trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Group Rationality Diary, May 16-31
by therufs — 2013-05-16T04:12:36.524Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for May 16-31.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating!

Next diary: June 1-30

Immediate past diary: May 1-15

Rationality Diaries archive
Why is it rational to invest in retirement? I don't get it. 
by diegocaleiro — 2013-05-16T01:28:42.000Z

I know I said I'd be gone... but this was just a comment originally, and I noticed it may actually be relevant.

Elharo said in Munchkin Ideas:

Put as much money as you can afford into tax advantaged retirement accounts. In the U.S. that means 401K, 403b, IRA, SEP, etc.

I'm interested in the following:
Why should people invest in retirement? Or, instead, why should someone invest as much as most do in retirement.
Few facts that make it a boggling question for me:

You are 10% to 20% likely to die before you enjoy even your first retirement year.
People adjust much more to harsh economical conditions than they believe they would. They remain happy, as many studies by Seligman and others show.
People who retire are only happier as retirees if they retired by choice (I lost the paper, sorry).
Most people here live in rich countries - darn, hate to be the exception! - , and their state would happily provide them with at least the maximal retirement plan legal in my country (aprox 2000 dollars/month). And surely would provide them with double the minimal (about 200/month) if they needed.
If you have descendants, they may support you in case you are still alive, and if you are not rich enough to keep a house, you have a good excuse to be in company of loved ones (you have nowhere else to go).

Last, but not least: That person is not even you that much anyway.

Given all that, I have no clue what the whole fuss about retirement plans, and being 60% of a rich old person with a crappy body is all about, specially if you are in the grave.

I mean, in the cryopreservation chamber, of course.

Edit: A related question not worth its own post, but maybe worth discussing, is Should inheritance "jump" a generation. Everyone inheriting from grandparents, instead of parents? Just the abstract ethical question. Regardless of implementation procedure.
Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!
by D_Malik — 2013-05-15T22:27:19.072Z

Thus spake Eliezer:

A Munchkin is the sort of person who, faced with a role-playing game, reads through the rulebooks over and over until he finds a way to combine three innocuous-seeming magical items into a cycle of infinite wish spells. Or who, in real life, composes a surprisingly effective diet out of drinking a quarter-cup of extra-light olive oil at least one hour before and after tasting anything else. Or combines liquid nitrogen and antifreeze and life-insurance policies into a ridiculously cheap method of defeating the invincible specter of unavoidable Death. Or figures out how to build the real-life version of the cycle of infinite wish spells.

It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.

So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.
[LINK] Prizes and open source for drug research (proposed, and some politics)
by NancyLebovitz — 2013-05-15T18:23:32.791Z

Trying to get drug research to happen in spite of the drug companies:

The article also has rather a lot about US government opposition to the proposed treaty, which includes a requirement that member nations spend 0.01% of GDP annually on neglected diseases, and Bill Gates' opposition as well.

Is there any reason why non-profits aren't doing drug research?

Love's idea suggests the use of cash prizes -- rather than patents -- to incentivize research; say, $2 billion for an effective therapeutic drug for Chagas disease. A cure, once developed, proven, and awarded a prize, would then exist as open-access intellectual property, with manufacturers around the world competing to produce the drug in the most cost effective manner. Implementing the idea, Love said, "is effectively leveraging the power of the free market twice, once to produce the thing you want and then again to manufacture it as economically as possible." The concept is known as delinking.

*****

To combat the problem [of isolated research groups], the R&D treaty would create an observatory, an open platform for researchers in disparate corners of the globe to pool data and coordinate their work. Grants given to fund their studies would come with provisions requiring that the research exist on that public, cloud-based observatory.

*****

Love's concept of delinking is outlined in a proposal for an R&D treaty, which remains in limbo at the WHO in Geneva. It will have its fate decided in late May, at the annual World Health Assembly (WHA), the democratic forum of members states that governs the WHO.

*****

Scannell worked as a consultant in the drug industry and then as an equity analyst, but quit last year to team up with Young once more at small biotech firm Scannell described as "heretical." The company is called e-Therapeutics, and its approaching drug design via the pair's background in networks. "Go back to how the drug industry says it discovers drugs. It looks for individual targets and then it optimizes drugs for high affinity binding on that target," Scannell said. The strategy, to Scannell's and Young's eyes, fails to take into account the complexity of biological systems.

"If you look at the structure of protein-protein interaction networks in cells, or the metabolic networks, these have been designed by evolution to be robust. You've got feedback loops, you've got parallel pathways, yo

...
Crash problems for total futarchy
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-05-15T10:41:59.215Z

Futarchy holds great promise for dealing with all the morass of poor decision making in our governments and corporations. For those who haven't heard of it, the main concept is to use betting markets, where people place bets on the expected outcome of a policy, and the decision-makers choose the policy that the market decrees is most likely to achieve their desired outcomes. Robin Hanson summarises it as "Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs".

The approach, however, could lead to problems in a large financial crisis. When a large financial bubble bursts, many things change: liquidity, risk aversion, volatility, the competence of the average investor. If the betting markets are integrated into the general market (which they would be), then they would be affected in the same way. So at precisely the moment when decision makers need the best results, their main tools would be going haywire.

This would be even worse if they'd been depending on the betting markets for their decisions, operating merely as overseers. At that point, they may have lost the ability to make effective decision entirely.

Since isolating the betting markets from the swings of the rest of the market is unrealistic/impossible/stupid, we should aim for a mixed governance model - one where betting markets play an integral part, but where the deciders still have experience making their own decisions and overriding the betting markets with some regularity.
Kevin Drum's Article about AI and Technology
by knb — 2013-05-15T07:38:18.403Z

Kevin Drum has an article in Mother Jones about AI and Moore's Law:

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT THE FUTURE. Not the unhappy future, the one where climate change turns the planet into a cinder or we all die in a global nuclear war. This is the happy version. It's the one where computers keep getting smarter and smarter, and clever engineers keep building better and better robots. By 2040, computers the size of a softball are as smart as human beings. Smarter, in fact. Plus they're computers: They never get tired, they're never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes, and they have instant access to all of human knowledge.

The result is paradise. Global warming is a problem of the past because computers have figured out how to generate limitless amounts of green energy and intelligent robots have tirelessly built the infrastructure to deliver it to our homes. No one needs to work anymore. Robots can do everything humans can do, and they do it uncomplainingly, 24 hours a day. Some things remain scarce—beachfront property in Malibu, original Rembrandts—but thanks to super-efficient use of natural resources and massive recycling, scarcity of ordinary consumer goods is a thing of the past. Our days are spent however we please, perhaps in study, perhaps playing video games. It's up to us.

Although he only mentions consumer goods, Drum presumably means that scarcity will end for services and consumer goods. If scarcity only ended for consumer goods, people would still have to work (most jobs are currently in the services economy).

Drum explains that our linear-thinking brains don't intuitively grasp exponential systems like Moore's law.

Suppose it's 1940 and Lake Michigan has (somehow) been emptied. Your job is to fill it up using the following rule: To start off, you can add one fluid ounce of water to the lake bed. Eighteen months later, you can add two. In another 18 months, you can add four ounces. And so on. Obviously this is going to take a while.

By 1950, you have added around a gallon of water. But you keep soldiering on. By 1960, you have a bit more than 150 gallons. By 1970, you have 16,000 gallons, about as much as an average suburban swimming pool.

At this point it's been 30 years, and even though 16,000 gallons is a fair amount of water, it's nothing compared to the size of Lake Michigan. To the naked eye you've made no progress at all.

S

...
How to Build a Community
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-05-15T05:43:05.131Z

I've noticed that quite a few people are interested in fostering communities -- both creating communities and improving them to make them work together. But how do we go about actually doing this? What's there to community that we can foster and build upon? What makes a community thrive, and how do we take advantage of this to make and/or improve communities?

To answer these questions, I turned to two books:

The first is The Penguin and The Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler. Benkler, in writing about cooperative systems (Penguins, named after the Linux Penguin) and hierarchical systems (Leviathans, named after Thomas Hobbes's The Leviathan), studies the psychology, economics, and political science of cooperation and helps explain what makes communities stick.

The second is Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive by Bruce Schneier. Schneier studies trust and cooperation from a dizzying variety of sciences (psychology, biology, economics, anthropology, computer science, and political science). Schneier's ultimate game is figuring out what is preventing society from falling apart, and that can be applied to building communities.

Let's see what they got.

Communities Need Cooperation

Schneier and Benkler both paint a view of human nature that is different than what is commonly thought, but what has emerged from the sciences: People are both self-interested and other-interested, different people will have different balances of each, and within each person these two goals can often conflict. Additionally, the "other-interested" aspect can be multiple and occasionally conflicting allegiances, such as to one's family, to one's neighborhood, to one's country, to one's venture philanthropy club, etc.

What's unique to all communities is that they involve people who have set aside some of their immediate self-interest to work together. For instance, when we work together in a group, I definitely don't beat you over the head and steal your lunch money, and I don't usually attempt to free ride and get you to do the group work for me, but we mutually work to solve communal problems and share in the benefits of community.

Public Goods and Free Riders

An example of how psychology has sought to simplify and simulate a community is through what's called ...
Adjusting Effort to Barely Meet Standards
by  — 2013-05-15T03:08:06.216Z

There is sometimes an observed inverse correlation between a student's inherent talent/intelligence and the amount of effort expended. The trend is one that I see everywhere in high school. Smart students just sort of shrug and coast by to get an acceptable grade. Or, on the other side, students that don't grasp material as quickly give it an extra push, knowing that it will take some work in order to get the grades they want.

The similarity between the two is that both types of students are adjusting the amount of work they need to put in, based on the given standard. Given an average, or a benchmark to aim at, they just figure out how much work they need to put in. Students find the equilibrium, the balance between their intelligence and the work they have to put in, that allows them to scrape by.

For students that have less inherent talent in a particular subject, this may be an incentive to improve. But for the students that are never challenged in school, who easily fly through classes that do not provide the adequate learning environment, this drills into their minds that they don't need to work hard.

And this lesson is definitely not desirable to teach to bright students. Some are never exposed to anything besides the monotony and apparent irrelevance of schoolwork (When will we ever use this in the real world?) and fall into the habit of filing everything new under the "pay attention only enough to scrape by" category of their minds. So, when faced with something like, say, global existential risk, the weight of the subject is ignored.

Of course, there are many other factors involved. It isn't that everyone has been trained to adjust to put in minimal work based on an average. If that was the case, then all smart students in public school would be slackers. On a larger scale, then there would be no deviations on either side - everyone would just fall exactly on the average line.

So there is clearly something that lets some people ignore the average. Most motivated and thoughtful people probably don't pay attention to what is considered typical or the standard, anyway. But for many students, a certain test score is a signal to just stop.

Back to the larger scale, now. The problem of using an external standard doesn’t apply only to high school students. There are a multitude of other areas in life, areas in which it is easy to reach a certain poin...
Improving Cryonics - Regulations and Ethical Considerations
by  — 2013-05-14T21:54:48.349Z

Here is my understanding - correct me if I'm wrong:

Cryonics is only allowed once a person is determined legally dead: when the heart stops beating.

One of the reasons why they have to be dead seems to be that the majority of the population consider cryonics to be a death-sentence, as there is no guarantee at this time that subjects can be revived - regardless of if there's a cure for whatever ailment caused a person's death.

It is difficult at this time to improve the revitalizing process as the patients - or clients - are incapable of surviving as their body was already in the process of shutting down, and we do not have the technology to bring them fully back.

Now, to some conjecturing.

We might be able to more reasonably test the effectiveness of procedures to revive current patients if we had healthier people, ones not yet at death's door.

Here's where the ethical dilemma hits home: we could use people who are in good health, here defined as 'not terminally-ill or otherwise dying from health complications in the near future,' who are already intending to end their life. Simply stated, those who are suicidal.

For all intensive purposes they would cease to exist, which would be part of the appeal to that subgroup. At this time there is a probability of them dying from the procedure, which should be ok as they were self-destructing anyway. And if they don't die, they get the chance to reflect on their life or go at it again. In this way their death would be more beneficial to the whole.

The benefits to this would be the additional research into the effects of cryonics on the body and how to develop a procedure to guarantee that you CAN be revived once put under.

I am aware of a couple of problems: legal complications, how to find willing participants, etc., and am thinking of ways to resolve that.

I've just been thinking about this for the past week or so and wanted additional insight. Thoughts?

***On Suicide

For those opposed to suicide: this idea does not encourage people to kill themselves. Rather, it provides those who are already intent upon ending their existence a means to do so more honorably.

In case people have not read it, I recommend Schopenhauer's Essay on Suicide, found here: http://www.egs.edu/library/arthur-schopenhauer/articles/essays-of-schopenhauer/on-suicide/
Meetup : Paris Meetup: Sunday, May 26.
by Emile — 2013-05-14T20:27:45.433Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Paris Meetup: Sunday, May 26.

WHEN:
26 May 2013 02:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Café des Arts et Métiers‎, 51 Rue Turbigo, Paris

The next Paris Meetup will be Sunday, May 26, at the Café des Arts et Métiers opposite the Museum.
We have several guests of honor! Cat should be around, and loup-vaillant is coming up from the south!

Discussion article for the meetup : Paris Meetup: Sunday, May 26.
Avoiding the emergency room
by NancyLebovitz — 2013-05-14T20:23:54.858Z

Diana Hsieh interviews Dr. Doug McGuff about avoidable injuries and deaths.

He's an emergency room physician in South Carolina, so he's pretty much just talking about what he's seen-- different regions have different characteristic injuries.

He says that you're safest in the largest car you can afford, which raises some interesting ethical issues.

There's a fair amount about the risks of getting overfocused on getting something done. This adds tremendously to the hazards of using ladders.
Also, did you know trees can go sproing? One of hazards of chainsaws is that a good bit of energy might be stored in a twisted tree trunk. Don't just know your physics, apply it!

More generally, there are machines and situations (ATVs, chainsaws, airplanes, skiing, etc.) which tend to make people feel more competent than they are.
On the other hand, injuries from rock climbing and horseback riding are less common than you might think. I don't know why the ancestral environment didn't give people a reflexive distaste against diving into water. Perhaps people back then had too much sense to dive much.

One of the pieces of advice-- to get out of stressful relationships-- is too general. This is mostly a good idea, but from what I've read, leaving a violent relationship can lead to more risk of violence. It's still a good idea to leave, but it's important to leave cautiously.

Both McGuff and Hsieh are objectivists, so some of the discussion might be in mind-killer territory.

Edited to add: It's possible that objectivism would be better discussed under a new post. It's certain that there's a bunch of interesting material in the podcast, and avoidable accidents are worth discussing.

Topic list:

“Black swans” of health and “The Dirty Dozen”

#1: Driving a car or motorcycle

#2: Riding an ATV

#3: Biking or jogging on public roads

#4: Flying a plane or helicopter yourself

#5: Getting into a fight

#6: Lighting a gas grill

#7: Diving into water

#8: Using ladders and chainsaws

#9: Retiring and building your dream house

#10: Allowing yourself to be forced into a car or trunk at gunpoint

#11: Staying in stressful relationships

#12: Winning the lottery

Dr. McGuff’s history with risky sports

The risks of other sports

How to survive the ER
The impact of whole brain emulation
by jefftk — 2013-05-14T19:59:11.520Z

At some point in the future we may be able to scan someone's brain at very high resolution and "run" them on a computer. [1] When I first heard this as a teenager I thought it was interesting but not hugely important. Running people faster or slower and keeping backups came immediately to mind, and Wikipedia adds space travel, but those three by themselves don't seem like they change that much. Thinking speed doesn't seem to be major limiting factor in coming up with good ideas, we generally only restore from backups in cases of rare failure, and while space travel would dramatically affect the ability of humans to spread [2] it doesn't sound like it changes the conditions of life.

This actually undersells emulation by quite a lot. For example "backups" let you repeatedly run the same copy of a person on different information. You can find identify a person when they're at their intellectual or creative best, and give them an hour to think about a new situation. Add in potentially increased simulation speed and parallelism, and you could run lots of these ones looking into all sorts of candidate approaches to problems.

With emulations you can get around the mental overhead of keeping all your assumptions about a direction of thought in your mind at once. I might not know if X is true, and spend a while thinking about what should happen if it's true and another while about what if it's not, but it's hard for me to get past the problem that I'm still uncertain about X. With an emulation that you can reset to a saved state however, you could have multiple runs where you give some emulations a strong assurance that X is true and some a strong assurance that X is false

You can also run randomized controlled trials where the experimental group and the control group are the same person. This should hugely bring down experimental cost and noise, allowing us to make major and rapid progress in discovering what works in education, motivation, and productivity.

(Backups stop being about error recovery and fundamentally change the way an emulation is useful.)

These ideas aren't new here [3] but I don't see them often in discussions of the impact of emulating people. I also suspect there are many more creative ways of using emulation; what else could you do with it?

[1] I think this is a long way off but don't see any reasons why it wouldn't be possible.

[2] Which ha...