trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Three kinds of political similarity
by  — 2010-10-23T16:01:59.956Z

Suppose you wanted to describe the political landscape efficiently. That is, you want to describe the range of existing political positions, and develop some way of evaluating which political positions are "similar." (I'm American, so I'm going to think in terms of the US.) There are three ways you could go about this and they are radically different.

1. Politicians' voting.

Because we have a two-party system, politicians (and some other political players, like Supreme Court justices) make decisions on a single, left-right axis. You can explain almost all the variation with one dimension: "More Republican" or "More Democrat." Generally, if a politician supports one "Republican" position, he'll support most of the other "Republican" positions. Studies have been done here (too lazy to look them up right now) supporting this phenomenon at all levels of politics.

2. Individuals' opinions on poll questions.

Here, we do something different. We ask poll questions about a variety of issues and see what people think. Suddenly, it's not one-dimensional any more. There are people who like low taxes and also like gay marriage. There are people who are anti-abortion and anti-war. The fact that individual opinions don't line up along a left-right axis is what's behind ideas like the Nolan Chart -- although it doesn't imply that the "real" way to explain opinions is necessarily two-dimensional. How many dimensions actually do efficiently explain all the different kinds of opinions? I don't know, and that's a statistical puzzle in itself, although I do know of techniques (like multi-dimensional scaling) that purport to estimate the "right" number of dimensions.

One thing we do know is that if we project all the opinions onto a set of dimensions that we like -- for example, the old standby of liberal/conservative and authoritarian/libertarian -- we can start to measure "political diversity." People who describe themselves as Democrats, for example, span a much wider range of views than people who describe themselves as "Republicans." Implicitly, we're putting a Euclidean distance on a high-dimensional space, projected onto a few dimensions.

3. Logical and causal implications of policies.

Just as politicians' voting doesn't capture what regular people think, it could also be argued ...
Green consumers more likely to steal
by nick012000 — 2010-10-23T11:42:46.099Z

Here's an article I found today, though it is a few months old; it seems to illustrate an interesting cognitive bias that I don't think I've seen mentioned before that might explain a good bit of hypocrisy people tend to have.

When Al Gore was caught running up huge energy bills at home at the same time as lecturing on the need to save electricity, it turns out that he was only reverting to "green" type.

According to a study, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the "licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour", otherwise known as "moral balancing" or "compensatory ethics".

Do Green Products Make Us Better People is published in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science. Its authors, Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, argue that people who wear what they call the "halo of green consumerism" are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal. "Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviours," they write. [See footnote].

The pair found that those in their study who bought green products appeared less willing to share with others a set amount of money than those who bought conventional products. When the green consumers were given the chance to boost their money by cheating on a computer game and then given the opportunity to lie about it – in other words, steal – they did, while the conventional consumers did not. Later, in an honour system in which participants were asked to take money from an envelope to pay themselves their spoils, the greens were six times more likely to steal than the conventionals.

Mazar and Zhong said their study showed that just as exposure to pictures of exclusive restaurants can improve table manners but may not lead to an overall improvement in behaviour, "green products do not necessarily make for better people". They added that one motivation for carrying out the study was that, despite the "stream of research focusing on identifying the 'green consumer'", there was a lack of understanding into "how green consumption fits into people's global sense of responsibility and morality and [how it] affects behaviours outside the consumption domain".

The pair said their findings surprised them, having thought that just as "exposure to

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The Problem With Trolley Problems
by lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall) — 2010-10-23T05:14:07.308Z

A trolley problem is something that's used increasing often in philosophy to get at people's beliefs and debate on them. Here's an example from Wikipedia:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you - your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

I believe trolley problems are fundamentally flawed - at best a waste of time, and at worst lead to really sloppy thinking. Here's four reasons why:

1. It assumes perfect information about outcomes.

2. It ignores the global secondary effects that local choices create.

3. It ignores real human nature - which would be to freeze and be indecisive.

4. It usually gives you two choices and no alternatives, and in real life, there's always alternatives.

First, trolley problems contain perfect information about outcomes - which is rarely the case in real life. In real life, you're making choices based on imperfect information. You don't know what would happen for sure as a result of your actions.

Second, everything creates secondary effects. If putting people involuntarily in harm's way to save others was an acceptable result, suddenly we'd all have to be really careful in any emergency. Imagine living in a world where anyone would be comfortable ending your life to save other people nearby - you'd have to not only be constantly checking your surroundings, but also constantly on guard against do-gooders willing to push you onto the tracks.

Third, it ignores human nature. Human nature is to freeze up when bad things happen unless you're explicitly trained to react. In real life, most people would freeze or panic instead of react. In order to get over that, first responders, soldiers, medics, police, firefighters go through training. That training includes dealing with questionable circumstances and how to evaluate them, so you don't have a society where your trained personnel act randomly in emergencies.

Fourth, it gives you two choices and no alternatives. I firmly reject this - I think there's almost always alternative ways to get there from here if you open your mind to it. Once you start thinking that your only choice is to push the one guy in fro...
Is there a "percentage fallacy"?
by ata — 2010-10-23T04:45:57.854Z

A couple years ago, Aaron Swartz blogged about what he called the "percentage fallacy":

There’s one bit of irrationality that seems like it ought to be in behavioral economics introduction but mysteriously isn’t. For lack of a better term, let’s call it the percentage fallacy. The idea is simple:

One day I find I need a blender. I see a particularly nice one at the store for $40, so I purchase it and head home. But on the way home, I see the exact same blender on sale at a different store for $20. Now I feel ripped off, so I drive back to the first store, return the blender, drive back to the second store, and buy it for $20.

The next day I find I need a laptop. I see a particularly nice one at the store for $2500, so I purchase it and head home. But on the way home, I see the exact same laptop for $2480. “Pff, well, it’s only $20,” I say, and continue home with the original laptop.

I’m sure all of you have done something similar — maybe the issue wasn’t having to return something, but spending more time looking for a cheaper model, or fiddling with coupons and rebates, or buying something of inferior quality. But the basic point is consistent: we’ll do things to save 50% that we’d never do to save 1%.

He recently followed up with a speculation that this may explain some irrational behaviour normally attributed to hyperbolic discounting:

In a famous experiment, some people are asked to choose between $100 today or $120 tomorrow. Many choose the first. Meanwhile, some people are asked to choose between $100 sixty days from now or $120 sixty-one days from now. Almost everyone choose the laster. The puzzle is this: why are people willing to sacrifice $20 to avoid waiting a day right now but not in the future?

The standard explanation is hyperbolic discounting: humans tend to weigh immediate effects much more strongly than distant ones. But I think the actual psychological effect at work here is just the percentage fallacy. If I ask for the money now, I may have to wait 60 seconds. But if I get it tomorrow I have to wait 143900% more. By contrast, waiting 61 days is only 1.6% worse than waiting 6 days. Why not wait an extra 2% when you get 16% more money for it?

Has anyone done a test confirming the percentage fallacy? A good test would be to show people treat the $100 vs. $120 trad

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Interesting talk on Bayesians and frequentists
by jsteinhardt — 2010-10-23T04:10:27.684Z

I recently started watching an interesting lecture by Michael Jordan on Bayesians and frequentists; he's a pretty successful machine learning expert that takes both views in his work. You can watch it here: http://videolectures.net/mlss09uk_jordan_bfway/. I found it interesting because his portrayal of frequentism is much different than the standard portrayal on lesswrong. It isn't about whether probabilities are frequencies or beliefs, it's about trying to get a good model versus trying to get rigorous guarantees of performance in a class of scenarios. So I wonder why the meme on lesswrong is that frequentists think probabilities are frequencies; in practice it seems to be more about how you approach a given problem. In fact, frequentists seem more "rational", as they're willing to use any tool that solves a problem instead of constraining themselves to methods that obey Bayes' rule.

In practice, it seems that while Bayes is the main tool for epistemic rationality, instrumental rationality should oftentimes be frequentist at the top level (with epistemic rationality, guided by Bayes, in turn guiding the specific application of a frequentist algorithm).

For instance, in many cases I should be willing to, once I have a sufficiently constrained search space, try different things until one of the works, without worrying about understanding why the specific thing I did worked (think shooting a basketball, or riffle shuffling a deck of cards). In practice, it seems like epistemic rationality is important for constraining a search space, and after that some sort of online learning algorithm can be applied to find the optimal action from within that search space. Of course, this isn't true when you only get one chance to do something, or extreme precision is required, but this is not often true in everyday life.

The main point of this thread is to raise awareness of the actual distinction between Bayesians and frequentists, and why it's actually reasonable to be both, since it seems like lesswrong is strongly Bayesian and there isn't even a good discussion of the fact that there are other methods out there.
Does inclusive fitness theory miss part of the picture?
by nhamann — 2010-10-22T21:49:12.297Z

I originally titled this post "The Less Wrong wiki is wrong about group selection", because it seemed wildly overconfident about its assertion that group selection is nonsense. The wiki entry on "group selection" currently reads:

People who are unfamiliar with evolutionary theory sometimes propose that a feature of the organism is there for the good of the group - for example, that human religion is an adaptation to make human groups more cohesive, since religious groups outfight nonreligious groups.

Postulating group selection is guaranteed to make professional evolutionary biologists roll up their eyes and sigh.

However, it appears that the real problem is not that the wiki is overconfident (that's a problem, but it's only a symptom of the next problem) but that the traditional dogma on the viability of group selection is wrong, or at least overconfident. I make this assertion after stumbling across a paper by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita, and E. O. Wilson titled "The evolution of eusociality", which appeared in Nature in August of this year. I found a PDF of this paper through Google scholar, click here. A blog entry discussing the paper can be found here (bias alert: it is written by a postdoc working in Martin Nowak's Evolutionary Dynamics program at Harvard).

Here's some quotes (bolding is mine):

It has further turned out that selection forces exist in groups that diminish the advantage of close collateral kinship. They include the favouring of raised genetic variability by colony-level selection in the ants Pogonomyrmex occidentalis and Acromyrmex echinatior—due, at least in the latter, to disease resistance. The contribution of genetic diversity to disease resistance at the colony level has moreover been established definitively in honeybees. Countervailing forces also include variability in predisposition to worker sub-castes in Pogonomyrmex badius, which may sharpen division of labour and improve colony fitness—although that hypothesis is yet to be tested. Further, an increase in stability of nest temperature with genetic diversity has been found within nests of honeybees and Formica ants. Other selection forces working against the binding role of close pedigree kinship are the disruptive impact of nepotism within colonies, and the overall negative effects associated with inbreeding. Most of these countervailing forces act through grou

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Church: a language for probabilistic modeling
by  — 2010-10-22T11:59:45.211Z

I've been reading about Church, which is a new computer language, developed in a prize-winning MIT doctoral thesis, that's designed to make computers better at modeling probability distributions.

The idea is that simulations are cheap to run (given a probability distribution, generate an example outcome) but inferred distributions are expensive to run (from a set of data, what was the most likely probability distribution that could have generated it?) This is essentially a Bayesian task, and it's what we want to do to understand, say, which borrowers are likeliest to default, or where terrorists are likely to strike again. It's also the necessary building block of AI. The problem is that the space of probability distributions that can explain the data is very big. Infinitely big in reality, of course, but still exponentially big after discretizing. Also, while the computational complexity of evaluating f(g(x)) is just f + g, the computational complexity of composing two conditional probability distributions B|A and C|B is

ΣB P(C, B|A)

whose computational time will grow exponentially rather than linearly.

Church is an attempt to solve this problem. (Apparently it's a practical attempt, because the founders have already started a company, Navia Systems, using this structure to build probabilistic computers.) The idea is, instead of describing a probability distribution as a deterministic procedure that evaluates the probabilities of different events, represent them in terms of probabilistic procedures for generating samples from them. That is, a random variable is actually a random variable. This means that repeating a computation will not give the same result each time, because evaluating a random variable doesn't give the same result each time. There's a computational advantage here because it's possible to compose random variables without summing over all possible values.

Church is based on Lisp. At the lowest level, it replaces Boolean gates with stochastic digital circuits. These circuits are wired together to form Markov chains (the probabilistic counterpart of finite state machines.) At the top, it's possible to define probabilistic procedures for generating samples from recursively defined distributions.

When I saw this paper, I thought it might make an interesting...
Does it matter if you don't remember?
by Alex Flint — 2010-10-22T11:53:18.401Z

Does it matter if you experienced pain in the past, but you don't remember? (And there are no other side-effects, etc etc). At one point in Accelerando, Charles Strauss describes children that routinely decapitate and disembowel each other, only to be repaired (bodily and memory-wise) by the friendly local AI. This struck me as awful, but I'm suspicious of my intuition. Note that here I'm assuming pain is a terminal "bad" factor in your utility function. You can substitute "pain" for whatever you think is bad. I think there are at least two questions here:

Is it bad for someone to be in pain if they will not remember it in the future? I think yes, because by assumption pain is a terminal "bad" node. Being relieved of future painful memories is good, but nowhere near good enough to fully compensate.

Is it bad to have experienced pain in the past, if you don't remember it? Or, can your utility function coherently include facts about the past, even if they have no causal connection to the present? My intuition here says yes, but I'd be interested in others' thoughts. To make this concrete, imaging that you have a choice between medium pain that you will remember, or extreme pain followed by memory erasure.
How are critical thinking skills acquired? Five perspectives
by matt — 2010-10-22T02:29:18.779Z

Link to source: http://timvangelder.com/2010/10/20/how-are-critical-thinking-skills-acquired-five-perspectives/
Previous LW discussion of argument mapping: Argument Maps Improve Critical Thinking, Debate tools: an experience report

How are critical thinking skills acquired? Five perspectives: Tim van Gelder discusses acquisition of critical thinking skills, suggesting several theories of skill acquisition that don't work, and one with which he and hundreds of his students have had significant success.

In our work in the Reason Project at the University of Melbourne we refined the Practice perspective into what we called the Quality (or Deliberate) Practice Hypothesis. This was based on the foundational work of Ericsson and others who have shown that skill acquisition in general depends on extensive quality practice. We conjectured that this would also be true of critical thinking; i.e. critical thinking skills would be (best) acquired by doing lots and lots of good-quality practice on a wide range of real (or realistic) critical thinking problems. To improve the quality of practice we developed a training program based around the use of argument mapping, resulting in what has been called the LAMP (Lots of Argument Mapping) approach. In a series of rigorous (or rather, as-rigorous-as-possible-under-the-circumstances) studies involving pre-, post- and follow-up testing using a variety of tests, and setting our results in the context of a meta-analysis of hundreds of other studies of critical thinking gains, we were able to establish that critical thinking skills gains could be dramatically accelerated, with students reliably improving 7-8 times faster, over one semester, than they would otherwise have done just as university students. (For some of the detail on the Quality Practice hypothesis and our studies, see this paper, and this chapter.)

LW has been introduced to argument mapping before.
How do autistic people learn how to read people's emotions?
by eugman — 2010-10-20T13:57:05.340Z

From my understanding, people on the autism spectrum have difficulty reading people's emotions and general social cues. I'm curious how these people develop these skills and what one can do to improve them. I ask this as a matter of personal interest; while I am somewhat neurotypical, I feel this is an area where I am very lacking.

(Sidenote: would this be considered an appropriate used of the discussion section?)
Help: Is there a quick and dirty way to explain quantum immortality?
by erratio — 2010-10-20T03:00:34.608Z

I had an incredibly frustrating conversation this morning trying to explain the idea of quantum immortality to someone whose understanding of MWI begins and ends at pop sci fi movies. I think I've identified the main issue that I wasn't covering in enough depth (continuity of identity between near-identical realities) but I was wondering whether anyone has ever faced this problem before, and whether anyone has (or knows where to find) a canned 5 minute explanation of it.
October 2010 Southern California Meetup
by jimmy — 2010-10-18T21:28:17.651Z

We're having the third SoCal LessWrong meetup this Saturday, the 23rd. It'll be held at this IHOP in Irvine, from 1PM to 8PM, in the upstairs meeting area.

For those that haven't yet come, the last two were quite successful bringing 13 and 16 people respectively, and there was plenty of intelligent and friendly discussion.

Make sure to comment if you have suggestions for how to improve on the last one, if you can give/need a ride, or just to say you're coming.
Vipassana Meditation: Developing Meta-Feeling Skills
by  — 2010-10-18T16:55:10.360Z

Followup to: Understanding vipassana meditation

I explain how to practice vipassana meditation1 (a form of Buddhist meditation), giving instructions, advice, and measures of progress. By practicing vipassana one becomes aware of (and exerts control over) the process of affective judgment. This process may underlie important (and subtle) mental patterns of feeling that are responsible for common rationality failures. While I've tried to give helpful information, you should meditate at your own risk; you may experience mental instability or change in undesirable ways.2 This is a somewhat brief post containing information I've personally found most helpful on my meditative journey, see other guides (like this one) for more.

Instructions

Decide beforehand how long you will meditate for, and set some kind of alarm to go off at the end of this period.

Start with 10-15 minutes; you can incrementally increase this amount to 30 minutes or an hour. The use of an alarm allows you to meditate without worrying about checking if your time is up.

Go to a quiet location where you feel comfortable. Assume a posture that you can stay in for a while. Do your best not to change your posture during the time period.

AFAICT the posture you choose is not especially important. You can sit Indian style, in a half-lotus position, or in a full-lotus position. You can sit on a pillow or directly on the floor. If none of these positions work you can also sit in a chair. You should be reasonably comfortable (but alert) and stable, and able to breathe naturally. Take care not to aggravate past injuries or cause new ones.

Close your eyes and your mouth. Breath naturally through your nose. Keep your awareness centered on the area below the nostrils and above the upper lip. Neutrally and passively observe the breath passing over this area3. If you realize your mind has wandered, patiently re-center your awareness. Once you have established some degree of concentration you should be able to "see through" thoughts and emotions without getting swept away by them.

You should not regulate your breath. If the breath is deep, simply observe that the breath is deep. If the breath is shallow, simply observe that the breath is shallow. Observe the breath neutrally and passively. Don't associate yourself with the breath.

The breath should be the center of your awareness, the anchor4 that you remain attached to ...