trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-04-01T09:51:01.855Z

Yesterday:

There is this very, very old puzzle/observation in economics about the lawyer who spends an hour volunteering at the soup kitchen, instead of working an extra hour and donating the money to hire someone...

If the lawyer needs to work an hour at the soup kitchen to keep himself motivated and remind himself why he's doing what he's doing, that's fine. But he should also be donating some of the hours he worked at the office, because that is the power of professional specialization and it is how grownups really get things done. One might consider the check as buying the right to volunteer at the soup kitchen, or validating the time spent at the soup kitchen.

I hold open doors for little old ladies. I can't actually remember the last time this happened literally (though I'm sure it has, sometime in the last year or so). But within the last month, say, I was out on a walk and discovered a station wagon parked in a driveway with its trunk completely open, giving full access to the car's interior. I looked in to see if there were packages being taken out, but this was not so. I looked around to see if anyone was doing anything with the car. And finally I went up to the house and knocked, then rang the bell. And yes, the trunk had been accidentally left open.

Under other circumstances, this would be a simple act of altruism, which might signify true concern for another's welfare, or fear of guilt for inaction, or a desire to signal trustworthiness to oneself or others, or finding altruism pleasurable. I think that these are all perfectly legitimate motives, by the way; I might give bonus points for the first, but I wouldn't deduct any penalty points for the others. Just so long as people get helped.

But in my own case, since I already work in the nonprofit sector, the further question arises as to whether I could have better employed the same sixty seconds in a more specialized way, to bring greater benefit to others. That is: can I really defend this as the best use of my time, given the other things I claim to believe?

The obvious defense—or perhaps, obvious rationalization—is that an act of altruism like this one acts as an willpower restorer, much more efficiently than, say, listening to music. I also mistrust my ability to be an altruist only in theory; I suspect that if...
Degrees of Radical Honesty
by MBlume — 2009-03-31T20:36:10.497Z

The Black Belt Bayesian writes:

Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires, because they’re Nazis or whatever.

Eliezer adds:

If you'll lie when the fate of the world is at stake, and others can guess that fact about you, then, at the moment when the fate of the world is at stake, that's the moment when your words become the whistling of the wind.

These are both radically high standards of honesty. Thus, it is easy to miss the fact that they are radically different standards of honesty. Let us look at a boundary case.

Thomblake puts the matter vividly:

Suppose that Anne Frank is hiding in the attic, and the Nazis come asking if she's there. Harry doesn't want to tell them, but Stan insists he mustn't deceive the Nazis, regardless of his commitment to save Anne's life.

So, let us say that you are living in Nazi Germany, during WWII, and you have a Jewish family hiding upstairs. There's a couple of brownshirts with rifles knocking on your door. What do you do?

I see four obvious responses to this problem (though there may be more)

"Yes, there are Jews living upstairs, third door on the left" -- you have promoted maximally accurate beliefs in the Nazi soldiers. Outcome: The family you are sheltering will die horribly.

"I cannot tell you the answer to that question" -- you have not deceived the Nazis. They spend a few minutes searching the house. Outcome: The family you are sheltering will die horribly.

"No, there are no Jews here" -- your words are like unto the whistling of the wind. The Nazis expect individuals without Jews in their homes to utter these words with near certainty. They expect individuals with Jews in their homes to utter these words with near certainty. These words make no change in P(there are Jews here) as measured by the Nazis. Even a couple of teenaged brownshirts will possess this much rationality. Outcome: The family you are sheltering will die horribly.

Practice the Dark Arts. Heil Hitler enthusiastically, and embrace the soldiers warmly. Thank them for the work they are doing in defending your fatherland from the Jewish menace. Bring them into your home, and have your wife bring them strong beer, and her best sausages. Over dinner, tell every filthy joke you know about rolling pennies through ghettos. Talk about the

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Building Communities vs. Being Rational
by swestrup — 2009-03-31T18:35:35.268Z

I've noticed a distinct trend lately in that I've been commenting less and less on posts as time goes by. I've been wondering if its just that the new car smell of lesswrong has been wearing off, or if it is something else.

Well, I think I've identified it. I just don't care for discussions about how to go about building communities. It may, in the long run, be beneficial to work out how to build communities of rationalists, but in the meantime I find these discussions are making this less and less a community I want to be a part of, and (if I am not unique) may be having the opposite effect that they intend.

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying these discussions are unimportant or are not germane to the building of this site. I am saying that if a new person comes here and reads the last posts, are they going to want to stay? For myself, I find I am willing to be part of a community of enthusiastic rationalists (which is why I started reading this blog in the first place), but I have NO interest in being part of a community that spends all its time debating on how to build the community.

Lately, to me, this place has seemed more of the latter and less of the former.
Money: The Unit of Caring
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-31T12:35:48.366Z

Steve Omohundro has suggested a folk theorem to the effect that, within the interior of any approximately rational, self-modifying agent, the marginal benefit of investing additional resources in anything ought to be about equal. Or, to put it a bit more exactly, shifting a unit of resource between any two tasks should produce no increase in expected utility, relative to the agent's utility function and its probabilistic expectations about its own algorithms.

This resource balance principle implies that—over a very wide range of approximately rational systems, including even the interior of a self-modifying mind—there will exist some common currency of expected utilons, by which everything worth doing can be measured.

In our society, this common currency of expected utilons is called "money". It is the measure of how much society cares about something.

This is a brutal yet obvious point, which many are motivated to deny.

With this audience, I hope, I can simply state it and move on. It's not as if you thought "society" was intelligent, benevolent, and sane up until this point, right?

I say this to make a certain point held in common across many good causes. Any charitable institution you've ever had a kind word for, certainly wishes you would appreciate this point, whether or not they've ever said anything out loud. For I have listened to others in the nonprofit world, and I know that I am not speaking only for myself here...

Many people, when they see something that they think is worth doing, would like to volunteer a few hours of spare time, or maybe mail in a five-year-old laptop and some canned goods, or walk in a march somewhere, but at any rate, not spend money.

Believe me, I understand the feeling. Every time I spend money I feel like I'm losing hit points. That's the problem with having a unified quantity describing your net worth: Seeing that number go down is not a pleasant feeling, even though it has to fluctuate in the ordinary course of your existence. There ought to be a fun-theoretic principle against it.

But, well...

There is this very, very old puzzle/observation in economics about the lawyer who spends an hour volunteering at the soup kitchen, instead of working an extra hour and donating the money to hire someone to work for five hours at the soup kitchen.

There's this thing called "R...
The Benefits of Rationality?
by cousin_it — 2009-03-31T11:17:39.503Z

Robin wrote how being rational can harm you. Let's look at the other side: what significant benefits does rationality give?

The community here seems to agree that rationality is beneficial. Well, obviously people need common sense to survive, but does an additional dose of LessWrong-style rationality help us appreciably in our personal and communal endeavors?

Does LessWrong make us WIN?

(If we don't WIN, our evangelism rings a little hollow. Science didn't spread due to evangelism, science spread because it works. Art spreads because people love it. I want to hold my Art to this standard. Push-selling a solution while it's still inferior might be the locally optimal decision but it corrupts long-term, as many of us have seen in the IT industry. That's if the example of all religions and political movements isn't enough for you. Beware the Evangelism Death Spiral!)

We may claim internal benefits such as improved clarity of thought from each new blog insight. But religious people claim similar internal benefits that actually spill out into the measurable world, such as happiness and charitability. This fact gives us envy and we attempt to use our internal changes to group together for world-benefitting tasks. To my mind this looks like putting the cart before the horse: why compete with religion on its terms, don't we have utility functions of our own to satisfy?

No, feelings won't do. If feelings turn you on, do drugs or get religious. Rationalism needs to verifiably bring external benefit. Don't help me become pure from racism or somesuch. Help me WIN, and the world will beat a path to our door.

Okay, interpersonal relationships are out. Then the most obvious area where rationalism could help is business. And the most obvious community-beneficial application (riffing on some recent posts here) would be scientists banding together and making a profitable part-time business to fund their own research. I can see how many techniques taught here could help, e.g. PD cooperation techniques. If a "rationalism case study" of this sort ever gets launched, I for one will gladly offer my effort. Of course this is just one suggestion; everything's possible.

One thing's definite for me: rationalism needs to be grounded in real-world victories for each one of us. Otherwise what's the point?
Helpless Individuals
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-30T11:10:37.791Z

When you consider that our grouping instincts are optimized for 50-person hunter-gatherer bands where everyone knows everyone else, it begins to seem miraculous that modern-day large institutions survive at all.

Well—there are governments with specialized militaries and police, which can extract taxes. That's a non-ancestral idiom which dates back to the invention of sedentary agriculture and extractible surpluses; humanity is still struggling to deal with it.

There are corporations in which the flow of money is controlled by centralized management, a non-ancestral idiom dating back to the invention of large-scale trade and professional specialization.

And in a world with large populations and close contact, memes evolve far more virulent than the average case of the ancestral environment; memes that wield threats of damnation, promises of heaven, and professional priest classes to transmit them.

But by and large, the answer to the question "How do large institutions survive?" is "They don't!" The vast majority of large modern-day institutions—some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization—simply fail to exist in the first place.

I first realized this as a result of grasping how Science gets funded: namely, not by individual donations.

Science traditionally gets funded by governments, corporations, and large foundations. I've had the opportunity to discover firsthand that it's amazingly difficult to raise money for Science from individuals. Not unless it's science about a disease with gruesome victims, and maybe not even then.

Why? People are, in fact, prosocial; they give money to, say, puppy pounds. Science is one of the great social interests, and people are even widely aware of this—why not Science, then?

Any particular science project—say, studying the genetics of trypanotolerance in cattle—is not a good emotional fit for individual charity. Science has a long time horizon that requires continual support. The interim or even final press releases may not sound all that emotionally arousing. You can't volunteer; it's a job for specialists. Being shown a picture of the scientist you're supporting at or somewhat below the market price for their salary, lacks the impact of being shown the wide-eyed puppy that you helped usher to a new home.&nb...
Kling, Probability, and Economics
by matt — 2009-03-30T05:15:24.400Z

Related to: Beautiful Probability, Probability is in the Mind

Arnold Kling ponders probability:

How one thinks about probability affects how one thinks about economics. Consider the use of the word "probability" in each of the following sentences:

1. What is the probability that when a fair coin is flipped it will come up heads?
2. What is the probability that exactly two number-one seeds will make it to the final four in the March Madness basketball tournament?
3. What is the probability that New York City will rank higher relative to other cities five years from now in terms of college graduates?

We would answer the first question by saying that the probability is 50 percent, based on the very definition of a fair coin. This is an axiomatic interpretation of probability. The axiomatic view treats probability as a matter of pure logic, with statements that do not require any empirical testing.

We would answer the second question by looking up historical records for the NCAA basketball tournament. This is the frequentist account of probability, which treats probability as counting outcomes from repeated trials. A frequentist would claim that the only way we can know that a coin has a 50 percent probability of coming up heads is by actually flipping a coin enough times to verify this empirically.

The third question cannot be answered on the basis of axioms or observed frequencies. The probability estimate is purely subjective. The subjective account of probability is that it reflects an individual belief that cannot be proven either logically or empirically.

In the tradition of Reddit, and a little inspired by Robin, this is a simple link to an interesting page somewhere else - I leave comment and discussion to the very awesome Less Wrong community.

Edit: Eliezer has in the past been uncomplimentary of the "accursèd frequentists". In at least Beautiful Probability and Probability is in the Mind, he has characterized (for at least some problems) the "frequentist" approach as being wrong, and the "Bayesian" approach as being right. Kling suggests different problems for which different approaches are approrpriate.
Framing Effects in Anthropology
by Scott Alexander — 2009-03-29T22:05:59.514Z

A large number of cognitive errors are grouped under "framing effects", the tendency of a fact to sound different when presented in different ways. Economists discuss framing effects in terms of changed decisions: for example, a patient will be more likely to agree to a treatment with a "ninety percent survival rate" than a "ten percent death rate", even though these are denotatively the same. Other social sciences use "framing" more broadly. For them, a frame is similar to a cultural filter through which we interpret and evaluate data.

Anthropologists are particularly wary of framing effects. The thought "primitive culture" immediately summons a set of associations - medicine men, chiefs, thatched huts, festivals, superstitions - that anthropologists risks interpreting new information about a tribe in light of what they think tribal cultures should be like. The problem is only compounded by the difficulty anthropologists have getting complete and accurate information from potentially reclusive societies.

One especially well-known anthropological work is Horace Miner's description of the Nacirema, a North American tribe centered around the northwest Chesapeake Bay area. He was especially interested in their purification customs, which he described as "an extreme of human behavior". Below the cut is Miner's essay, Body Ritual among the Nacirema. Do you think Miner is affected by a framing bias? Where does the bias manifest itself?

The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways in which different peoples behave in similar situations that he is not apt to be surprised by even the most exotic customs. In fact, if all of the logically possible combinations of behavior have not been found somewhere in the world, he is apt to suspect that they must be present in some yet undescribed tribe. This point has, in fact, been expressed with respect to clan organization by Murdock. In this light, the magical beliefs and practices of the Nacirema present such unusual aspects that it seems desirable to describe them as an example of the extremes to which human behavior can go.

Nacirema culture is characterized by a highly developed economy which has evolved in a rich natural habitat. While much of the people's time is devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these labors and a considerable portion of the day are spent in rit

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Most Rationalists Are Elsewhere
by RobinHanson — 2009-03-29T21:46:49.307Z

Most healthy intellectual blogs/forums participate in conversations among larger communities of blogs and forums. Rather than just "preaching to a choir" of readers, such blogs often quote and respond to posts on other blogs. Such responses sometimes support, and sometimes criticize, but either way can contribute to a healthy conversation.
If folks at Less Wrong saw themselves as a part of a larger community of rationalists, they would realize that most rationalist authors and readers are not at Less Wrong. To participate in a healthy conversation among the wider community of rationalists, they would often respond to posts at other sites, and expect other sites to respond often to them. In contrast, an insular group defined by something other than its rationality would be internally focused, rarely participating in such larger conversations.
Today at Overcoming Bias I respond to a post by Eliezer here at Less Wrong. Though I post occasionally here at Less Wrong, I will continue to post primarily at Overcoming Bias. I consider myself part of a larger rationalist community, and will continue to riff off relevant posts here and elsewhere. I hope you will continue to see me as a part of your relevant world.

I worry a little that Less Wrong karma score incentives may encourage an inward focus, since karma is so far only scored for internal site activity.
Deliberate and spontaneous creativity
by Kaj_Sotala — 2009-03-29T19:45:07.798Z

Related to: Spock's Dirty Little Secret, Does Blind Review Slow Down Science?

After finding out that old scientists don't actually resist change, I decided to do a literature search to find out if the related assumption was true. Is it mainly just the young scientists who are productive? (This should be very relevant for rationalists, since we and scientists in general have the same goal - to find the truth.)

The answer was a pretty resounding no. Study after study after study found that the most productive scientists were those in middle age, not youth. Productivity is better predicted by career age than chronological age. One study suggested that middle-aged scientists aren't more productive as such, but have access to better resources, and that the age-productivity connection disappears once supervisory position is controlled for. Another argued that it was the need for social networking that led the middle-aged to be the most productive. So age, by itself, doesn't seem to affect scientific productivity much, right?

Well, there is one exception. Dietrich and Srinivasan found that paradigm-busting discoveries come primarily from relatively young scientists. They looked at different Nobel Prize winners and finding out the age when the winners had first had the idea that led them to the discovery. In total, 60% of the discoveries were made by people aged below 35 and around 30% were made by people aged between 35 and 45. The data is strongest for theoretical physics, which shows that 90% of all theoretical contributions occurred before the age of 40 and that no theoretician over the age of 50 had ever had an idea that was deemed worthy of the Nobel prize. Old scientists are certainly capable of expanding and building on an existing paradigm, but they are very unlikely to revolutionize the whole paradigm. Why is this so?

Actually, this wasn't something that Dietrich just happened to randomly stumble on - he was testing a prediction stemming from an earlier hypothesis of his. In "the cognitive neuroscience of creativity", he presents a view of two kinds of systems for creativity: deliberate and spontaneous (actually four - deliberate/cognitive, deliberate/emotional, spontaneous/cognitive and spontaneous/emotional, but the cognitive-emotional difference doesn't seem relevant for our purposes). Summarizing the differences relevant to the aging/creativity question:

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