trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Identity and Death
by Tenoke — 2014-02-18T11:35:49.393Z

This recent SMBC comic illustrates the old question of what exactly is you by referencing the Star Trek Teleporter Problem. Do you actually get teleported or does the teleporter just kill you before making a copy of you somewhere else?

Well, the answer that a lot of rationalist seem to accept is Pattern Identity Theory proposed by Hans Moravec (skim the link or do a google search for the theory if you have no idea what I am referring to). I am very sympathetic to this view and it definitely ties with my limited understanding of physics and biology - elementary particles are interchangeable and do not have 'identity', at least some of the atoms in your body (including some of those who form neurons) get replaced over time etc.

This is all fine and dandy, but if you take this view to its logical extreme it looks like a sufficently modified version of you shouldn't actually qualify as you - the difference in the pattern might be as great or greater than the difference in the patterns of any two random people.

Let's say something happens to Eliezer and he gets successfully cryo-preserved in 2014. Then 80 years later the singularity hasn't arrived yet but the future is still pretty good - everyone is smart and happy due to enhancements, ageing is a thing of the past and we have the technology to wake cryopreserved people up. The people in that future build Eliezer a new body, restore the information from his brain and apply all the standard enhancements on him and then they wake him up. The person who wakes up remembers all that good old Eliezer did and seems to act like you would expect an enhanced Eliezer to act. However, if you examine things closely the difference between 2014!Eliezer and 2094!Eliezer is actually bigger than the difference between 2014!Eliezer and let's say 2014!Yvain due to having all the new standard enhancements. Does that person really qualify as the same person according to Pattern Identity Theory, then? Sure, he originates from Eliezer and arguably the difference between the two is similar to the difference between kid!Eliezer and adult!Eliezer but is it really the same pattern? If you believe that you really are the pattern then how can you not think of Eliezer!2014 as a dead man?

Sure, you could argue that continual change (as opposed to the sudden change in the cryo!Eliezer scenario) or 'evolution of the pattern' is in some way relevant ...
Don't rely on the system to guarantee you life satisfaction
by JonahS — 2014-02-18T05:48:01.215Z

A brief essay intended for high school students: any thoughts?

If you go to school, take the classes that people tell you to, do your homework, and engage in the extracurricular activities that your peers do, you'll be setting yourself up for an "okay" life. But you can do better than that.

The school system wasn't designed to help you achieve your goals. It wasn't designed to optimize student welfare in general: it was cobbled together by many different actors with many different goals, from politicians to teachers to parents to colleges. It often suffers from inadequate resources. Even if the school system were optimized on average, the one-size-fits-all approach it takes means that it wouldn't be optimized for people who differ in any relevant respect from average. Compared with what you can achieve by carefully thinking about what your goals are and how you can achieve them, following "the system" fares poorly.

KEEP IN MIND: Doing well within the system should be treated as a constraint within which you need to operate, rather than a defining feature of your life.

By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. Yes, as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is crap. And yes, as you suspect, the college admissions process is largely a charade. But like many fouls, this one was unintentional. So just keep playing. Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there. — Paul Graham in What You'll Wish You'd Known

Some subjects are more important than others

High school can give an illusion of democracy between the different subjects you study: they all seem to get equal weight in class time and in grades, so you may believe that all subjects are equally important to study. This is not true even in general: some subjects are more important to study overall, and within each subject, some topics may be more important than what school seems to suggest.

Because the method of exposition and choice of topics in school is likely suboptimal, it generally m...
[RESCHEDULED] NYC Rationality Megameetup and Unconference: 4/5 - 4/6
by KenChen — 2014-02-18T01:28:51.571Z

Please see the updated post here:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jqh/rescheduled_nyc_rationality_megameetup_and/

On the weekend of April 5-6, the NYC community will be hosting a megameetup and rationality unconference. Everyone who can make the trip is strongly encouraged to come. There will be presentations, interesting discussions, and cake.

If you think you might come, please leave a comment and a confidence estimate. For example, if you would bring two guests and are 75% certain you will come, your comment might contain "me +2, 75%." If you need a space to crash at night, please send me a PM.

Location:

Highgarden
851 Park Place
Brooklyn, NY 11216
Book Review: Linear Algebra Done Right (MIRI course list)
by So8res — 2014-02-17T20:52:42.699Z

I'm reviewing the books in the MIRI course list.

It's been a while since I did a book review. The last book I reviewed was Computation and Logic, which I read in November. After that, I spent a few weeks brushing up on specific topics in preparation for my first MIRI math workshop. I read about half of The Logic of Provability and studied a little topology. I also worked my way through some relevant papers.

After the workshop, I took some time off around the holidays and wrote a bit about my experience. I'm finally back into Study Mode. This week I finished Linear Algebra Done Right, by Sheldon Axler.

I quite enjoyed the book. Linear algebra has far-reaching impact, and while I learned it in college, I was mostly just memorizing passwords. There are a few important concepts in linear algebra that seem prone to poor explanations. Linear Algebra Done Right derives these concepts intuitively. My understanding of Linear Algebra improved drastically as I read this book.

Below, I'll review the contents of the text before giving a more detailed overview of the book as a whole.

My Background

When reading a review of a textbook, it's important to know the reviewer's background. I studied Linear Algebra briefly in college, not in a Linear Algebra course, but as a subsection of a Discrete Mathematics course. I knew about vector spaces, I understood what 'linearity' entailed, and I was acquainted with the standard tools of linear algebra. I had a vague idea that matrices encoded multiple linear equations at the same time. I could solve problems mechanically using the usual tools, but I didn't fully understand them.

The book was an easy read (as I already knew the answers), but was still quite informative (as I didn't yet understand them).

Contents

Vector Spaces

Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces

Linear Maps

Polynomials

Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues

Inner-Product Spaces

Operators on Inner-Product Spaces

Operators on Complex Vector Spaces

Operators on Real Vector Spaces

Trace and Determinant

Vector Spaces

This chapter briefly explains complex numbers, vectors (providing both geometric and non-geometric interpretations), and vector spaces. It's short, and it's a nice review. If you don't know what vector spaces are, this is as good a way to learn as any. Even if you are already familiar with vector spaces, this chapter is worth a skim to learn the specific nota...
Methods for treating depression
by JonahS — 2014-02-17T19:02:04.148Z

Many people struggle with depression, and I've been trying to formulate some general advice for treating it as a part of my work for Cognito Mentoring. I'm hesitant to write about the subject on account of lacking professional expertise, and so am especially interested in getting feedback on my thinking on the subject. I've written up some tentative thoughts below. The reader being addressed is somebody who's struggling with depression, with a special focus on high school students.

The research on the efficacy of different depression treatments is only moderately strong. I'm not confident in my remarks below: they reflect an attempt to come to the best conclusion possible with the evidence available.

Any given treatment of depression only works for a fraction of depressed people, suggesting that causes of depression may be diverse.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) stands out for its combination of efficacy, potential for producing lasting changes, low cost, and absence of averse side effects.

It's worth experimenting with different treatment methods to see which works best for you, with the possible exception of antidepressants.

Combining treatment methods may be more impactful than applying one individually.

Cognitive behavioral therapy

According to The empirical status of cognitive-behavioral therapy: A review of meta-analyses, there's a strong base of evidence that CBT has a large effect of reducing depression on average. There's evidence that the benefits extend beyond the duration of the treatment. Studies generally seem to show that CBT is as effective as antidepressants at reducing depression (some find that CBT is more effective, but the evidence is unclear).

CBT has the advantage that one can learn to do the exercises on one's own, without the expense of a therapist or a psychiatrist. The evidence for the efficacy of self-help CBT materials is weaker than the evidence for the efficacy of therapist-administered CBT, but this may reflect insufficient commitment on the part of patients who were assigned to use self-help CBT materials. The clinical effectiveness of CBT-based guided self-help interventions for anxiety and depressive disorders: A systematic review finds that for self-selected users of self-help CBT materials, the treatment was efficacious (though the quality of the studies was not high). If you're sufficiently committed, t...
Steelmanning Young Earth Creationism
by ChrisHallquist — 2014-02-17T07:17:19.181Z

In a recent discussion of steelmanning, I observed that few people around here seem interested in steelmanning young earth creationism. In the resulting subthread, someone suggested Yvain's steelman of the Time Cube as illustrating what a steelman of of young earth creationism might look like. But steelmanning the Time Cube may be too much of a stretch, it's a little too incoherent to steelman effectively without changing it into something else entirely. In contrast, once I thought about it it wasn't hard to come up with some ways to steelman young earth creationism in a way that was very much in keeping with the spirit of real young earth creationist writings.

The way to do it, I think, is to approach it from a philosophy of science angle. For example, here's a quote from an article titled "Creation: 'Where's the Proof?'" on Answers in Genesis, a website run by young earth creationist Ken Ham (who recently debated science guy Bill Nye):

Creationists and evolutionists, Christians and non-Christians all have the same evidence—the same facts. Think about it: we all have the same earth, the same fossil layers, the same animals and plants, the same stars—the facts are all the same.

The difference is in the way we all interpret the facts. And why do we interpret facts differently? Because we start with different presuppositions. These are things that are assumed to be true, without being able to prove them. These then become the basis for other conclusions. All reasoning is based on presuppositions (also called axioms). This becomes especially relevant when dealing with past events.

You find a lot of this kind of thing on Answers in Genesis. For example, they're willing to concede that on certain assumptions, radiometric dating is a strong argument that the earth is a lot more than 10,000 years old, but they deny that they need to accept those assumptions.

I honestly don't think it's much of a stretch to steelman this into something that would look a lot like some of the things the philosophers of science I studied in graduate school said. I started writing a long post spelling this out, but then I started worrying I was going too far in playing devil's advocacy for creationism (even for an exercise in exploring the weaknesses of steelmanning). So instead, I'll just mention some places too look for mate...
[Open Thread] Stupid Questions (2014-02-17)
by solipsist — 2014-02-17T05:34:51.540Z

This is part of a two-week experiment on having more open threads.

Obvious answers aren't always obvious. If you feel silly for not understanding something, you're not alone. Ask a question here.

Previous stupid questions

Other similar threads include:

Open Thread

Media recommendations

Links

Advice (Not yet posted)

Other Special Threads
Meetup Report Thread: February 2014
by eggman — 2014-02-17T03:19:51.622Z

A month ago, a new type of thread was proposed: a monthly page for meetup reports. The idea is that meetup attendees, or organizers, who wanted to share information about how the meetup went could do so in the comments of this thread. This is so information is dispersed, but without the need for anyone, and/or everyone, to dedicate their own thread to the report. The idea worked for January, and nobody had objections. So, we'll do this every month.

If you had an interesting Less Wrong meetup recently, but don't have the time to write up a big report to post to Discussion, feel free to write a comment here. Even if it's just a couple lines about what you did and how people felt about it, it might encourage some people to attend meetups or start meetups in their area.

If you have the time, you can also describe what types of exercises you did, what worked and what didn't. This could help inspire meetups to try new things and improve themselves in various ways.

If you're inspired by what's posted below and want to organize a meetup, check out this page for some resources to get started! You can also check FrankAdamek's weekly post on meetups for the week
Meta: social influence bias and the karma system
by  — 2014-02-17T01:07:45.973Z

Given LW’s keen interest in bias, it would seem pertinent to be aware of the biases engendered by the karma system. Note: I used to be strictly opposed to comment scoring mechanisms, but witnessing the general effectiveness in which LWers use karma has largely redeemed the system for me.

In “Social Influence Bias: A Randomized Experiment” by Muchnik et al, random comments on a “social news aggregation Web site” were up-voted after being posted. The likelihood of such rigged comments receiving additional up-votes were quantified in comparison to a control group. The results show that users were significantly biased towards the randomly up-voted posts:

The up-vote treatment significantly increased the probability of up-voting by the first viewer by 32% over the control group ... Uptreated comments were not down-voted significantly more or less frequently than the control group, so users did not tend to correct the upward manipulation. In the absence of a correction, positive herding accumulated over time.

At the end of their five month testing period, the comments that had artificially received an up-vote had an average rating 25% higher than the control group. Interestingly, the severity of the bias was largely dependent on the topic of discussion:

We found significant positive herding effects for comment ratings in “politics,” “culture and society,” and “business,” but no detectable herding behavior for comments in “economics,” “IT,” “fun,” and “general news”.

The herding behavior outlined in the paper seems rather intuitive to me. If before I read a post, I see a little green ‘1’ next to it, I’m probably going to read the post in a better light than if I hadn't seen that little green ‘1’ next to it. Similarly, if I see a post that has a negative score, I’ll probably see flaws in it much more readily. One might say that this is the point of the rating system, as it allows the group as a whole to evaluate the content. However, I’m still unsettled by just how easily popular opinion was swayed in the experiment.

This certainly doesn't necessitate that we reprogram the site and eschew the karma system. Moreover, understanding the biases inherent in such a system will allow us to use it much more effectively. Di...
Meetup report: London LW paranoid debating session
by philh — 2014-02-16T23:46:40.591Z

A photo from a (different) recent LW London meetup

Cross-posted from my blog.

I wasn't going to bother writing this up, but then I remembered it's important to publish negative results.

LessWrong London played a few rounds of paranoid debating at our meetup on 02/02/14. I'm not sure we got too much from the experience, except that it was fun. (I enjoyed it, at any rate.)

There were nine of us, which was unwieldy, so we split into two groups. Our first questions probably weren't very good: we wanted the height of the third-highest mountain in the world, and the length of the third-longest river. (The groups had different questions so that someone on the other group could verify that the answer was well-defined and easy to discover. I had intended to ask "tallness of the third-tallest mountain", but the wikipedia page I found sorted by height, so I went with that.)

I was on the "river" question, and we did pretty badly. None of us really knew what ballpark we were searching in. I made the mistake of saying an actual number that was in my head but I didn't know where from and I didn't trust it, that the longest river was something like 1,800 miles long. Despite my unconfidence, we became anchored there. Someone else suggested that the thing to do would be to take a quarter of the circumference of earth (which comes to 6,200 miles) as a baseline and adjust for the fact that rivers wiggle. I thought, that's crazy, you must be the mole. I think I answered 1500 miles.

In reality, the longest river is 4,100 miles, the third longest is 3900 miles, and the mole decided that 1800 was dumb and he didn't need to do anything to sabotage us. (I don't remember what the circumference-over-four person submitted. I have a recollection that he was closer than I was, but I also had a recollection that circumference-over-four was actually pretty close, which it isn't especially.)

The other team did considerably better, getting answers in the 8,000s for a true answer of 8,600.

I'd devised a scoring system, where every player submits their own answer, and non-moles score proportional to -|log(given answer / actual answer)|; the mole scores the negative mean of everyone else's score. But after calculating it for a few people, we decided we didn't really care, and we probably wouldn't be playing enough rounds for it to become meaningful.

Those questions weren't so great, because we felt ther...
Meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup
by rocurley — 2014-02-15T18:41:42.580Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup

WHEN:
16 February 2014 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
national portrait gallaey

We'll be meeting to hang out and play games.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup
Rethinking Education
by Adam Zerner — 2014-02-15T05:22:11.067Z

Problems

Problems have bottlenecks. To solve problems, you need to overcome each bottleneck. If you fail to overcome just one bottleneck, the problem will go unsolved, and your effort will have been fruitless.

In reality, it’s a little bit more complicated than that. Some bottlenecks are tighter than others, and some progress might leak through, but it usually isn’t anything notable.

Education

There is a lot wrong with education. Attempts are being made to improve it, but they’re glossing over important bottlenecks. Consequently, progress is slowly dripping through. I think that it’d be a better use of our time to take the time to think through each bottleneck, and how it can be addressed.

I have a theory of how we can overcome enough bottlenecks such that progress will fall through, instead of drip through.

Consider how we learn. Say that you want to learn parent concept A. To do this, it’ll require you to understand a bunch of other things first

My groundbreaking idea: make sure that students know A1…An before teaching them A.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4gnwamufalg5gqo/learning.jpg

The bottlenecks to understanding A are A1…An. Some of these bottlenecks are tighter than others, and in reality, there are constraints on our ability to teach, so it’s probably best to focus on the tighter bottlenecks. Regardless, this is the approach we’ll need to take if we want to truly change education.

How would this work?

1) Create a dependency tree.

2) Explain each cell in the tree.

3) Devise a test of understanding for each cell in the tree.

4) Teach accordingly.

Where does our system fail us?

When you’re in class and the teacher is explaining A when you still don’t get, say A2 and A5.

When you’re in class and the teacher is explaining A, when she never thought to explain A2 and A5.

When you’re reading the textbook and you’re confused, but you don’t even know what child concepts you’re confused about.

When you memorize for the test/assignment instead of properly filling out your dependency tree.

When being too far ahead or behind the class leads to a lack of motivation.

When lack of interest in the material leads to lack of motivation.

When physical distractions divert your attention (tired, uncomfortable, hungry…).

My proposa

...
Mental Subvocalization --"Saying" Words In Your Mind As You Read
by Torello — 2014-02-15T02:38:58.030Z

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization

I'm curious about how often or to what degree visitors to this site subvocalize as they read. I was originally interested in reducing subvocalizations as a way to increase reading speed, as the idea is mentioned in multiple pieces I've read about speed reading.

The Wikipedia entry seems to focus on subtle throat and muscle movements, but I'm more interested to know if you "say" or "hear" the words in your head as you read.

Since reading about subvocalization recently, I seem to notice that I "say/hear" what I'm reading quite frequently. I'm not sure if this is causal (in the way that the command "don't think of pink elephants" obliges you to do so), or if I just notice it more now, or both.

When I'm very engrossed in a book either I don't notice the subvocalizations or they stop happening, so seems that it could either be a cause or a symptom of distractedness.

In the comments, please describe your mental subvocalizations (or lack of them) and if they are related to how engrossed you are in the book. Any other comments relevant comments about speed reading or subvocalizations are welcome.
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Politics and the English Language
by Mestroyer — 2014-02-15T02:30:28.436Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Politics and the English Language

WHEN:
16 February 2014 02:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
40.109545,-88.2273

Read this:
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

And then show up and discuss it.

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Politics and the English Language