trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The application of the secretary problem to real life dating
by Elo — 2015-09-29T22:28:06.512Z

The following problem is best when not described by me:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

Although there are many variations, the basic problem can be stated as follows:

There is a single secretarial position to fill.

There are n applicants for the position, and the value of n is known.

The applicants, if seen altogether, can be ranked from best to worst unambiguously.

The applicants are interviewed sequentially in random order, with each order being equally likely.

Immediately after an interview, the interviewed applicant is either accepted or rejected, and the decision is irrevocable.

The decision to accept or reject an applicant can be based only on the relative ranks of the applicants interviewed so far.

The objective of the general solution is to have the highest probability of selecting the best applicant of the whole group. This is the same as maximizing the expected payoff, with payoff defined to be one for the best applicant and zero otherwise.

Application

After reading that you can probably see the application to real life. There are a series of bad and good assumptions following, some are fair, some are not going to be representative of you. I am going to try to name them all as I go so that you can adapt them with better ones for yourself. Assuming that you plan to have children and you will probably be doing so like billions of humans have done so far in a monogamous relationship while married (the entire set of assumptions does not break down for poly relationships or relationship-anarchy, but it gets more complicated). These assumptions help us populate the Secretary problem with numbers in relation to dating for the purpose of children.

If you assume that a biological female's clock ends at 40. (in that its hard and not healthy for the baby if you try to have a kid past that age), that is effectively the end of the pure and simple biological purpose of relationships. (environment, IVF and adoption aside for a moment). (yes there are a few more years on that)

For the purpose of this exercise – as a guy – you can add a few years for the potential age gap you would tolerate. (i.e. my parents are 7 years apart, but that seems like a big understanding and maturity gap – they don't even like the same music), I personally expect I could tolerate an age...
Meetup : LW Scotland October Meetup
by cjb230 — 2015-09-29T18:19:42.327Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Scotland October Meetup

WHEN:
11 October 2015 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
8 Clifton Terrace, Edinburgh, EH12 5DR

As usual, this is a static copy of the canonical details, available here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1667702333459781/

We'll meet at Platform 5 cafe, opposite Haymarket station, at 2pm. At 3:45pm we'll be at The Melville, a couple of minutes walk away. If you don't know who we are, we'll make ourselves recognisable with Bayes' Theorem in big letters!

http://www.platform5-edinburgh.co.uk/
8 Clifton Terrace
Edinburgh
EH12 5DR

http://www.themelvillebar.com/
19 - 25 William Street
Edinburgh
EH3 7NG

This time our agenda will be:

1 - Brief intros, and any rational wins or fails over the last month

2 - A Fermi estimation game

3 - Discussion of Part H of the Rationality book, chapters 81 to 86. This section is, "Against Doublethink", and it's a relatively short one :-)

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Scotland October Meetup
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Availability Heuristic
by RobinZ — 2015-09-29T15:43:02.223Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Availability Heuristic

WHEN:
04 October 2015 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

Meetup is moving to the Luce Center due to an event in the courtyard.

Crossposted from mailing list. Meeting in courtyard, gathering from 3:00pm, hard start 3:30pm - until closing.

We'll be meeting to talk about the availability heuristic: the tendency to answer questions based on what examples come easily to mind.

Side conversations welcome.

Upcoming meetups:

Oct. 11: Fun & Games

Oct. 18: Utilitarianism

Oct. 25: Wise Sayings

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Availability Heuristic
Meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - October
by luminosity — 2015-09-29T12:14:31.637Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - October

WHEN:
04 October 2015 03:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
10 Shepherd Street, Chippendale

Come join us for this month's Rationality Dojo, this Sunday. We've been experimenting with the format recently, to keep things moving along, and fit more material in. If you've been away for a while, now is a perfect chance to come back!
Afterwards we will go for the usual group dinner, for those who can make it.

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - October
Ultimatums in the Territory
by MalcolmOcean — 2015-09-28T22:01:48.924Z

When you think of "ultimatums", what comes to mind?

Manipulativeness, maybe? Ultimatums are typically considered a negotiation tactic, and not a very pleasant one.

But there's a different thing that can happen, where an ultimatum is made, but where articulating it isn't a speech act but rather an observation. As in, the ultimatum wasn't created by the act of stating it, but rather, it already existed in some sense.

Some concrete examples: negotiating relationships

I had a tense relationship conversation a few years ago. We'd planned to spend the day together in the park, and I was clearly angsty, so my partner asked me what was going on. I didn't have a good handle on it, but I tried to explain what was uncomfortable for me about the relationship, and how I was confused about what I wanted. After maybe 10 minutes of this, she said, "Look, we've had this conversation before. I don't want to have it again. If we're going to do this relationship, I need you to promise we won't have this conversation again."

I thought about it. I spent a few moments simulating the next months of our relationship. I realized that I totally expected this to come up again, and again. Earlier on, when we'd had the conversation the first time, I hadn't been sure. But it was now pretty clear that I'd have to suppress important parts of myself if I was to keep from having this conversation.

"...yeah, I can't promise that," I said.

"I guess that's it then."

"I guess so."

I think a more self-aware version of me could have recognized, without her prompting, that my discomfort represented an unreconcilable part of the relationship, and that I basically already wanted to break up.

The rest of the day was a bit weird, but it was at least nice that we had resolved this. We'd realized that it was a fact about the world that there wasn't a serious relationship that we could have that we both wanted.

I sensed that when she posed the ultimatum, she wasn't doing it to manipulate me. She was just stating what kind of relationship she was interested in. It's like if you go to a restaurant and try to order a pad thai, and the waiter responds, "We don't have rice noodles or peanut sauce. You either eat somewhere else, or you eat something other than a pad thai."

An even simpler example would be that at the start of one of my relationships, my partner wanted to be monogamous and I wanted to be polyamorous (i.e.

...
Examples of growth mindset or practice in fiction
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2015-09-28T21:47:29.000Z

As people who care about rationality and winning, it's pretty important to care about training. Repeated practice is how humans acquire skills, and skills are what we use for winning.

Unfortunately, it's sometimes hard to get System 1 fully on board with the fact that repeated, difficult, sometimes tedious practice is how we become awesome. I find fiction to be one of the most useful ways of communicating things like this to my S1. It would be great to have a repository of fiction that shows characters practicing skills, mastering them, and becoming awesome, to help this really sink in.

However, in fiction the following tropes are a lot more common:

hero is born to greatness and only needs to discover that greatness to win [I don't think I actually need to give examples of this?]

like (1), only the author talks about the skill development or the work in passing… but in a way that leaves the reader's attention (and system 1 reinforcement?) on the "already be awesome" part, rather that the "practice to become awesome" part [HPMOR; the Dresden Files, where most of the implied practice takes place between books.]

training montage, where again the reader's attention isn't on the training long enough to reinforce the "practice to become awesome" part, but skips to the "wouldn't it be great to already be awesome" part [TVtropes examples].

The hero starts out ineffectual and becomes great over the course of the book, but this comes from personal revelations and insights, rather than sitting down and practicing [Nice Dragons Finish Last is an example of this].

Example of exactly the wrong thing:
The Hunger Games - Katniss is explicitly up against the Pledges who have trained their whole lives for this one thing, but she has … something special that causes her to win. Also archery is her greatest skill, and she's already awesome at it from the beginning of the story and never spends time practicing.

Close-but-not-perfect examples of the right thing:
The Pillars of the Earth - Jack pretty explicitly has to travel around Europe to acquire the skills he needs to become great. Much of the practice is off-screen, but it's at least a pretty significant part of the journey.
The Honor Harrington series: the books depict Honor, as well as the people around her, rising through the ranks of the military and gradually levelling up, with emphasis on dedication to trai...
Meetup : Reading First Meetup!
by Acty — 2015-09-28T16:40:10.228Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Reading First Meetup!

WHEN:
07 October 2015 06:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Reading, England

We'll be meeting in the Starbucks next to Vue cinema and the river Kennet, in the Oracle Shopping Centre (Riverside Entrance). I'll be there from 6pm and I'll stay for at least two hours (longer, if enough people turn up to make it a proper meeting). There will be at least one other person there (so, at least two of us). I will have a whiteboard with paperclips drawn on it and "LessWrong" written on it, wear my EAG shirt and have a makeshift Slytherin badge on (there is at least an 85% chance I forget at least one of those things, in which case just look for the group of geeks - it's quite a small Starbucks so it ought to be obvious enough).

This is our first meeting and we're planning to make it a regular thing if we get enough interest, so this one will probably be focused on introducing ourselves and discussing plans. We'll hopefully announce more, so don't worry if you miss the first one.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/The+Oracle+Shopping+Centre/@51.45308,-0.971488,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1s7305926!2e1!3e10!6s%2F%2Fstorage.googleapis.com%2Fstatic.panoramio.com%2Fphotos%2Fsmall%2F7305926.jpg!7i2048!8i1536!4m2!3m1!1s0x48769b15e736aff1:0x91a4b0447e720259!6m1!1e1 <--- Here is a photo of the area to be in, in case the location directions weren't clear enough. People in IRC say the link works. You have to kind of squint to see the Starbucks in the photo, but if you recognise this, you're close.

Hope to see you there :)

Discussion article for the meetup : Reading First Meetup!
The Infinity Project
by Inyuki — 2015-09-28T13:14:04.633Z

Seeking for knowledge, resources, and love; one world's dream, intercultural understanding, and safe arrival of technological singularity, I am creating a public self-explanatory, inter-lingual, financial, programmable, hierarchical think-tank: https://infty.xyz [The Infinity Project]. Anyone's welcome to join, just send an e-mail to forever@infty.xyz and I'll send you an invite.

I'm posting a story on it for your scrutiny. :)

BACKGROUND PROBLEMS:

Problem 1 -- The Knowledge Acquisition
In 2005, due to the lack of resources my mother's second husband was telling me to go get a job. However, I strongly disliked the idea of 'work for money'. I highly liked the idea of 'work for ideas', so I started viewing all things as subject of making rather than subject of receiving for money. Like many, I knew that things are made in factories semi-automatically, so, instead of thinking how to make money for a living, I got absorbed into thinking how to automate the production of everything what I need for living. For that, I needed knowledge.
Seeing how Wikipedia had around 2003 organized the world's semantic knowledge suggested that we could do the same with the procedural knowledge as well, and here(goo.gl/ve2YKT) is my initial idea.
I spent much time thinking how to extract and represent the procedural knowledge. Large amount of which is the hidden "know-how”, which I wanted to make widely available. So, during both my undergraduate mathematics studies, as well as in the further occupations, I continued to think how to do it in such a way as to make it easily accessible to both children and adults.
The extraction of such knowledge alone presents a challenge: we could try to obtain it by reverse-engineering things recursively breaking down every thing into its components and asking what tools were used to manufacture them, and breaking down each of the tools into their components, and repeating so until the tool='*ancient stone tool*'. However, it would require enormous amount of time. So, I asked myself -- how to document all the mankind's creation in the process of making in such a way as to maximize its educational value, i.e., how to make everyone easily understand the work breakdown structures of all technology?
The presenting the procedural knowledge is also a challenge: there is no universal way to describe how to make some

...
Meetup : Suzhou Meet-up
by Bound_up — 2015-09-28T11:35:59.281Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Suzhou Meet-up

WHEN:
28 October 2015 07:35:00PM (+0800)

WHERE:
Suzhou, Jiangsu, China

This is just to get started if there's anyone around.
If you're interested, let me know and we'll figure out when to time it.

Discussion article for the meetup : Suzhou Meet-up
Open thread, Sep. 28 - Oct. 4, 2015
by MrMind — 2015-09-28T07:13:19.622Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

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 be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Dry Ice Cryonics- Preliminary Thoughts
by Fluttershy — 2015-09-28T07:00:03.440Z

Edited nearly a year later to clarify: dry ice cryonics probably won't work, for reasons hinted at in the post, and stated by Gav in the comments, regarding nanoscale ice crystals. It seems like there may be less of a tradeoff between fracturing and having ice crystals now than there used to be, especially if newer approaches involving e.g. cryonics with persufflation end up working well in humans.

This post is a spot-check of Alcor's claim that cryonics can't be carried out at dry ice temperatures, and a follow-up to this comment. This article isn't up to my standards, yet I'm posting it now, rather than polishing it more first, because I strongly fear that I might never get around to doing so later if I put it off. Despite my expertise in chemistry, I don't like chemistry, so writing this took a lot of willpower. Thanks to Hugh Hixon from Alcor for writing "How Cold is Cold Enough?".

Summary

More research (such as potentially hiring someone to find the energies of activation for lots of different degradative reactions which happen after death) is needed to determine if long-term cryopreservation at the temperature of dry ice is reasonable, or even preferable to storage in liquid nitrogen.

On the outside view, I'm not very confident that dry ice cryonics will end up being superior to liquid nitrogen cryonics. Still, it's very hard to say one way or the other a priori. There are certain factors that I can't easily quantify that suggest that cryopreservation with dry ice might be preferable to cryopreservation with liquid nitrogen (specifically, fracturing, as well as the fact that the Arrhenius equation doesn't account for poor stirring), and other such factors that suggest preservation in liquid nitrogen to be preferable (specifically, that being below the glass transition temperature prevents movement/chemical reactions, and that nanoscale ice crystals, which can grow during rewarming, can form around the glass transition temperature).

(I wonder if cryoprotectant solutions with different glass transition temperatures might avoid either of the two problems mentioned in the last sentence for dry ice cryonics? I just heard about the issue of nanoscale ice crystals earlier today, so my discussion of them is an afterthought.)

Motivation

Using dry ice to cryopreserve people for future revival could be cheaper than using liquid nitrogen for the same purpose (how mu...
Quantilizers maximize expected utility subject to a conservative cost constraint
by jessicata — 2015-09-28T02:17:38.000Z

Summary: this post reframes ideas from "Learning a concept using only positive examples" and "The AI, the best human advisor" in terms of a strong constraint for conservative behavior, and shows that quantilizers are optimal under this constraint.

Defining a quantilizer

A q-quantilizer is an agent that, when faced with a decision problem,
gives a random action in the top q proportion by expected utility. More formally,
let A be the action set and pA be some distribution over actions.
For any 0<q≤1, a q-quantilizer returns an action a with probability

P(a)=0 if ∑a′∈ApA(a′)[E[U(a′,W)]>E[U(a,W)]]>q
P(a)=pA(a)/q if ∑a′∈ApA(a′)[E[U(a′,W)]≥E[U(a,W)]]<q
P(a)=1qpA(a)∑a′∈A,a′ also falls into this casepA(a′)(q−∑a′∈ApA(a′)[E[U(a′,W)]>E[U(a,W)]]) otherwise

where U is the quantilizer's utility function. The weird logic in the third case is necessary for handling ties; the details are not especially important. Naturally, a 0-quantilizer is just a maximizer. A 0.5-quantilizer (which we could also call a 50-percentilizer) samples a random above-average action,
a 0.01-quantilizer samples a random action in the top 1%, and a 1-quantilizer samples a random action from pA.

The conservative cost constraint

Why might we use a quantilizer? Suppose we believe there is some unknown cost function c:A→R+, which quantifies the negative contribution of the action to our utility function (e.g. we could define c(a)=max{0,E[V(do nothing,W)]−E[V(a,W)]}, where V is our true utility function).
For example, an action that turns the universe into paperclips would be very costly. As explained previously in "Learning a concept using only positive examples",
the fact that an agent's distribution over actions fits under pA indicates
that it does not accrue many times more expected cost than would be accrued by sampling from pA.
It turns out that for 0<q≤1, a q-quantilizer maximizes expected utility subject to the conservative cost constraint

∀(c:A→R+)∑a∈AP(a)c(a)∑a∈ApA(a)c(a)≤1/q

The cost constraint states that, for any cost function, the expected cost of an action drawn from P is no more than 1/q times the expected cost of an action drawn from pA.

Optimality of quantilizers under the cost constraint

From the cost constraint we can prove
∀(a∈A)P(a)≤pA(a)/q

Suppose this were not true. Then for

...
Instrumental Rationality Questions Thread
by NoSignalNoNoise — 2015-09-27T21:22:14.904Z

Previous thread: http://lesswrong.com/lw/mnq/instrumental_rationality_questions_thread/

This thread is for asking the rationalist community for practical advice. It's inspired by the stupid questions series, but with an explicit focus on instrumental rationality.

Questions ranging from easy ("this is probably trivial for half the people on this site") to hard ("maybe someone here has a good answer, but probably not") are welcome. However, please stick to problems that you actually face or anticipate facing soon, not hypotheticals.

As with the stupid questions thread, don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better, and please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

(See also the Boring Advice Repository)
Hypothetical situations are not meant to exist
by casebash — 2015-09-27T10:58:25.433Z

Hypotheticals are a powerful tool for testing intuitions. However, many people believe that it is problematic a hypothetical does not represent a realistic situation. On the contrary, it is only problematic if it is represented as being realistic when it is not realistic. Realism isn’t required if the aim is simply to show that there is *some* situation where the proposed principle breaks. We may still choose to utilise an imperfect principle, but when we know about the potential for breakage, we are much less likely to be tripped up if we find a situation where the principle is invalid.

It is instructive to look at physics. In physics, we model balls by perfect spherical objects. Nobody believes that a perfectly spherical object exists in real life. However, they provide a baseline theory from which further ideas can be explored. Bumps or ellipticity can be added later. Indeed, they probably *should* be added later. Unless a budding physicist can demonstrate their competence with the simple case, they probably should not be trusted with dealing with the much more complicated real world situation.

If you are doubting a hypothetical, then you haven’t accepted the hypothetical. You can doubt that a hypothetical will have any relevance from outside the hypothetical, but once you step inside the hypothetical you cannot doubt the hypothetical or you never stepped inside in the first place.

This topic has been discussed previously on LessWrong, but a single explanation won't prove compelling to everyone, so it is useful to have different explanations that explain the same topic in a different way.

TimS states similar thoughts in Please Don’t Fight the Hypothetical:

Likewise, people who responds to the Trolley problem by saying that they would call the police are not talking about the moral intuitions that the Trolley problem intends to explore. There's nothing wrong with you if those problems are not interesting to you. But fighting the hypothetical by challenging the premises of the scenario is exactly the same as saying, "I don't find this topic interesting for whatever reason, and wish to talk about something I am interested in."

In, The Least Convenient World, Yvain recommends limiting your responses as follows:

[Say] "I completely reject the entire basis of your argument" or "I accept the basis of your argument,

...
Meetup : FallacyMania game in Kocherga club
by Alexander230 — 2015-09-27T09:58:00.548Z

Discussion article for the meetup : FallacyMania game in Kocherga club

WHEN:
30 September 2015 08:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Moscow, B.Dorogomilovskaya, 5-2

Welcome to FallacyMania: it is a game where you guess logical fallacies in arguments, or practise using logical fallacies yourself (depending on team in which you will be).

Details about the game are here: https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/Fallacymania--neGfMe9MFjH

Come to antikafe "Kocherga", ul.B.Dorogomilovskaya, 5-2. The map is here: http://kocherga-club.ru/#contacts . Nearest metro station is Kievskaya. If you are lost, call Sasha at +7-905-527-30-82.

The game begins at 20:00, the length is 1-1.5 hours.

Discussion article for the meetup : FallacyMania game in Kocherga club