trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Antidepressant Pharmacogenomics: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
by Scott Alexander — 2017-03-06T05:38:42.000Z

[Epistemic status: very uncertain. Not to be taken as medical advice. Talk to your doctor before deciding whether or not to get any tests.]

I.

There are many antidepressants in common use. With a few exceptions, none are globally better than any others. The conventional wisdom says patients should keep trying antidepressants until they find one that works for them. If we knew beforehand which antidepressants would work for which patients, it would save everyone a lot of time, money, and misery. This is the allure of pharmacogenomics, the new field of genetically-guided medication prescription.

Everybody has various different types of cytochrome enzymes which metabolize medication. Some of them play major roles in metabolizing antidepressants; usually it’s really complicated and several different enzymes can affect the same antidepressant at different stages. But sometimes one or another dominates; for example, Prozac is mostly metabolized by one enzyme called CYP2D6, and Zoloft is mostly metabolized by a different enzyme called CYP2C19.

Suppose (say the pharmacogenomicists) that my individual genetics code for a normal CYP2D6, but a hyperactive CYP2C19 that works ten times faster than usual. Then maybe Prozac would work normally for me, but every drop of Zoloft would get shredded by my enzymes before it can even get to my brain. A genetic test could tell my psychiatrist this, and then she would know to give me Prozac and not Zoloft. Some tests like this are already commercially available. Preliminary results look encouraging. As always, the key words are “preliminary” and “look”, and did I mention that these results were mostly produced by pharma companies pushing their products?

But let me dream for a just a second. There’s been this uneasy tension in psychopharmacology. Clinical psychiatrists give their patients antidepressants and see them get better. Then research psychiatrists do studies and show that antidepressant effect sizes are so small as to be practically unnoticeable. The clinicians say “Something must be wrong with your studies, we see our patients on antidepressants get much better all the time”. The researchers counter with “The plural of anecdote isn’t ‘data’, your intuitions deceive you, antidepressant effects are almost imperceptibly weak.” At this point we prescribe...
Open Thread, March. 6 - March 12, 2017
by Elo — 2017-03-06T05:29:40.540Z

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.
Meetup : Melb Rationality Dojo, March: Communication and Cognitive Biases
by Chriswaterguy — 2017-03-05T23:07:48.054Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melb Rationality Dojo, March: Communication and Cognitive Biases

WHEN:
12 March 2017 03:30:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
Ross House, 247 Flinders Lane. Level 1, Room 1

NOTE DATE: 12 March is the correct date. (The details previously stated 19 March, before correction.)

THIS MONTH: (1) We look at some of the biases and heuristics that affect our communication with others. (2) A lightning talk or two, at 5 to 10 min each (including questions) on the art of rationality or something to enlighten our understanding of the world. (3) We practise a rationality technique inspired by the CFAR curriculum.

BRING: * An idea or question to share. * Perhaps a snack to share. (Healthy snack choice is optional but welcome.)
At about 6:30pm some of us generally head for dinner in the CBD, and you are welcome to join us.

WHEN:
3:30pm to 6:30pm (and then optional dinner). Come early to catch up and maybe grab a tea or coffee, and the meeting proper will begin at 4pm sharp. WHERE: Ross House, 247 Flinders Lane. Level 1, Room 1.
Check details closer to the day. If you have any trouble finding the venue on the day, please text or call Chris on 0439 471 632.

WHO ARE WE AND WHY DO WE MEET? The Less Wrong Melbourne Rationality Dojos are self-improvement sessions for those committed to the art of rationality and personal growth. We welcome new members who are interested in exploring rationality. We're "aspiring rationalists" and always open to learn.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melb Rationality Dojo, March: Communication and Cognitive Biases
Restaurant Guide 1: Restaurants should not look like (most) restaurants
by Zvi — 2017-03-05T22:19:22.000Z

Epistemic Status: Full Power

Related: Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons, An Economist Gets Lunch

Follow-Up: Restaurant Guide 2: Pizza

Conceptually Related More Than You Might Think: Short-Termism

I have spent a lot of time optimizing restaurant choice, and what to do when you get there. A lot of this is based on my personal preferences, but a lot also generalizes to others. A lot also generalizes to things that are not restaurants.

The basic thesis is that a restaurant will choose what signals to send based on what type of place they want to be and what they care about, so those signals are remarkably reliable. It would not benefit a place to send a misleading signal to someone using my criteria, because it would hurt them otherwise.

I can’t find his old posts on this, but Scott Adams had experience with it when he owned a restaurant. He didn’t know the rules, so he had a signal mismatch. The most stark example was when he made his place look ‘too nice.’ People would walk in, decide the place was not right for them, and leave, so he got better results by making the place superficially appear worse. A signal mismatch drives people away. Even when people don’t consciously understand what is going on, they can feel it.

The other basic principle is that the more a place is optimizing for things you don’t want, the less they are optimizing for the things you do want. Attention and focus are limiting factors, and (except perhaps on the very high end) if the place is focusing on the symbolic representation of the thing, it won’t get you the thing.

You want the thing. Restaurants tell you what they are. Believe them. The trick is to know how to read them.

This post covers finding candidate restaurants, and considerations for evaluating those restaurants that are mostly independent of cuisine. Intent is for part 2+, to the extent I do finish this series, is to cover different cuisine types, chains, how to order, how to balance exploration/exploitation, min/max considerations, group dynamics, delivery, and location recommendations in New York City.

Where to Look

There are seven procedures I know of to decide what places to consider. Each has its place.

Option 1: Walk Around

This is the default method in New York, since walking around is a free action. You can get better data from looking in person than you can any other way.

Option 2: ...
Am I Really an X?
by Gram_Stone — 2017-03-05T00:11:14.943Z

As I understand it, there is a phenomenon among transgender people where no matter what they do they can't help but ask themselves the question, "Am I really an [insert self-reported gender category here]?" In the past, a few people have called for a LessWrong-style dissolution of this question. This is how I approach the problem.
There are two caveats which I must address in the beginning.
The first caveat has to do with hypotheses about the etiology of the transgender condition. There are many possible causes of gender identity self-reports, but I don't think it's too controversial to propose that at least some of the transgender self-reports might result from the same mechanism as cisgender self-reports. Again, the idea is that there is some 'self-reporting algorithm', that takes some input that we don't yet know about, and outputs a gender category, and that both cisgender people and transgender people have this. It's not hard to come up with just-so stories about why having such an algorithm and caring about its output might have been adaptive. This is, however, an assumption. In theory, the self-reports from transgender people could have a cause separate from the self-reports of cisgender people, but it's not what I expect.
The second caveat has to do with essentialism. In the past calls for an article like this one, I saw people point out that we reason about gender as if it is an essence, and that any dissolution would have to avoid this mistake. But there's a difference between describing an algorithm that produces a category which feels like an essence, and providing an essentialist explanation. My dissolution will talk about essences because the human mind reasons with them, but my dissolution itself will not be essentialist in nature.
Humans universally make inferences about their typicality with respect to their self-reported gender. Check Google Scholar for 'self-perceived gender typicality' for further reading. So when I refer to a transman, by my model, I mean, "A human whose self-reporting algorithm returns the gender category 'male', but whose self-perceived gender typicality checker returns 'Highly atypical!'"

And the word 'human' at the beginning of that sentence is important. I do not mean "A human that is secretly, essentially a girl," or "A human that is secretly, essentially a boy,"; I just mean a human. I postulate that there ar...
Meetup : Superintellignce chapter 2
by pepe_prime — 2017-03-04T20:29:07.035Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Superintellignce chapter 2

WHEN:
17 March 2017 05:45:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Lindstedtsvägen 3, room 1537, SE-114 28 Stockholm, Sverige

We'll have a 30 minute summary of chapter 1 of Superintelligence, followed by free-form discussion. We'll repeat this with later chapters about every 2 weeks.

Format:
We meet and start hanging out at 5:45, but don't officially start doing the meetup topic until 6:00 to accomodate stragglers. We often go out for dinner after the meetup.

How to find us:
The meetup is at a KTH academic building and the room is on the 5th floor, two stairs up.

Influence future meetups:
Times - http://www.when2meet.com/?5723551-cJBhD
Topics - https://druthe.rs/dockets/-KcCvpn97vUhg3tQRrKn

Discussion article for the meetup : Superintellignce chapter 2
Generalizing Foundations of Decision Theory
by abramdemski — 2017-03-04T16:46:11.000Z

This post is more about articulating motivations than about presenting anything new, but I think readers may learn something about the foundations of classical (evidential) decision theory as they stand.

The Project

Most people interested in decision theory know about the VNM theorem and the Dutch Book argument, and not much more. The VNM theorem shows that if we have to make decisions over gambles which follow the laws of probability, and our preferences obey four plausible postulates of rationality (the VNM axioms), then our preferences over gambles can be represented as an expected utility function. On the other hand, the Dutch Book argument assumes that we make decisions by expected utility, but perhaps with a non-probabilistic belief function. It then proves that any violation of probability theory implies a willingness to take sure-loss gambles. (Reverse Dutch Book arguments show that indeed, following the laws of probability eliminates these sure-loss bets.)

So we can more or less argue for expected utility theory starting from probability theory, and argue for probability theory starting from expected utility theory; but clearly, this is not enough to provide good reason to endorse Bayesian decision theory overall. Subsequent investigations which I will summarize have attempted to address this gap.

But first, why care?

Logical Induction can be seen as resulting from a small tweak to the Dutch Book setup, relaxing it enough that it could apply to mathematical uncertainty. Although we were initially optimistic that Logical Induction would allow significant progress in decision theory, it has proven difficult to get a satisfying logical-induction DT. Perhaps it would be useful to instead understand the argument for DT as a whole, and try to relax the foundations of DT in "the same way" we relaxed the foundations of probability theory.

It seems likely to me that such a re-examination of the foundations would automatically provide justification for reflectively consistent decision theories like UDT. Hopefully I can make my intuitions clear as I describe things.

Furthermore, the foundations of DT seem like they aren't that solid. Perhaps we've put blinders on by not investigating these arguments for DT in full. Even without the kind of modification to the assumptions which I'm proposing, we may find significant generalizations of DT are given just by droppi

...
Short Termism
by Zvi — 2017-03-04T12:18:45.000Z

Epistemic Status: Metrics look good

Original Post: Larry Summers: Case Still Out On Whether Short-Termism is a Problem

There is a long-standing hypothesis that corporate America focuses too much on short-term results. Larry Summers looks at a new study by McKinsey (McKinsey’s summary here), and concludes in his words that ‘the case is still out on whether corporate short-termism is a problem.’

Summers:

the short-term hypothesis is ‘corporations systematically take too short a view and do not invest enough for the long term.’

Summers considers the short-term hypothesis reasonable, but does not think McKinsey has provided strong additional evidence. Summers’ objection to the study is that what is being labeled ‘short-termism’ is largely a proxy for quality corporations with good prospects. Taking a long-term approach is a luxury, requiring both a stable short term situation and strong long term prospects, so it is not surprising that such firms provide better long term returns. Causality is reversed: If your long-term returns are strong, you then invest heavily. This can then cause systematic mispricing if investors do not update sufficiently on this information.

Reverse causality is certainly plausible, and there are models where it results in long term focused companies being undervalued without short-termism being a problem.

What I found more interesting was the details of what McKinsey was actually measuring. They use five (see page 3):

On the theory that long-term firms will invest more, they measure the ratio of capital expenditures to depreciation.

Earnings Quality. On the theory that long-term firms will generate earnings ‘that reflect cash flow, not accounting decisions’ they measure accruals as a share of revenue.

Margin Growth. On the theory that long-term firms will avoid driving margins unsustainably high, they measure the difference between earnings growth and revenue growth.

Quarterly Management. On the theory that short-term firms will care about hitting earnings per share (EPS) targets but long-term firms will not, they measure the incidence of beating EPS by less than 2 cents, versus missing by less than 2 cents.

Earnings-per-share Growth. On the theory that long-term firms won’t spend money on share buybacks (since they take up money with better uses, and are used to inflate EPS growth), they measure the difference between EPS growth and ‘

...
5 Project Hufflepuff Suggestions for the Rationality Community
by  — 2017-03-04T02:23:09.596Z

<cross-posed on Facebook>

In the spirit of Project Hufflepuff, I’m listing out some ideas for things I would like to see in the rationality community, which seem like perhaps useful things to have. I dunno if all of these are actually good ideas, but it seems better to throw some things out there and iterate.

Ideas:

Idea 1) A more coherent summary of all the different ideas that are happening across all the rationalist blogs. I know LessWrong is trying to become more of a Schelling point, but I think a central forum is still suboptimal for what I want. I’d like something that just takes the best ideas everyone’s been brewing and centralizes them in one place so I can quickly browse them all and dive deep if something looks interesting.

Suggestions:

A) A bi-weekly (or some other period) newsletter where rationalists can summarize their best insights of the past weeks in 100 words or less, with links to their content.

B) An actual section of LessWrong that does the above, so people can comment / respond to the ideas.

Thoughts:

This seems straightforward and doable, conditional on commitment from 5-10 people in the community. If other people are also excited, I’m happy to reach out and get this thing started.

Idea 2) A general tool/app for being able to coordinate. I’d be happy to lend some fraction of my time/effort in order to help solve coordination problems. It’s likely other people feel the same way. I’d like a way to both pledge my commitment and stay updated on things that I might be able to plausibly Cooperate on.

Suggestions:

A) An app that is managed by someone, which sends out broadcasts for action every so often. I’m aware that similar things / platforms already exist, so maybe we could just leverage an existing one for this purpose.

Thoughts:

In abstract, this seems good. Wondering what others think / what sorts of coordination problems this would be good for. The main value here is being confident in *actually* getting coordination from the X people who’ve signed up.

Idea 3) More rationality materials that aren’t blogs. The rationality community seems fairly saturated with blogs. Maybe we could do with more webcomics, videos, or something else?

Suggestions:

A) Brainstorm good content from other mediums, benefits / drawbacks, and see why we might want content in other...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2017-03-03T16:10:06.878Z

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

[Zurich] March Rationality meetup: 04 March 2017 05:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

[Amsterdam] #13 - Focusing: 05 March 2017 03:13PM
Baltimore / UMBC Meetup - general discussion: 05 March 2017 08:00PM
Chicago Rationality Reading Group - Luminosity Part 3: 05 March 2017 01:00PM
Denver Area LW March Meetup (CHANGED TO MONDAY 3/6!): 06 March 2017 07:00PM
San Francisco Meetup: Cooking: 06 March 2017 06:15PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - March 2017: 05 March 2017 04:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games: 05 March 2017 03:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Ann Arbor, Austin, Baltimore, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Chicago, Cologne, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Netherlands, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Prague, Research Triangle NC, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Cambridge UK, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Ma...
Meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Meetup - general discussion
by iarwain1 — 2017-03-03T15:35:02.145Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Meetup - general discussion

WHEN:
05 March 2017 08:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg 4th floor, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250

No parking restrictions on weekends, so park wherever you want.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore / UMBC Meetup - general discussion
Phenomenological Complexity Classes
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2017-03-02T19:47:40.930Z
Link: https://mapandterritory.org/phenomenological-complexity-classes-8b41836437b9#.253ac2tbh

This is an introduction to phenomenological complexity classes. The formulation is my own, but is heavily informed by existing results in developmental psychology and complexity theory and parallels phenomenological complexity theory enough that I had to reinvent many aspects of it from the fragments of phenomenology I knew before I started on this project. As such I am working in the field of phenomenological complexity theory ex post facto, so I’ll first explain the history of the idea as I discovered it before formally introducing it and giving an accounting of known phenomenological complexity classes.

The Story of Phenomenological Complexity Classes

For the last few years I’ve been wrestling with an idea. An idea whose threads I found woven through the fields of developmental psychology, phenomenology, epistemology, organizational development, economics, history, information theory, theory of computation, literature, and self-help. I’ve struggled to understand it, and of late I’ve focused my philosophical work on sewing together its many patches of insight into whole cloth. My stitching is still a bit rough, but after long hours of needling, I’m satisfied that my intellectual tapestry can tell its story well enough to be understood.

The seed of the idea formed in me when I was 18. Throughout my junior and senior years of high school I was on something of a quest to find a “true” and “authentic” way to live my life. I tried on libertarianism, Objectivism, classical rationality, pop Stoicism, and more. I constructed for myself a complete worldview out of each, only to inevitably tear each one down when, after a few months, I ran into evidence and arguments that knocked over my reasoning as quickly as a breeze collapses a house of cards. It was during one of these demolition phases, before new building had begun, that I had an epiphany.

I was reading, of all things, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Creating Friendly AI. I seriously doubt that CFAI has any special power to do this, but in the midst of reading Chapter 2, my relationship to reality changed. I realized that all my creating and destroying of worldviews had been attempts, not to understand reality, but to try to make reality as I wanted it. When I looked at libertarianism and the rest it hadn’t been that I thought they offered a way to ...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games
by RobinZ — 2017-03-02T13:57:46.387Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games

WHEN:
05 March 2017 03:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture

We will be meeting in the courtyard to hang out, play games, and engage in fun conversation.

Upcoming meetups:

Mar. 12: Pi Day

Mar. 19: Tolerating the Outgroup

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games