trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Deception and Self-Doubt
by Psychohistorian — 2010-03-11T02:39:06.462Z

A little while ago, I argued with a friend of mine over the efficiency of the Chinese government. I admitted he was clearly better informed on the subject than I. At one point, however, he claimed that the Chinese government executed fewer people than the US government. This statement is flat-out wrong; China executes ten times as many people as the US, if not far more. It's a blatant lie. I called him on it, and he copped to it. The outcome is besides the point. Why does it matter that he lied? In this case, it provides weak evidence that the basics of his claim were wrong, that he knew the point he was arguing was, at least on some level, incorrect.

The fact that a person is willing to lie indefensibly in order to support their side of an argument shows that they have put "winning" the argument at the top of their priorities. Furthermore, they've decided, based on the evidence they have available, that lying was a more effective way to advance their argument than telling the truth. While exceptions obviously exist, if you believe that lying to a reasonably intelligent audience is the best way of advancing your claim, this suggests that you know your claim is ill-founded, even if you don't admit this fact to yourself.

Two major exceptions exist. First, the person may simply have no qualms about lying, and may just say anything they think will advance their point, regardless of its veracity. This indicates the speaker should never be trusted on basically any factual claim he makes, though it does not necessarily show self-doubt. Second, the speaker may have little respect for the intelligence of her audience, and believe that the audience is not sophisticated enough for the truth to persuade them. While this may be justified, depending on the audience,1 unless there is good evidence to believe the audience legitimately would not process the truth accurately, this shows the speaker is likely wrong about his central point. However, "the masses are ignorant and should be lead by their betters" is a pretty effective cognitive dissonance resolver, so he may not experience the same self-doubt.

This principle applies in direct proportion to the deception, and in direct proportion to the sophistication of the speaker. An informed person relying on outright lies indicates either an Escher-like mind or a belief in the wrongness of your position. Lesser deception indicate...
Blackmail, Nukes and the Prisoner's Dilemma
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2010-03-10T14:58:38.238Z

This example (and the whole method for modelling blackmail) are due to Eliezer. I have just recast them in my own words.

We join our friends, the Countess of Rectitude and Baron Chastity, in bed together. Having surmounted their recent difficulties (she paid him, by the way), they decide to relax with a good old game of prisoner's dilemma. The payoff matrix is as usual:

(Baron, Countess)
Cooperate
Defect

Cooperate

(3,3)
(0,5)

Defect

(5,0)
(1,1)

Were they both standard game theorists, they would both defect, and the payoff would be (1,1). But recall that the baron occupies an epistemic vantage over the countess. While the countess only gets to choose her own action, he can choose from among four more general tactics:

(Countess C, Countess D)→(Baron D, Baron C) "contrarian" : do the opposite of what she does

(Countess C, Countess D)→(Baron C, Baron C) "trusting soul" : always cooperate

(Countess C, Countess D)→(Baron D, Baron D) "bastard" : always defect

(Countess C, Countess D)→(Baron C, Baron D) "copycat" : do whatever she does

Recall that he counterfactually considers what the countess would do in each case, while assuming that the countess considers his decision a fixed fact about the universe. Were he to adopt the contrarian tactic, she would maximise her utility by defecting, giving a payoff of (0,5). Similarly, she would defect in both trusting soul and bastard, giving payoffs of (0,5) and (1,1) respectively. If he goes for copycat, on the other hand, she will cooperate, giving a payoff of (3,3).

Thus when one player occupies a superior epistemic vantage over the other, they can do better than standard game theorists, and manage to both cooperate.

"Isn't it wonderful," gushed the Countess, pocketing her 3 utilitons and lighting a cigarette, "how we can do such marvellously unexpected things when your position is over mine?"

Next to the bed, the butler had absent-mindedly left a pair of nuclear bombs, along with the champagne flutes. The countess and the baron each picked up one of the nukes, and the wily baron proposed that they play another round of prisoner's dilemma. With the added option of setting off a nuke, the game payoff matrix looks like:

(Baron, Countess)
Cooperate
Defect
Nuke!

Cooperate

(3,3)
(0,5)
-∞

Defect

(5,0)
(1,1)

-∞

Nuke!
-∞

...
The Blackmail Equation
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2010-03-10T14:46:24.821Z

This is Eliezer's model of blackmail in decision theory at the recent workshop at SIAI, filtered through my own understanding. Eliezer help and advice were much appreciated; any errors here-in are my own.

The mysterious stranger blackmailing the Countess of Rectitude over her extra-marital affair with Baron Chastity doesn't have to run a complicated algorithm. He simply has to credibly commit to the course of action:

"If you don't give me money, I will reveal your affair."

And then, generally, the Countess forks over the cash. Which means the blackmailer never does reveal the details of the affair, so that threat remains entirely counterfactual/hypothetical. Even if the blackmailer is Baron Chastity, and the revelation would be devastating for him as well, this makes no difference at all, as long as he can credibly commit to Z. In the world of perfect decision makers, there is no risk to doing so, because the Countess will hand over the money, so the Baron will not take the hit from the revelation.

Indeed, the baron could replace "I will reveal our affair" with Z="I will reveal our affair, then sell my children into slavery, kill my dogs, burn my palace, and donate my organs to medical science while boiling myself in burning tar" or even "I will reveal our affair, then turn on an unfriendly AI", and it would only matter if this changed his pre-commitment to Z. If the Baron can commit to counterfactually doing Z, then he never has to do Z (as the countess will pay him the hush money), so it doesn't matter how horrible the consequences of Z are to himself.

To get some numbers in this model, assume the countess can either pay up or not do so, and the baron can reveal the affair or keep silent. The payoff matrix could look something like this:

(Baron, Countess)
Pay
Not pay

Reveal

(-90,-110)
(-100,-100)

Silent

(10,-10)
(0,0)

Both the countess and the baron get -100 utility if the affair is revealed, while the countess transfers 10 of her utilitons to the baron if she pays up. Staying silent and not paying have no effect on the utility of either.

Let's see how we could implement the blackmailing if the baron and the countess were running simple decision algorithms. The baron has a variety of tactics he could implement. What is a tactic, for the baron? A tactic is a list of responses he could implement, depending on what the countess does. His four tactics...
Coffee: When it helps, when it hurts
by JustinShovelain — 2010-03-10T06:14:56.186Z

Many people take caffeine always, or never. But the evidence is clear: for some tasks, drink coffee -- for others, don't.

Caffeine:

Impairs hippocampal neurogenesis and long term memory

Narrows focus -- aiding short-term memory when the information is related to the current focus of thought, and making short-term recall more difficult when the information isn't related

Increases short term recall of both true and false memories

Increases short term memory and attentional control

Increases memory retention and retrieval

So:

Use caffeine for short-term performance on a focused task (such as an exam).

Avoid caffeine for tasks that require broad creativity and long-term learning.

(Disclaimer: The greater altertness, larger short-term memory capacity, and eased recall might make the memories you do make of higher quality.)

At least, this is my take. But the issue is convoluted enough that I'm unsure. What do you think?
Trade makes you responsible, but why?
by KatjaGrace — 2010-03-09T18:54:23.000Z

It’s supposedly bad to exploit poor people by paying them as little as you can get away with in trade.

Onlookers who don’t offer the needy anything condemn those who offer some non altruistic benefit through trade because it isn’t enough. It’s interesting that we see this as a fault with the person trading, rather than with everyone. Very few people think they themselves are morally obliged to pay the poor more. I’ve discussed before how misguided this is if we care about the wellbeing of the poor person. But why do people feel this way? Here are some reasons I’ve occasionally heard, though I doubt they are all independently responsible for this curiosity:

The issue is domination more than wellbeing. A trader forces a poor person into a low value deal by offering when they can’t afford to refuse. At least the rest of us respect poor people enough to mind our own businesses.

It is the role of the trader to trade fairly with the poor people. It is the role of the casual observer to have opinions, not to intervene in traders’ doings.

Benefiting from another’s misfortune is evil, even if it helps them, so interactions with people who need help should be charitable. It’s not great of most people to ignore poor people, but it’s horrific to go out and benefit from their hardships.

Trade is a form of social relation, and people should be nice in their relationships much more than they should be to those they are unconnected to.
Divide individuals for utilitarian libertarianism
by KatjaGrace — 2010-03-07T23:59:06.000Z

or Why I could conceivably support banning smoking part 2 (at the request of Robert Wiblin, who would not support banning smoking)

A strong argument for individuals having complete freedom in decisions affecting nobody else is that each person has much better information about what they want and the details of their situation than anyone else does or could. For example it is often argued that people should choose for themselves how much fat to eat without government intervention, as they have intimate knowledge of how much they like eating fat and how much they dislike being fat, and what degree of mockery their social scene will administer and so forth. Not only that, but they have a much stronger incentive to get the decision right than anyone else.

A counterargument often made here is that people are just so irrational that they don’t know what’s good for them. Sometimes it’s not clear how anyone else would do better, being people themselves, and people in complicated organizations full of other motives no less. Sometimes it’s not clear whether people are actually that irrational in real life, or if they manage to compensate.

However one situation where it seems quite likely that other people would be better informed on your preferences and how an outcome will affect you is when you are making decisions that will affect you far in the future. The average seventy five year old probably has more in common with the next average seventy five year old than they have in common with their twenty five year old selves, at least in some relevant respects. The stranger people are the less true this is presumably, but most people are not strange. So for instance a bunch of old people dying of lung cancer have a much better idea of how much you would like lung cancer than you do when you are weighing it up in the decision to smoke or not much earlier in life.

This might not matter if people care a lot about their far future selves, as they can of course seek out people to ask about how horrible or great which experiences are. However even then they are doing no better than anyone else who does that, so there is no argument to be made that they have much more intimate knowledge of their own preferences and situation.

You could still argue that I have much more of an interest than anyone else in my own future, if only a slight one compared to how much my future self cares ...
Selfishness Signals Status
by Liron — 2010-03-07T03:38:30.190Z

The "status" hypothesis simply claims that we associate one another with a one-dimensional quantity: the perceived degree to which others' behavior can affect our well-being. And each of us behaves toward our peers according to our internally represented status mapping.

Imagine that, within your group, you're in a position where everyone wants to please you and no one can afford to challenge you. What does this mean for your behavior? It means you get to act selfish -- focusing on what makes you most pleased, and becoming less sensitive to lower-grade pleasure stimuli.

Now let's say you meet an outsider. They want to estimate your status, because it's a useful and efficient value to remember. And when they see you acting selfishly in front of others in your group, they will infer the lopsided balance of power.

In your own life, when you interact with someone who could affect your well-being, you do your best to act in a way that is valuable to them, hoping they will be motivated to reciprocate. The thing is, if an observer witnesses your unselfish behavior, it's a telltale sign of your lower status. And this scenario is so general, and so common, that most people learn to be very observant of others' deviations from selfishness.

On Less Wrong, we already understand the phenomenon of status signaling -- the causal link from status to behavior, and the inferential link from behavior to status. If we also recognize the role of selfishness as a reliable status signal, we can gain a lot of predictive power about which specific behavioral mannerisms are high- and low-status.

Are each of the following high- or low-status?

1. Standing up straight

2. Saying what's on your mind, without thinking it through

3. Making an effort to have a pleasant conversation

4. Wearing the most comfortable possible clothes

5. Apologizing to someone you've wronged

6. Blowing your nose in front of people

7. Asking for permission

8. Showing off

Answers:

1. Standing up straight is low-status, because you're obviously doing it to make an impression on others -- there's no first-order benefit to yourself.

2. Saying what's on your mind is high-status, because you're doing something pleasurable. This signal is most reliable when what you say doesn't have any intellectual merit.

3. Making an effort to have a pleasant conversation is low-status. It's high-status to talk about what you ...
The strongest status signals
by pwno — 2010-03-06T08:13:40.962Z

The community’s awareness and strong understanding of status-motivated behavior in humans is clearly evident. However, I still believe the community focuses too much on a small subset of observable status transactions; namely, status transactions that occur between people of approximately the same status level. My goal is to bring attention to the rest of the status game.
Because your attention is a limited resource and carries an opportunity cost, your mind is evolved to constantly be on the look-out for stimuli that may affect your survival and reproductive success and ignore stimuli that doesn’t. Of course, the stimulus doesn’t really have to affect your fitness, it just needs some experienceable property that correlates with an experience in the ancestral environment that did. But when our reaction to stimuli proves to be non-threatening, through repeated exposure, we eventually become desensitized and stop reacting. Much like how first time drivers are more reactive to stimuli than experienced drivers: the majority of past mental processes are demoted from executive functions and become automated. So it’s safe to posit a sort of adaptive mechanism that filters sensory input to keep your attention-resources spent efficiently. This attention-conserving mechanism is the crux of status transactions.
When someone is constantly surrounded by people who don’t have power i.e. status over them, their attention-conserving mechanism goes to work. In this case, the stimulus they’re filtering out is “people who share experienceable characteristics with low status people they’re constantly surrounded by.” The stimulus, over time, proved it’s not worthy of being paid attention to. And just like an experienced driver, the person devotes substantially less attention-resources towards the uninteresting stimuli.
The important thing to note is the behavior that’s a function of how much attention-resources are used. These behaviors can be interpreted as evidence of the relative status levels in an interaction. And because it’s evolutionarily advantageous to recognize your own status level, we’ve evolved a mechanism that detects these behaviors in order to assist us in figuring out our status level. [Notice how this isn’t a chicken or the egg problem].
This behavior manifests itself in all sorts ...
The strongest status signals
by pwno — 2010-03-06T08:03:42.180Z

The community’s awareness and strong understanding of status-motivated behavior in humans is clearly evident. However, I still believe the community focuses too much on a small subset of observable status transactions; namely, status transactions that occur between people of approximately the same status level. My goal is to bring attention to the rest of the status game.

---

Because your attention is a limited resource and carries an opportunity cost, your mind is evolved to constantly be on the look-out for stimuli that may affect your survival and reproductive success and ignore stimuli that doesn’t. Of course, the stimulus doesn’t really have to affect your fitness, it just needs some experienceable property that correlates with an experience in the ancestral environment that did. But when our reaction to stimuli proves to be non-threatening, through repeated exposure, we eventually become desensitized and stop reacting. Much like how first time drivers are more reactive to stimuli than experienced drivers: the majority of past mental processes are demoted from executive functions and become automated. So it’s safe to posit a sort of adaptive mechanism that filters sensory input to keep your attention-resources spent efficiently. This attention-conserving mechanism is the crux of status transactions.

When someone is constantly surrounded by people who don’t have power i.e. status over them, their attention-conserving mechanism goes to work. In this case, the stimulus they’re filtering out is “people who share experienceable characteristics with low status people they’re constantly surrounded by.” The stimulus, over time, proved it’s not worthy of being paid attention to. And just like an experienced driver, the person devotes substantially less attention-resources towards the uninteresting stimuli.

The important thing to note is the behavior that’s a function of how much attention-resources are used. These behaviors can be interpreted as evidence of the relative status levels in an interaction. And because it’s evolutionarily advantageous to recognize your own st

...
TED Talks: Daniel Kahneman
by Cyan — 2010-03-06T01:45:39.377Z

People who have had a painful experience remember it as less painful if the pain tapers off, rather than cutting off sharply at the height of intensity, even if they experience more pain overall. I'd heard of this finding before (from Dan Ariely), but Kahneman uses the finding to throw the idea of "experiencing self" vs. "remembering self" into sharp relief. He then discusses the far-reaching implications of this dichotomy and our blindness to it.

The talk is entitled "The riddle of experience vs. memory".
Signaling Strategies and Morality
by MichaelVassar — 2010-03-05T21:09:25.939Z

I am far from convinced that people in general wish to be seen as caring more about morality than they actually do. If this was the case, why would the persistent claim that people are -- and, logically, must be -- egoists have so long survived strong counter-arguments? The argument appears to me to be a way of signaling a lack of excessive and low status moral scruples.

It seems to me that the desire to signal as much morality as possible is held by a minority of women and by a small minority of men. Those people are also the main people who talk about morality. This is commonly a problem in the development of thought. People with an interest in verbally discussing a subject may have systematically atypical attitudes towards that subject. Of course, this issue is further complicated by the fact that people don't agree on what broad type of thing morality is.

The conflict within philosophy between Utilitarians and Kantians is among the most famous examples of this disagreement. <a href=" http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/moraljudgment.html”> Haidt’s views on conservative vs. liberal morality </a> is another. Major, usually implicit disagreements regard whether morality is supposed to serve as a decision system, a set of constraints on a decision system, or a set of reasons that should influence a person along with prudential, honor, spontaneity, authenticity, and other such types of reasons.

It seems to me that people usually want to signal whatever gives others the most reason to respect their interests. Roughly, this amounts to wanting to signal what Haidt calls conservative morality. Basically, people would like to signal "I am slightly more committed to the group’s welfare, particularly to that of its weakest members (caring), than most of its members are. If you suffer a serious loss of status/well-being I will still help you in order to display affiliation to the group even though you will no longer be in a position to help me. I am substantially more kind and helpful to the people I like (loyal) and substantially more vindictive and aggressive towards those I dislike (honorable, ignored by Haidt). I am generally stable in who I like (loyalty and identity, implying low cognitive cost for allies, low vari...