trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Charitable explanation
by KatjaGrace — 2009-09-08T05:55:33.000Z

Is anyone really altruistic? The usual cynical explanations for seemingly altruistic behavior are that it makes one feel good, it makes one look good, and it brings other rewards later. These factors are usually present, but how much do they contribute to motivation?

One way to tell if it’s all about altruism is to invite charity that explicitly won’t benefit anyone. Curious economists asked their guinea pigs for donations to a variety of causes, warning them:

“The amount contributed by the proctor to your selected charity WILL be reduced by however much you pass to your selected charity. Your selected charity will receive neither more nor less than $10.”

Many participants chipped in nonetheless:

We find that participants, on average, donated 20% of their endowments and that approximately 57% of the participants made a donation.

This is compared to giving an average of 30-49% in experiments where donating benefited the cause, but it is of course possible that knowing you are helping offers more of a warm glow. It looks like at least half of giving isn’t altruistic at all, unless the participants were interested in the wellbeing of the experimenters’ funds.

The opportunity to be observed by others also influences how much we donate, and we are duly rewarded with reputation:

Here we demonstrate that more subjects were willing to give assistance to unfamiliar people in need if they could make their charity offers in the presence of their group mates than in a situation where the offers remained concealed from others. In return, those who were willing to participate in a particular charitable activity received significantly higher scores than others on scales measuring sympathy and trustworthiness.

This doesn’t tell us whether real altruism exists though. Maybe there are just a few truly altruistic deeds out there? What would a credibly altruistic act look like?

Fortunately for cute children desirous of socially admirable help, much charity is not driven by altruism (picture: Laura Lartigue)

If an act made the doer feel bad, look bad to others, and endure material cost, while helping someone else, we would probably be satisfied that it was altruistic. For instance if a person killed their much loved grandmother to steal her money to donate to a charity they believed would increase the birth rate somewhere far away, at much risk to t...
Why I'm Staying On Bloggingheads.tv
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-09-07T20:15:56.595Z

Recently, Sean Carroll, Carl Zimmer, and Phil Plait have all decided to stop appearing on BloggingHeads.TV (BHTV), and PZ Myers announced he would not appear on it in the future, after a disastrous decision to have creationist Michael Behe interviewed by the linguist and non-biologist John McWhorter, who failed to call Behe on his standard BS.

I'm hereby publicly announcing that I intend to stay on BloggingHeads.TV.

Why? Two main reasons:

1) Robert Wright publicly said that this was foolish, apologized for the poor editorial oversight that led to it, and says they're going to try never to do this again. This looks sincere to me, and given that it's sincere, people really ought to be allowed more chance than this to recover from their mistakes.

2) Bloggingheads.TV has given me a forum to debate accomodationist atheists who are insufficiently condemning of religion - for example my diavlog with Adam Frank, author of "The Constant Fire". Adam Frank argues that, while of course we now know that God doesn't exist, nonetheless scientific wonder at the universe and its mysteries has a lot in common with the roots of religion. And I said this was wishful thinking, historically ignorant of how religions really arose and propagated themselves, and a continuation of such theistic bad habits as thinking that things of which we are temporarily ignorant are "sacred mysteries". And no one at BHTV complained that I was being too confrontational, or too anti-religious, or that it was unfair to have the diavlog be between two atheists.

If BHTV is willing to let me come on and (politely) kick hell out of atheists who aren't atheistic enough to suit me, then I don't believe that their unfortunate failure to have Behe interviewed by someone who could call his BS, represents any deep hidden agenda in favor of religion and against science.

Rather, I think it represents a commitment to having interesting discussions by people who intelligently disagree with each other and have something courteous to say about it - even if that discussion wanders into the fearsome death zones where science does ("does not!") clash with religion - and this commitment managed to go wrong on one or two occasions.

My friends and fellow antitheists, this is an important commitment while most of the world is continuing to pretend that there is no conflict between science...
Forcing Anthropics: Boltzmann Brains
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-09-07T19:02:52.990Z

Followup to: Anthropic Reasoning in UDT by Wei Dai

Suppose that I flip a logical coin - e.g. look at some binary digit of pi unknown to either of us - and depending on the result, either create a billion of you in green rooms and one of you in a red room if the coin came up 1; or, if the coin came up 0, create one of you in a green room and a billion of you in red rooms. You go to sleep at the start of the experiment, and wake up in a red room.

Do you reason that the coin very probably came up 0? Thinking, perhaps: "If the coin came up 1, there'd be a billion of me in green rooms and only one of me in a red room, and in that case, it'd be very surprising that I found myself in a red room."

What is your degree of subjective credence - your posterior probability - that the logical coin came up 1?

There are only two answers I can see that might in principle be coherent, and they are "50%" and "a billion to one against".

Tomorrow I'll talk about what sort of trouble you run into if you reply "a billion to one".

But for today, suppose you reply "50%". Thinking, perhaps: "I don't understand this whole consciousness rigamarole, I wouldn't try to program a computer to update on it, and I'm not going to update on it myself."

In that case, why don't you believe you're a Boltzmann brain?

Back when the laws of thermodynamics were being worked out, there was first asked the question: "Why did the universe seem to start from a condition of low entropy?" Boltzmann suggested that the larger universe was in a state of high entropy, but that, given a long enough time, regions of low entropy would spontaneously occur - wait long enough, and the egg will unscramble itself - and that our own universe was such a region.

The problem with this explanation is now known as the "Boltzmann brain" problem; namely, while Hubble-region-sized low-entropy fluctuations will occasionally occur, it would be far more likely - though still not likely in any absolute sense - for a handful of particles to come together in a configuration performing a computation that lasted just long enough to think a single conscious thought (whatever that means) before dissolving back into chaos. A random reverse-entropy fluctuation is exponentially vastly more likely to take place in a small region than a large one.

So on Boltzmann's attempt to explain the low-entropy...
Subconscious stalking?
by KatjaGrace — 2009-09-06T09:00:43.000Z

Just seeing another person look at something can tend to make you like it a bit more than if you see them looking in another direction:

In this study, we found that objects that are looked at by other people are liked more than objects that do not receive the attention of other people (Experiment 1). This suggests that observing averted gaze can have an impact on the affective appraisals of objects in the environment. This liking effect was absent when an arrow was used to cue attention (Experiment 2). This underlines the importance of other people’s interactions with objects for generating our own impressions of such stimuli in the world.

The authors suggest this is because people really do tend to look at things more if they like them, and that another person likes something is information about its value. This makes sense, and even more if we assume that the ancestral environment contained fewer eye catching people paid to prominently give items their attention.

Is observing the eye movement of others a precursor to facebook? (picture: xkcd.com)

Another possibility though is that people want to have coinciding tastes to those around them often, so we are not so much interested in clues to the item’s inherent value, but directly in the other person’s values. In that case if we evolved nicely we would react more to some people looking than to others.

Sure enough, this study found that such an effect seems to hold for attractive people, but not unattractive:

In a conditioning paradigm, novel objects were associated with either attractive or unattractive female faces, either displaying direct or averted gaze. An affective priming task showed more positive automatic evaluations of objects that were paired with attractive faces with direct gaze than attractive faces with averted gaze and unattractive faces, irrespective of gaze direction. Participants’ self-reported desire for the objects matched the affective priming data.

Added: These days we can discover (and adapt to) many people’s likes and dislikes prior to meeting them extensively, as long as they post them all over Facebook or the like. If the tendency to coordinate our values based on minor cues was good enough to evolve, does the possibility of doing so much more effectively via online stalking give a selective advantage to those who use it?
Decision theory: Why Pearl helps reduce “could” and “would”, but still leaves us with at least three alternatives
by AnnaSalamon — 2009-09-06T06:10:20.344Z

(This is the third post in a planned sequence.)
My last post left us with the questions:

Just what are humans, and other common CSAs, calculating when we imagine what “would” happen “if” we took actions we won’t take?

Is there more than one natural way to calculate these counterfactual “would”s? If so, what are the alternatives, and which alternative works best?

Today, I’ll take an initial swing at these questions. I’ll review Judea Pearl’s causal Bayes nets; show how Bayes nets offer a general methodology for computing counterfactual “would”s; and note three plausible alternatives for how to use Pearl’s Bayes nets to set up a CSA. One of these alternatives will be the “timeless” counterfactuals of Eliezer’s Timeless Decision Theory.

The problem of counterfactuals is the problem what we do and should mean when we we discuss what “would” have happened, “if” something impossible had happened. In its general form, this problem has proved to be quite gnarly. It has been bothering philosophers of science for at least 57 years, since the publication of Nelson Goodman’s book “Fact, Fiction, and Forecast” in 1952:

Let us confine ourselves for the moment to [counterfactual conditionals] in which the antecedent and consequent are inalterably false--as, for example, when I say of a piece of butter that was eaten yesterday, and that had never been heated,

`If that piece of butter had been heated to 150°F, it would have melted.'

Considered as truth-functional compounds, all counterfactuals are of course true, since their antecedents are false. Hence

`If that piece of butter had been heated to 150°F, it would not have melted.'

would also hold. Obviously something different is intended, and the problem is to define the circumstances under which a given counterfactual holds while the opposing conditional with the contradictory consequent fails to hold.

Recall that we seem to need counterfactuals in order to build agents that do useful decision theory -- we need to build agents that can think about the consequences of each of their “possible actions”, and can choose the action with best expected-consequences. So we need to know how to compute those counterfactuals.&n...
Counterfactual Mugging and Logical Uncertainty
by Vladimir_Nesov — 2009-09-05T22:31:27.354Z

Followup to: Counterfactual Mugging.

Let's see what happens with Counterfactual Mugging, if we replace the uncertainty about an external fact of how a coin lands, with logical uncertainty, for example about what is the n-th place in the decimal expansion of pi.

The original thought experiment is as follows:

Omega appears and says that it has just tossed a fair coin, and given that the coin came up tails, it decided to ask you to give it $100. Whatever you do in this situation, nothing else will happen differently in reality as a result. Naturally you don't want to give up your $100. But Omega also tells you that if the coin came up heads instead of tails, it'd give you $10000, but only if you'd agree to give it $100 if the coin came up tails.

Let's change "coin came up tails" to "10000-th digit of pi is even", and correspondingly for heads. This gives Logical Counterfactual Mugging:

Omega appears and says that it has just found out what that 10000th decimal digit of pi is 8, and given that it is even, it decided to ask you to give it $100. Whatever you do in this situation, nothing else will happen differently in reality as a result. Naturally you don't want to give up your $100. But Omega also tells you that if the 10000th digit of pi turned out to be odd instead, it'd give you $10000, but only if you'd agree to give it $100 given that the 10000th digit is even.

This form of Counterfactual Mugging may be instructive, as it slaughters the following false intuition, or equivalently conceptualization of "could": "the coin could land either way, but a logical truth couldn't be either way".

For the following, let's shift the perspective to Omega, and consider the problem about 10001th digit, which is 5 (odd). It's easy to imagine that given that the 10001th digit of pi is in fact 5, and you decided to only give away the $100 if the digit is odd, then Omega's prediction of your actions will still be that you'd give away $100 (because the digit is in fact odd). Direct prediction of your actions can't include the part where you observe that the digit is even, because the digit is odd.

But Omega doesn't compute what you'll do in reality, it computes what you would do if the 10001th digit of pi was even (which it isn't). If you decline to give away the $100 if the digit is even, Omega's simulation of counterfactual where the digit is even will say that you wouldn't o...
Notes on utility function experiment
by taw — 2009-09-05T19:10:05.400Z

I just finished a two-week experiment of trying to live by a point system. I attached a point value to various actions and events, and made some effort to maximize the score. I cannot say it was successful in making me achieve more than normally during the same period of time, but it made more clear some of the problems with my behaviour.

Here's some notes from my experiment:

Points are marginal utilities, they are for things you want to do more of, but don't due to akrasia. If you want to exercise more you'll assign very high value to half an hour of exercise, but that doesn't mean you want to spend 8 hours a day cross-training. As expected, I got most points for thing that weren't that important but I finally got myself to do more.

Values can be put on terminal values (results), or instrumental values (effort, and partial results). Valuing only the former tends to be highly demoralizing, valuing the latter tends to be highly encouraging.

It's a good idea to assign some points to cleanup of your system (decide against doing something that was previously on your list, get trivial thing off your list). It cleans your mind, even if it doesn't progress your big goals.

Another good idea are points for sitting down and thinking, making mindmaps and so on.

One big problem that the system didn't cover at all were distractions, like spending too much time on Wikipedia or TvTropes.

Another big problem were times when I didn't have enough energy to do anything big, but wasn't sleepy enough to sleep. It's usually pure waste of time.

During the first week I was more successful (in terms of points) almost every day, then it went far downhill, perhaps due to my enthusiasm running out. This made me decide against extending the experiment past the original two week schedule.

In other words - there was some value to it, but akrasia mostly won again.

Anyone else wants to share their anti-akrasia experiments?
Freedom is slavery
by KatjaGrace — 2009-09-04T09:00:28.000Z

These comparisons are sometimes made as arguments in favor of the former in each pair being forcibly prevented:

Selling equity in yourself is like slavery

Allowing organ selling is like stealing organs

Choosing genetic characteristics of your children is like eugenics

Languages dying out is like genocide

Selling babies is like slavery, or is like stealing babies and selling them

Sweatshops are like slavery

Euthenasia is like murder

Prostitution is like rape

Globalization is like colonialism

Any more to add?

The general pattern:

Freely chosen X is like X coerced. And as X coerced is bad, we should prevent X (coercively if need be).

Why is this error prevalent? I suspect it stems from assuming value to be in goods or activities, rather than in the minds of their beholders. Consent is important because it separates those who value something enough to do it and those who don’t. Without the idea that people value things different amounts, consent seems just another nice thing to have, but not functional. If most people wouldn’t make a choice unless forced, then that choice is bad, then others making it should be stopped.

Bought kidneys look like stolen kidneys; can you spot the difference?

I wonder if this is related to the misunderstanding that trade must be exploitative, because employers gain and the gain must come from somewhere. This also appears to stem from overlooking the possibility that people place different values on the same things, so extra value can be created by exchange.

This is related.
Torture vs. Dust vs. the Presumptuous Philosopher: Anthropic Reasoning in UDT
by Wei Dai — 2009-09-03T23:04:27.130Z

In this post, I'd like to examine whether Updateless Decision Theory can provide any insights into anthropic reasoning. Puzzles/paradoxes in anthropic reasoning is what prompted me to consider UDT originally and this post may be of interest to those who do not consider Counterfactual Mugging to provide sufficient motivation for UDT.

The Presumptuous Philosopher is a thought experiment that Nick Bostrom used to argue against the Self-Indication Assumption. (SIA: Given the fact that you exist, you should (other things equal) favor hypotheses according to which many observers exist over hypotheses on which few observers exist.)

It is the year 2100 and physicists have narrowed down the search for a theory of everything to only two remaining plausible candidate theories, T1 and T2 (using considerations from super-duper symmetry). According to T1 the world is very, very big but finite, and there are a total of a trillion trillion observers in the cosmos. According to T2, the world is very, very, very big but finite, and there are a trillion trillion trillion observers. The super-duper symmetry considerations seem to be roughly indifferent between these two theories. The physicists are planning on carrying out a simple experiment that will falsify one of the theories. Enter the presumptuous philosopher: "Hey guys, it is completely unnecessary for you to do the experiment, because I can already show to you that T2 is about a trillion times more likely to be true than T1 (whereupon the philosopher runs the God’s Coin Toss thought experiment and explains Model 3)!"
One suspects the Nobel Prize committee to be a bit hesitant about awarding the presumptuous philosopher the big one for this contribution.

To make this example clearer as a decision problem, let's say that the consequences of carrying out the "simple experiment" is a very small cost (one dollar). And the consequences of just assuming T2 is a disaster down the line if T1 turns out to be true (we create a power plant based on T2, and it blows up and kills someone).

In UDT, no Bayesian updating occurs, and in particular, you don't update on the fact that you exist. Suppose in CDT you have a prior P(T1) = P(T2) = .5 before taking into account that you exist, then translated into UDT you have Σ P(Vi) = Σ P(Wi) = .5, where Vi...
The Sword of Good
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-09-03T00:53:55.237Z

..fragments of a book that would never be written...

* * *

Captain Selena, late of the pirate ship Nemesis, quietly extended the very tip of her blade around the corner, staring at the tiny reflection on the metal. At once, but still silently, she pulled back the sword; and with her other hand made a complex gesture.

The translation spell told Hirou that the handsigns meant: "Orcs. Seven."

Dolf looked at Hirou. "My Prince," the wizard signed, "do not waste yourself against mundane opponents. Do not draw the Sword of Good as yet. Leave these to Selena."

Hirou's mouth was very dry. He didn't know if the translation spell could understand the difference between wanting to talk and wanting to make gestures; and so Hirou simply nodded.

Not for the first time, the thought occurred to Hirou that if he'd actually known he was going to be transported into a magical universe, informed he was the long-lost heir to the Throne of Bronze, handed the legendary Sword of Good, and told to fight evil, he would have spent less time reading fantasy novels. Joined the army, maybe. Taken fencing lessons, at least. If there was one thing that didn't prepare you for fantasy real life, it was sitting at home reading fantasy fiction.

Dolf and Selena were looking at Hirou, as if waiting for something more.

Oh. That's right. I'm the prince.

Hirou raised a finger and pointed it around the corner, trying to indicate that they should go ahead -

With a sudden burst of motion Selena plunged around the corner, Dolf following hard on her heels, and Hirou, startled and hardly thinking, moving after.

(This story ended up too long for a single LW post, so I put it on yudkowsky.net.
Do read the rest of the story there, before continuing to the Acknowledgments below.)

Acknowledgments:

I had the idea for this story during a conversation with Nick Bostrom and Robin Hanson about an awful little facet of human nature I call "suspension of moral disbelief". The archetypal case in my mind will always be the Passover Seder, watching my parents and family and sometimes friends reciting the Ten Plagues that God is supposed to have visited on Egypt. You take drops from the wine glass - or grape juice in my case - and drip them onto the plate, to symbolize your sadness at God slaught...