trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Self-Reinforcing Binary
by lucidfox — 2010-11-22T09:01:06.419Z

I originally wrote this post for my own blog, but after discovering Less Wrong, I've thought that it might make sense to submit it here.

The late 20th - early 21st century have been rich with various concepts beginning with "post-". Postindustrial society, postmodernism, post-theism, postgenderism, posthumanism... The opinions on these, as well as the larger trends behind them all, are of course divided, but if anything, this only illustrates the point I'm trying to make.

I think that what happened is that as the barriers of communication fell down, as we learned more about different cultures and lifestyles, so did we realize that many social concepts formerly thought of as absolute and rigid actually weren't. It will take another generation, or perhaps more than one, just to process this very idea to its fullest. We have come to realize that concepts and ideas, real or fictional, live in the historical and cultural context of their creators, and can only be fully understood in a relative rather than absolute way. No matter how many times literary critics say "death of the author", you can't abstract away from the fact that George Orwell had the political trends of early-to-mid-20th century in mind when he wrote 1984, or that J.R.R. Tolkien's Catholic beliefs influenced the cosmology and tone of The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.

Social ideas and norms are much the same way. Appeal to tradition, "it has always been that way", is just about the worst argument you can make when defending an existing social custom, right next to "God decrees so". Even if the God you believe in tells you that someone will go to Hell for the terrible, terrible moral crime of enjoying sex without the intent of procreation, it's not your business to try and "save" them. Just act yourself the way your beliefs dictate. Hence the "post-": not in the sense of rejection, but in the sense of outgrowing. A post-theistic society is not an atheistic society, but merely one that got over theism, a society where religion is a matter of personal choice rather than a shaping force in politics.

And yes, I realize that my own writing is influenced by my atheist bias, conscious and unconscious. While I cannot fully abstract from them, I can be made aware of them; let the unconscious become conscious.

So how does it all relate to the gender binary? Well, the way I see it, gender roles and relig...
Risk is not empirically correlated with return
by jsalvatier — 2010-11-22T05:31:59.316Z

The most widely appreciated finance theory is the Capital Asset Pricing Model. It basically says that diminishing marginal utility of absolute wealth implies that riskier financial assets should have higher expected returns than less risky assets and that only risk correlated with the market (beta risk) is a whole is important because other risk can be diversified out.

Eric Falkenstein argues that the evidence does not support this theory; that the riskiness of assets (by any reasonable definition) is not positively correlated with return (some caveats apply). He has a paper (long but many parts are skimmable; not peer reviewed; also on SSRN) as well as a book on the topic. I recommend reading parts of the paper.

The gist of his competing theory is that people care mostly about relative gains rather than absolute gains. This implies that riskier financial assets will not have higher expected returns than less risky assets. People will not require a higher return to hold assets with higher undiversifiable variance because everyone is exposed to the same variance and people only care about their relative wealth.

Falkenstein has a substantial quantity of evidence to back up his claim. I am not sure if his competing theory is correct, but I find the evidence against the standard theory quite convincing.

If risk is not correlated with returns, then anyone who is mostly concerned with absolute wealth can profit from this by choosing a low beta risk portfolio.

This topic seems more appropriate for the discussion section, but I am not completely sure, so if people think it belongs in the main area, let me know.

Added some (hopefully) clarifying material:

All this assumes that you eliminate idiosyncratic risk through diversification. Technically impossible, but you can get it reasonably low. The R's are all *instantaneous* returns; though since these are linear models they apply to geometrically accumulated returns as well. The idea that E(R_asset) are independent of past returns is a background assumption for both models and most of finance.

Beta_portfolio = Cov(R_portfolio, R_market)/variance(R_market)

In CAPM your expected and variance are:
E(R_portfolio) = R_rfree + Beta_portfolio * (E(R_market) - R_rfree)
Var(R_portfolio) = Beta_portfolio * Var(R_market)
in Falkenstein's model your expected return are:
E(R_portfolio) = R_market # you could...
Can cryoprotectant toxicity be crowd-sourced?
by lsparrish — 2010-11-21T17:46:05.731Z

From the article The red blood cell as a model for cryoprotectant toxicity by Aschwin de Wolf

One simple model that allows for “high throughput” investigations of cryoprotectant toxicity are red blood cells (erythrocytes). Although the toxic effects of various cryoprotective agents may differ between red blood cells, other cells, and organized tissues, positive results in a red blood cell model can be considered the first experimental hurdle that needs to be cleared before the agent is considered for testing in other models. Because red blood cells are widely available for research, this model eliminates the need for animal experiments for initial studies. It also allows researchers to investigate human cells. Other advantages include the reduced complexity of the model (packed red blood cells can be obtained as an off-the-shelf product) and lower costs.

It sounds to me like this is a very cheap assay for viability. You don't need much equipment. High toxicity compounds can be screened on visual appearance. More detailed analysis can be done by a light microscope or a spectrophotometer.

The biggest issue facing cryonics (and the holy grail of suspended animation with true biostasis) is the existence of cryoprotectant toxicity. Less toxic solutions can be perfused for a longer period of time, and thus penetrate the entire organism without triggering additional loss of viability. Vitrification already eliminates all ice formation -- we know enough to know that without toxicity, it should work for trivially reversible forms of long-term suspended animation.

Thus if we want to ask what can be done cheaply by a lot of people to help cryonics move forward, one possibility is that they could perform empirical tests on the compounds most likely to prove effective for cryoprotection.

We can speculate about the brain being reparable at all kinds of levels of damage -- but that is speculation. Sure we do have to make a decision to sign up or not based on that speculation. But the more hard evidence we can obtain, the more of a chance that we aren't being distracted from the reality of the situation by wishful thinking -- and the more likely we are to persuade our fellow self-identifying rational skeptics to take our side. Furthermore (and I know this sounds obvious, but it still needs to be said) in taking a more empirical approach to actua...
Competition to write the best stand-alone article on efficient charity
by Roko — 2010-11-21T16:57:35.003Z

I have a friend who is currently in a lucrative management consultancy career, but is considering getting a job in eco-tourism because he "wants to make the world a better place" and we got into a debate about Efficient Charity, Roles vs. Goals, and Optimizing versus Acquiring Warm Fuzzies.

I thought that there would be a good article here that I could send him to, but there isn't. So I've decided to ask people to write such an article. What I am looking for is an article that is less than 1800 words long, and explains the following ideas:

Charity should be about actually trying to do as much expected good as possible for a given amount of resource (time, $), in a quantified sense. I.e. "5000 lives saved in expectation", not "we made a big difference".

The norms and framing of our society regarding charity currently get it wrong, i.e. people send lots of $ to charities that do a lot less good than other charities. The "inefficiency" here is very large, i.e. GWWC estimates by a factor of 10,000 at least. Therefore most money donated to charity is almostly entirely wasted.

It is usually better to work a highly-paid job and donate because if you work for a charity you replace the person who would have been hired had you not applied

Our instincts will tend to tempt us to optimize for signalling, this is to be resisted unless (or to the extent that) it is what you actually want to do

Our motivational centre will tend to want to optimize for "Warm Fuzzies". These should be purchased separately from utilons.

but without using any unexplained LW Jargon. (Utilons, Warm Fuzzies, optimizing). Linking to posts explaining jargon is NOT OK. I will judge the winner based upon these criteria and the score that the article gets on LW. I may present a small prize to the winner, if (s)he desires it!

Happy Writing

Roko

EDIT: As well as saying that he will pay $100 to the winner, Jsalvatier makes two additional points that I feel should be included in the specification of the article:

6. Your intuition about what counts as a cause worth giving money to is extremely bad. This is completely natural: everyone's intuition about this is bad. Why? Because your brain was not optimized by evolution to be good at thinking clearly about large problems involving milli...
Agents of No Moral Value: Constrained Cognition?
by Vladimir_Nesov — 2010-11-21T16:41:10.603Z

Thought experiments involving multiple agents usually postulate that the agents have no moral value, so that the explicitly specified payoff from the choice of actions can be considered in isolation, as both the sole reason and evaluation criterion for agents' decisions. But is that really possible to require from an opposing agent to have no moral value, without constraining what it's allowed to think about?

If agent B is not a person, how do we know it can't decide to become a person for the sole reason of gaming the problem, manipulating agent A (since B doesn't care about personhood, so it costs B nothing, but A does)? If it's stipulated as part of the problem statement, it seems that B's cognition is restricted, and the most rational course of action is prohibited from being considered for no within-thought-experiment reason accessible to B.

It's not enough to require that the other agent is inhuman in the sense of not being a person and not holding human values, as our agent must also not care about the other agent. And once both agents don't care about each other's cognition, the requirement for them not being persons or valuable becomes extraneous.

Thus, instead of requiring that the other agent is not a person, the correct way of setting up the problem is to require that our agent is indifferent to whether the other agent is a person (and conversely).

(It's not a very substantive observation I would've posted with less polish in an open thread if not for the discussion section.)
The true prisoner's dilemma with skewed payoff matrix
by Jonii — 2010-11-20T20:37:14.926Z

Related to The True Prisoner's Dilemma, Let's split the cake, lengthwise, upwise and slantwise, If you don't know the name of the game, just tell me what I mean to you

tl;dr: Playing the true PD, it might be that you should co-operate when expecting the other one to defect, or vice versa, in some situations, against agents that are capable of superrationality. This is because relative weight of outcomes for both parties might vary. This could lead this sort of agents to outperform even superrational ones.

So, it happens that our benevolent Omega has actually an evil twin, that is as trustworthy as his sibling, but abducts people into a lot worse hypothetical scenarios. Here we have one:

You wake up in a strange dimension, and this Evil-Omega is smiling at you, and explains that you're about to play a game with unknown paperclip maximizer from another dimension that you haven't interacted with before and won't interact with ever after. The alien is like GLUT when it comes to consciousness, it runs a simple approximation of rational decision algorithm but nothing that you could think of as "personality" or "soul". Also, since it doesn't have a soul, you have absolutely no reason to feel bad for it's losses. This is true PD.

You are also told some specifics about the algorithm that the alien uses to reach its decision, and likewise told that alien is told about as much about you. At this point I don't want to nail the algorithm the opposing alien uses down to one specific. We're looking for a method that wins when summing up all these possibilities. Next, especially, we're looking at the group of AI's that are capable of superrationality, since against other's the game is trivial.

The payoff matrix is like this:

DD=(lose 3 billion lives and be tortured, lose 4 paperclips), CC=(2 billion lives and be made miserable, lose 2 paperclips), CD=(lose 5 billion lives and be tortured a lot, nothing), DC=(nothing, lose 8 paperclips)

So, what do you do? Opponent is capable of superrationality. In the post "The True Prisoner's Dilemma", it was(kinda, vaguely, implicitly) assumed for simplicity's sake that this information is enough to decide whether to defect or not. Answer, based on this information, could be to co-operate. However, I argue that information given is not enough.

Back to the hypothetical: In-hypothetical you is still wondering about his/her decision, but we zoom ou...
Pseudolikelihood as a source of cognitive bias
by Peter_de_Blanc — 2010-11-20T20:06:32.222Z

Pseudolikelihood is method for approximating joint probability distributions. I'm bringing this up because I think something like this might be used in human cognition. If so, it would tend to produce overconfident estimates.

Say we have some joint distribution over X, Y, and Z, and we want to know about the probability of some particular vector (x, y, z). The pseudolikelihood estimate involves asking yourself how likely each piece of information is, given all of the other pieces of information. Then you multiply these together. So the pseudolikelihood of (x, y, z) is P(x|yz) P(y|xz) P(z|xy).

Not only is this wrong, but it gets more wrong as your system is bigger. By that I mean that a ratio of two pseudolikelihoods will tend towards 0 or infinity for big problems, even if the likelihoods are close to the same.

So how can we avoid this? A correct way to calculate a joint probability P(x,y,z) looks like P(x) P(y|x) P(z|xy). At each step we only condition on information "prior" to the thing we are asking about. My guess about how to do do this involves making your beliefs look more like a directed acyclic graph. Given two adjacent beliefs, you need to be clear on which is the "cause" and which is the "effect." The cause talks to the effect in terms of prior probabilities and the effect talks to the cause in terms of likelihoods.

Failure to do this could take the form of an undirected relationship (two beliefs are "related" without either belief being the cause or the effect), or loops in a directed graph. I don't actually think we want to get rid of undirected relationships entirely -- people do use them in machine learning -- but I can't see any good reason for keeping the latter.

An example of a causal loop would be if you thought of math as an abstraction from everyday reality, and then turned around and calculated prior probabilities of fundamental physical theories in terms of mathematical elegance. One way out is to declare yourself a mathematical Platonist. I'm not sure what the other way would look like.
What I've learned from Less Wrong
by Louie — 2010-11-20T12:47:42.727Z

Related to: Goals for which Less Wrong does (and doesn’t) help

I've been compiling a list of the top things I’ve learned from Less Wrong in the past few months. If you’re new here or haven’t been here since the beginning of this blog, perhaps my personal experience from reading the back-log of articles known as the sequences can introduce you to some of the more useful insights you might get from reading and using Less Wrong.
1. Things can be correct - Seriously, I forgot. For the past ten years or so, I politely agreed with the “deeply wise” convention that truth could never really be determined or that it might not really exist or that if it existed anywhere at all, it was only in the consensus of human opinion. I think I went this route because being sloppy here helped me “fit in” better with society. It’s much easier to be egalitarian and respect everyone when you can always say “Well, I suppose that might be right -- you never know!”
2. Beliefs are for controlling anticipation (Not for being interesting) - I think in the past, I looked to believe surprising, interesting things whenever I could get away with the results not mattering too much. Also, in a desire to be exceptional, I naïvely reasoned that believing similar things to other smart people would probably get me the same boring life outcomes that many of them seemed to be getting... so I mostly tried to have extra random beliefs in order to give myself a better shot at being the most amazingly successful and awesome person I could be.

3. Most peoples' beliefs aren’t worth considering - Since I’m no longer interested in collecting interesting “beliefs” to show off how fascinating I am or give myself better odds of out-doing others, it no longer makes sense to be a meme collecting, universal egalitarian the same way I was before. This includes dropping the habit of seriously considering all others’ improper beliefs that don’t tell me what to anticipate and are only there for sounding interesting or smart.
4. Most of science is actually done by induction - Real scientists don’t get their hypotheses by sitting in bathtubs and screaming “Eureka!”. To come up with something worth testing, a scientist needs to do lots of sound induction first or borrow an idea from someone who already...
Games People Play
by Douglas_Knight — 2010-11-20T04:41:39.635Z

Game theory is great if you know what game you're playing. All this talk of Diplomacy reminds me of this memory of Adam Cadre:

I remember that in my ninth grade history class, the teacher had us play a game that was supposed to demonstrate how shifting alliances work. He divided the class into seven groups — dubbed Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Austria and Russia — and, every few minutes, declared a "battle" between two of the countries. Then there was a negotiation period, during which we all were supposed to walk around the room making deals. Whichever warring country collected the most allies would win the battle and a certain number of points to divvy up with its allies. The idea, I think, was that countries in a battle would try to win over the wavering countries by promising them extra points to jump aboard.

That's not how it worked in practice. Three or four guys — the same ones who had gotten themselves elected to ASB, the student government — decided among themselves during the first negotiation period what the outcome would be, and told people whom to vote for. And the others just shrugged and did as they were told. The ASB guys had decided that Germany would win, followed by France, Britain, Belgium, Austria, Italy and Russia. The first battle was France vs. Russia. Germany and Britain both signed up on the French side. Austria and Italy, realizing that if they just went along with the ASB plan they'd come in 5th and 6th, joined up with Russia. That left it up to Belgium. I was on team Belgium. I voted to give our vote to the Russian side, because that way at least we weren't doomed to come in 4th. And no one else on my team went along. They meekly gave their points to the French side. (As I recall, Josh Lorton was particularly adamant about this. I guess he thought it would make the ASB guys like him.) After that, there was no contest. Britain vs. Austria? 6-1, Britain. Germany vs. Belgium? 6-1, Germany. (And we could have beaten them if we'd just formed a bloc with the other three losers!) The teacher noticed that Germany and France were always on the same side and declared Germany vs. France. Outcome: 6-1, Germany.

The ASB guys were able to just impose their will on a class of 40 students. No carrots, no sticks, just "here's what will happen" and everyone else nodding. I have no idea how that works. I do recal

...
Rationality and being child-free
by InquilineKea — 2010-11-20T02:12:03.269Z

So I found this post quite interesting:

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/03/gnxp-readers-do-not-breed.php

(I'm quite sure that the demographics of this site closely parallel the demographics on Gene Expression).

Research seems to indicate that people are happiest when they're married, but that each child imposes a net decrease in happiness (parents in fact, enjoy a boost in happiness once their children leave the house). It's possible, of course, that adult children may be pleasurable to interact with, but it seems that in many cases, the parents want to interact with the children more than the children want to interact with the parent (although daughters generally seem more interactive with their parents).

So how do you think being child-free relates to rationality/happiness? Of course, Bryan Caplan (who is pro-natalist) cites research (from Judith Rich Harris) saying that parents really have less influence over their children than they think they have (so it's a good idea for parents to spend less effort in trying to "mold" their children, since their efforts will inevitably result in much frustration). And in fact, if parents did this, it's possible that they may beat the average.

(This doesn't convince me in my specific case, however, and I'm still committed to not having children).
Common Sense Atheism summarizing the Sequences
by Alexandros — 2010-11-19T12:55:00.130Z

Since popularising the sequences seems to be a pursuit that's been in the spotlight recently, I thought I'd point out that blogger Luke Muehlhauser of Common Sense Atheism has started blogging through the sequences. The first installment is here:

Reading Yudkowsky, Part 1

Perhaps someone you know will benefit from the sequences but can/will not invest the time to go though the whole thing can be directed to Luke's metasequence.
Fiction: "Chicken Little" by Cory Doctorow
by NancyLebovitz — 2010-11-19T11:13:45.490Z

What would happen if people could feel what they knew about probability? The story's in Gateways, a tribute collection for Frederik Pohl. Unfortunately, the story is more about whether a drug with that effect is a good idea rather than extended exploration of the effects, but it's still interesting. One of the points is that, while people on the drug are more sensible (laugh at lotteries, don't eat food that makes them feel bad), they don't have children. That last might be less of an obvious outcome than it seems-- rationality can improve parenthood.