

This suggested to me a few issues with no easy answers that I could see.

Is it better to emulate 1 human faithfully or 10 humans with occasional glitches (for example could no longer appreciate music in the same way)

How glitch free would you want the emulation to be before you gave up your body.

How glitch free would you want the emulation to be before letting it use heavy machinery.

How glitch free would you want the emulation to be before you had it working on FAI.

Also please ignore the 3Ghz vs 25Mhz comparison, it perpetuates the myth that computational power is about clock speed and not operations per second and memory bandwidth.