trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[LINK] Subculture roles (by Brad Hicks)
by hairyfigment — 2011-05-18T03:00:43.252Z

By what looks like popular demand on the Society for Creative Anachronism thread, I'm linking a three-part account of three roles that supposedly exist within every lasting subculture or "volunteer-dominated" organization. The author has no proper authority at all but has personally observed many subcultures in the wild.

These roles do not represent exclusive personality types as such. A person who serves as Authenticity Cop in one community may theoretically serve as Fun Maven or even Dream Nazi elsewhere.*

Dream Nazis: Supply vision for the group. Brad describes this as inherently promoting a Golden Age myth of a glorious past. Hopefully this reflects the term's origins in the SCA and not any practical necessity.

Authenticity Police: Seek accuracy and nitpick perceived mistakes. You know this one already.

Fun Mavens: Work up a sweat doing free lifting or other labor for the organization, then enjoy 'a few' cold beers with their comrades. (I find it amusing that I took a while to think of the right word at the end there.) Brad argues that in addition to doing all that work, Fun Mavens sustain the organization by recruiting.

*I wonder if Eliezer doesn't wear two hats right here, never mind at the SIAI.
Triangle NC Meetup - May 20th 6pm
by curiousepic — 2011-05-18T00:19:52.027Z

When: Friday May 20th, at 6pm

Where: *Note this has changed* Starbucks on NC Highway 55

If this is not a good date/time for you, please comment and we'll plan our upcoming meetups accordingly. We plan to have biweekly meetings, alternating between Wednesdays and a weekend day; we'd like to gather more weekend availability info before settling on a day and time.

This meeting is planned to consist of Instrumental Rationality/Becoming Awesome discussion, and Zendo (please read the rules).
Living Forever is Hard, or, The Gompertz Curve
by gwern — 2011-05-17T21:08:20.080Z

I recently recalled, apropos of the intermittent fasting/caloric restriction discussion, a very good blog post on mortality curves and models of aging:

For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly miniscule 0.03% — about 1 in 3,000. When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on. By the time I reach age 100 (and I do plan on it) the probability of living to 101 will only be about 50%. This is seriously fast growth — my mortality rate is increasing exponentially with age.

...This data fits the Gompertz law almost perfectly, with death rates doubling every 8 years. The graph on the right also agrees with the Gompertz law, and you can see the precipitous fall in survival rates starting at age 80 or so. That decline is no joke; the sharp fall in survival rates can be expressed mathematically as an exponential within an exponential:

Exponential decay is sharp, but an exponential within an exponential is so sharp that I can say with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130. (Ignoring, of course, the upward shift in the lifetime distribution that will result from future medical advances)

...There is one important lesson, however, to be learned from Benjamin Gompertz’s mysterious observation. By looking at theories of human mortality that are clearly wrong, we can deduce that our fast-rising mortality is not the result of a dangerous environment, but of a body that has a built-in expiration date.

gravityandlevity then discusses some simple models of aging and the statistical characters they have which do not match Gompertz's law:

'lightning' model: risk of mortality each period is constant; Poisson distribution:

What a crazy world! The average lifespan would be the same, but out of every 100 people 31 would die before age 30 and 2 of them would live to be more than 300 years old. Clearly we do not live in a world where mortality is governed by “lightning bolts”.

'accumulated lightning'; like in a video game, one has a healthbar which may take a hit each period; similar to above:

Shown above are the results from a simulated world where “lightning bolts” of misfortune hit people on average every 16 years, and death occur

...
DC Meetup: May 22nd
by atucker — 2011-05-17T20:13:14.234Z

Sunday, May 22nd

Core hours: 1 PM - 3PM

Ballston Common Mall Food Court

4238 Wilson Boulevard

Arlington, Virginia 22203

Core hours are 1-3 PM, but many people are willing to hang out longer than that. People have stayed at previous meetups for 4 and 5 hours.

We decided to meet in Virginia to see if there are any more LWers in the Northern Virginia area, and to see if we can meet them. If you've found other meetup locations inconvenient, please show up so that we can know that we might want to try and accommodate you.

Join us at lesswrong-dc@googlegroups.com
[SEQ RERUN] Self-deception: Hypocrisy or Akrasia?
by badger — 2011-05-17T15:22:24.522Z

Today's post, Self-deception: Hypocrisy or Akrasia? was originally published on March 26, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

If part of a person—for example, the verbal module—says it wants to become more rational, we can ally with that part even when weakness of will makes the person's actions otherwise; hypocrisy need not be assumed.

This post is part of a series rerunning Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts so those interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Chronophone Motivations, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
How and Why to Granularize
by lukeprog — 2011-05-17T15:16:42.898Z

Say you want to learn to play piano. What do you do? Do you grab some sheet music for 'Flight of the Bumblebee' and start playing? No. First you learn how to read music, and where to put your fingers, and how to play chords, and how to use different rhythms, and how to evoke different textures. You master each of these skills in turn, one or two at a time, and it takes you weeks or months to master each little step on your way to playing Rimsky-Korsakov. And then you play 'Flight of the Bumblebee.'

Building small skills in the right order is not just a way to do the impossible by breaking down the impossible into little bits of possible. It is also a way to maintain motivation.

Imagine that you didn't feel a reward, a sense of accomplishment, until you had mastered 'Flight of the Bumblebee'. You'd have to stay motivated for years without payoff. Luckily, your brain sends out reward signals when you learn how to read music, where to put your fingers, and how to play chords. You are rewarded every step of the way. Granularizing a project into tiny bits, each of which is its own (small) reward, helps maintain your motivation and overcome the challenges of hyperbolic discounting.

Granularizing is an important meta-skill. Want to play piano but don't know how? Don't feel overwhelmed watching someone play 'Flight of the Bumblebee.' Figure out how to granularize the skill of 'playing Flight of the Bumblebee' into lots of tiny sub-skills, and then master each one in turn.

Want to improve your sex life? Don't feel overwhelmed watching the local Casanova or Cleopatra at work. Figure out how to granularize the skills of 'creating attraction' and 'having good sex' into lots of tiny sub-skills and master each one in turn.

Want to become economically independent? Don't feel overwhelmed watching Tim Ferriss at work. Granularize that skill into tiny sub-skills and master each one in turn.

This doesn't mean that anyone can learn anything just by granularizing and then mastering sub-skills one at a time. Nor does it mean that you should apportion your limited resources to mastering just about anything. But it does mean that mastering skills that are within your reach might be easier than you think.

Example: Social effectiveness

Take 'social effectiveness' as an example, and pretend you know almost nothing about it.

So you talk to people who are sociall...
Space-worthiness
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-05-17T14:50:52.398Z

A recent post about the Fermi paradox left me wondering about relative difficulties of getting into space, though I don't think it affects those specific arguments.

People establishing a presence in space is difficult but at least plausible-- I'm talking about biological people as we are now, and being able to live and reproduce indefinitely without returning to Earth.

It would be easier if we were less massive, or our planet was less massive, or if we were more radiation resistant. It would be harder if these qualities were reversed, or if we needed a much denser atmosphere.There might come a point where it just isn't feasible for a species to get itself off its planet.

Is there any reasonable speculation about where we are likely to be on the ease-of-getting-into-space spectrum?
Pascal's Mugging - Penalizing the prior probability?
by XiXiDu — 2011-05-17T14:44:49.377Z

Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote that Robin Hanson solved the Pascal's mugging thought experiment:

Robin Hanson has suggested penalizing the prior probability of hypotheses which argue that we are in a surprisingly unique position to affect large numbers of other people who cannot symmetrically affect us. Since only one in 3^^^^3 people can be in a unique position to ordain the existence of at least 3^^^^3 other people who are not symmetrically in such a situation themselves, the prior probability would be penalized by a factor on the same order as the utility.

I don't quite get it, is there a post that discusses this solution in more detail?

To be more specific, if a stranger approached me, offering a deal saying, "I am the creator of the Matrix. If you fall on your knees, praise me and kiss my feet, I'll use my magic powers from outside the Matrix to run a Turing machine that simulates 3^^^^3 copies of you having their coherent extrapolated volition satisfied maximally for 3^^^^3 years." Why exactly would I penalize this offer by the amount of copies being offered to be simulated? I thought the whole point was that the utility, of having 3^^^^3 copies of myself experiencing maximal happiness, does outweigh the low probability of it actually happening and the disuility of doing what the stranger asks for?

I would love to see this problem being discussed again and read about the current state of knowledge.

I am especially interested in the following questions:

Is the Pascal's mugging thought experiment a "reduction to the absurd" of Bayes’ Theorem in combination with the expected utility formula and Solomonoff induction?1

Could the "mugger" be our own imagination?2

At what point does an expected utility calculation resemble a Pascal's mugging scenario and should consequently be ignored?3

1 If you calculate the expected utility of various outcomes you imagine impossible alternative actions. The alternatives are impossible because you already precommited to choosing the outcome with the largest expected utility. Problems: 1.) You swap your complex values for a certain terminal goal with the highest expected utility, indeed your instrumental and terminal goals converge to become the expected utility formula. 2.) Your decision-making is eventually dominated by extremely small probabilities of obtaining vast utility.

2 Insignificant inferences might exhibit hyperbol...
Beyond Smart and Stupid
by PhilGoetz — 2011-05-17T06:25:16.280Z

I've often wondered about people who appear to be very smart, and do very stupid things. One theory is that people are smart and stupid independently in different domains. Another theory is that "smart" and "stupid" are oversimplifications. In line with the second theory, here is an ad-hoc set of axes of intelligence, based only on my own observations.

Memory

This may cover several sub-categories. The advantages of a good memory should be obvious.

Ability to follow instructions

This is more important than it sounds. I'm including the ability to verify mathematical proofs, and the ability to design a regression analysis for a psychology study. Things that aren't research or engineering, but taking known solutions and applying them.

I came up with this because I have some friends who have difficult, complex jobs that they are good at - and yet frequently say incoherent things.

Doctors are smart. Yet doctors are forbidden by law from being creative. They're great at following instructions. Becoming an MD means transforming yourself into a giant look-up table. You memorize anatomy, physiology, diseases, symptoms, diagnostics, and treatments. For every disease, there is an approved set of clinical diagnostic criteria, an approved set of laboratory diagnostics, an approved way of interpreting those tests, an approved way of presenting the results to the patient, and an approved set of possible treatments. After using your knowledge to observe the patient, rule out some branches of the tree of possibilities, make further tests, and discern what the underlying problem is, if instead of retrieving the approved treatment from your look-up table, you ask the engineering question, "How can we fix this?", you are on the path to losing your license.

This ability is strongly correlated with memory.

Ability to think outside the box

This may be the same thing as creativity; but calling it "thinking outside the box" is less vague. "Ability to not conform" is also part of it. This may be anti-correlated with memory and the ability to follow instructions; it's probably more difficult to think of new approaches if old ones leap quickly to mind, just like it's difficult to compose music if every theme in your head turns into a Beatles tune after two bars.

This is the distinction between an M.S. and a ...
Values vs. parameters
by PhilGoetz — 2011-05-17T05:53:59.864Z

I've written before about the difficulty of distinguishing values from errors, from algorithms, and from context. Now I have to add to that list: How can we distinguish our utility function from the parameters we use to apply it?

In my recent discussion post, "Rationalists don't care about the future", I showed that exponential time-discounting, plus some assumptions about physics and knowledge, leads to not caring about the future. Many people responded by saying that, if I care about the future, this shows that my utility function does not use exponential time-discounting.

This response assumes that the shape of my time-discounting function is part of my utility function. In other words, the way you time-discount is one of your values.

By contrast, Eliezer wrote an earlier post saying that we should use human values, but without time-discounting. Eliezer is aware that humans appear to use time discounting. Therefore, this implicitly claims that the time-discounting function is not one of our values. It's a parameter for how we implement them.

(Some of the arguments Eliezer used were value-based arguments, suggesting that we can use our values to set the parameters that we use to implement our values... I suspect this recursive approach could introduce bogus solutions, like multiplying both sides of an equation by a variable, or worse; but that would take a longer post to address. I will note that some recursive equations do have unique solutions.)

The program of CEV assumes that a transhuman can use some extrapolated version of values currently used by some humans. If that transhuman has a life expectancy of a billion years, it will likely view time discounting differently. Eliezer's post against time discounting suggests, to me, a God-like view of the universe, in which we eliminate time discounting in the same way (and for the same reasons) that many people want to eliminate space-discounting (not caring about far-away people) in contemporary ethics. This is taking an ethical code that evolved agents have, which is constructed to promote the propagation of those agents' genes, and applying it without reference to any particular set of genes. This is also pretty much what folk-morality says a social moral code is. So the idea that you can apply the same utility function from a ...
Colonization models: a tutorial on computational Bayesian inference (part 2/2)
by snarles — 2011-05-17T03:54:29.547Z

Recap

Part 1 was a tutorial for programming a simulation for the emergence and development of intelligent species in a universe 'similar to ours.' In part 2, we will use the model developed in part 1 to evaluate different explanations of the Fermi paradox. However, keep in mind that the purpose of this two-part series is for showcasing useful methods, not for obtaining serious answers.

We summarize the model given in part 1:

SIMPLE MODEL FOR THE UNIVERSE

The universe is represented by the set of all points in Cartesian 4-space which are of Euclidean distance 1 from the origin (that is, the 3-sphere). The distance between two points is taken to be the Euclidean distance (an approximation to the spherical distance which is accurate at small scales)

The lifespan of the universe consists of 1000 time steps.

A photon travels s=0.0004 units in a time step.

At the end of each time step, there is a chance that a Type 0 civilization will spontaneously emerge in an uninhabited region of space. The base rate for civilization birth is controlled by the parameter a. But this base rate is multiplied by the proportion of the universe which remains uncolonized by Type III civilizations.

In each time step, a Type 0 civilization has a probability b of self-destructing, a probability c of transitioning to a non-expansionist Type IIa civilization, and a probability d of transitioning to a Type IIb civilization.

Observers can detect all Type II and Type III civilizations within their past light cones.

In each time step, a Type IIb civilization has a probability e of transitioning to an expansionist Type III civilization.

In each time step, all Type III civilizations colonize space in all directions, expanding their sphere of colonization by k * s units per time step.

Section III. Inferential Methodology

In this section, no apologies are made for assuming that the reader has a solid grasp of the principles of Bayesian reasoning. Those currently following the tutorial from Part 1 may find it a good idea to skip to Section IV first.

To dodge the philosophical controversies surrounding anthropic reasoning, we will employ an impartial observer model. Like Jaynes, we introduce a robot which is capable of Bayesian reasoning, but here we imagine a model in which such a robot is instantaneously created and randomly injected into the universe a...
Colonization models: a programming tutorial (Part 1/2)
by snarles — 2011-05-16T23:33:25.187Z

Introduction

Are we alone in the universe? How likely is our species to survive the transition from a Type 0 to a Type II civilization? The answers to these questions would be of immense interest to our race; however, we have few tools to reason about these questions. This does not stop us from wanting to find answers to these questions, often by employing controversial principles of inference such as 'anthropic reasoning.' The reader can find a wealth of stimulating discussion about anthropic reasoning at Katja Grace's blog, the site from which this post takes its inspiration. The purpose of this post is to give a quantitatively oriented approach to anthropic reasoning, demonstrating how computer simulations and Bayesian inference can be used as tools for exploration.

The central mystery we want to examine is the Fermi paradox: the fact that

we are an intelligent civilization

we cannot observe any signs that other intelligent civilizations ever existed in the universe

One explanation for the Fermi paradox is that we are the only intelligent civilization in the universe. A far more chilling explanation is that intelligent civilizations emerge quite frequently, but that all other intelligent civilizations that have come before us ended up destroying themselves before they could manage to make their mark on their universe.

We can reason about which of the above two explanations are more likely if we have the audacity to assume a model for the emergence and development of civilizations in universe 'similar to ours.' In such a model, it is usually useful to distinguish different 'types' of civilizations. Type 0 civilizations are civilizations with similar levels of technology as ourselves. If a Type 0 civilization survives long enough and accumulates enough scientific knowledge, it can make a transition to a Type I civilization--a civilization which has attained mastery of their home planet. A Type I civilization, over time, can transition to a Type II civilization if it colonizes its solar system. We would suppose that a nearby civilization would have to have reached Type II in order for their activities to be prominent enough for us to be able to detect them. In the original terminology, a Type III civilization is one which has mastery of its galaxy, but in this post we take it to mean some...
Off-topic: Russian machine translation
by thomblake — 2011-05-16T20:12:40.485Z

This is a little off-topic, but I can't find the answer and I realized this might actually be an excellent place to ask this question:

I've noticed Google Translate seems to do a pretty bad job sometimes of Russian-to-English and vice versa, assuming that my human-translated documents are correct. Does anyone know of a better free service for machine translation for Russian?
Life Extension through Diet Modification
by Caerbannog — 2011-05-16T18:36:52.278Z

Life extension is a relevant topic here, and I was wondering if people are aware of the apparently life-extending effects of calorie restriction (CR) and intermittent fasting (IF). To the extent of my knowledge, this is the best method using currently realized technology that has shown repeated and significant life-extension benefits.
Studies show that reducing calories by 20% to 40% from ad libitum feeding (but maintaining the supply of required protein and micro-nutrients) gives improvements in markers related to aging, and extends life span in rodents and other organisms.
Other rodent studies have also shown similar results in subjects which were kept on various intermittent fasting schedules. Rats that were fed only on alternating days gained up to 25% lifespan (see Table 2).
The benefits of IF are seen even if the total calorie intake is the same as in ad libitum subjects.
There are ongoing full-lifespan studies in rhesus macaques to test the effects in primates, but none of these studies have completed. This abstract of the interim results appears promising, though.
Studies of CR and IF on humans have shown effects consistent with reduced mortality, including:
- Improved triglyceride profiles (a marker for heart disease)
- Increased insulin sensitivity
- Reduced cell proliferation (a marker for cancer)
Generally, these diet modifications appear to not just extend life span, but improve the quality of life too. In aged subjects they improve things like: muscle mass, cognition, energy, appearance, and activity level.
Have people heard about this or tried it? If you are trying to maximize your chance of surviving to the point that technology can lengthen lifespan indefinitely, it seems like something worth exploring.
I tried an IF schedule for about 6 months during 2010. I followed a schedule of 3 x ~thirty hour fasts every 7 days and found it somewhat tolerable. I exercise regularly and found that exercising on the non-fasting days was not a problem. I'm thinking of starting up such a schedule again.