trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Silver Chairs, Paternalism, and Akrasia
by dclayh — 2009-04-09T21:24:19.367Z

Inspired in part by Robin Hanson's excellent article on paternalism a while back, and in response to the various akrasia posts.

In C.S. Lewis's fourth Narnia book, The Silver Chair, the protagonists (two children and a Marsh-wiggle) are faced with a dilemma regarding the title object. To wit, they met an eloquent and quite sane-seeming young man, who after a while reveals that he has a mental disorder: for an hour every night, he loses his mind and must be restrained in the Silver Chair; and if he were to be released during that time he would become a giant, evil snake (it is a fantasy novel, after all). The heroes determine to witness this, and the young man calmly straps himself into the chair. After a few moments, a change comes over him and he begins struggling and begging for release, claiming the other personality is the false one. The children are nonplussed: which person(ality) should they believe? And (a separate question) which should they help?

In the book this dilemma is resolved by means of a cheat*, but we in real life have no such thing. We do, however, have an abundance of Silver Chairs, in the form of psychotropic drugs from alcohol to hallucinogens to fancy antidepressants and antipsychotics. Of course not every person who takes such drugs is in a Silver Chair situation, but consider for instance the alcoholic who insists he doesn't have a problem, or the paranoid schizophrenic who fears that any drug is an attempt to poison him. Now we as observers or authorities may know from statistics or even from their personal histories that the detoxxed/drugged-up versions of these people would be happy for the change and not want to return to the previous state, but does that mean it's right (in a paternalistic sense, meaning for their own good) to force them towards what we call mental health?

I would say it is not, that our preference for one side of the Silver Chair over the other is simple bias in favor of mental states similar to our own. From our places near normality we can't imagine wanting to be in these bizarre mental states, so we assume that the people who are in them don't really want to be either. They might claim to, sure, but why believe them? After all, they're crazy. For two amusing thought experiments in this line which have been considered in detail by others, let the...
Secret Identities vs. Groupthink
by Swimmy — 2009-04-09T20:26:21.052Z

From Marginal Revolution:

A new meta-analysis (pdf) of 72 studies, involving 4,795 groups and over 17,000 individuals has shown that groups tend to spend most of their time discussing the information shared by members, which is therefore redundant, rather than discussing information known only to one or a minority of members. This is important because those groups that do share unique information tend to make better decisions.
Another important factor is how much group members talk to each other. Ironically, Jessica Mesmer-Magnus and Leslie DeChurch found that groups that talked more tended to share less unique information.

A result that shouldn't surprise this group. I've noticed obvious attempts to avoid this tendency in Less Wrong (for instance, Yvain's avoiding further Christian-bashing). We've had at least one post asking specifically for information that was unique. And I don't know about the rest of you, but I've already had plenty of new food for thought on Less Wrong.

But are we tapping the full potential? Each of us has, or should have, a secret identity. The nice thing about those identities is that they give us access to unique knowledge. We've been asked (though I can't find the link) to avoid large posts applying learned rationality techniques to controversial topics, for fear of killing minds, which seems reasonable to me. Is there a better way to allow discipline-specific knowledge to be shared among Less Wrong readers without setting off our politicosensors? It seems beneficial not only for improved rationality training, but also to enhance our secret identities. For instance, I, as an economist-in-training, would like to know not just what an anthropologist can tell me, but what a Bayesian-trained anthropologist can tell me.
"Playing to Win"
by CronoDAS — 2009-04-09T15:45:07.922Z

John F. Rizzo is an expert on losing. However, if you want to win, you would do better to seek advice from an expert on winning.

David Sirlin is such an expert, a renowned Street Fighter player and game designer. He wrote a series of articles with the title "Playing to Win", about playing competitive games at a high level, which were so popular that he expanded them into a book. You can either read it for free online (donations are appreciated) or purchase a dead tree edition.

Any further summary would simply be redundant when you could simply read Sirlin's own words, so here is the link:

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw
Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great
by Scott Alexander — 2009-04-09T02:44:20.056Z

Related to: Individual Rationality is a Matter of Life and Death, The Benefits of Rationality, Rationality is Systematized Winning
But I finally snapped after reading: Mandatory Secret Identities
Okay, the title was for shock value. Rationality is pretty great. Just not quite as great as everyone here seems to think it is.
For this post, I will be using "extreme rationality" or "x-rationality" in the sense of "techniques and theories from Overcoming Bias, Less Wrong, or similar deliberate formal rationality study programs, above and beyond the standard level of rationality possessed by an intelligent science-literate person without formal rationalist training." It seems pretty uncontroversial that there are massive benefits from going from a completely irrational moron to the average intelligent person's level. I'm coining this new term so there's no temptation to confuse x-rationality with normal, lower-level rationality.
And for this post, I use "benefits" or "practical benefits" to mean anything not relating to philosophy, truth, winning debates, or a sense of personal satisfaction from understanding things better. Money, status, popularity, and scientific discovery all count.
So, what are these "benefits" of "x-rationality"?
A while back, Vladimir Nesov asked exactly that, and made a thread for people to list all of the positive effects x-rationality had on their lives. Only a handful responded, and most responses weren't very practical. Anna Salamon, one of the few people to give a really impressive list of benefits, wrote:

I'm surprised there are so few apparent gains listed. Are most people who benefited just being silent? We should expect a certain number of headache-cures, etc., just by placebo effects or coincidences of timing.

There have since been a few more people claiming practical benefits from x-rationality, but we should generally expect more people to claim benefits than to actually experience them. Anna mentions the placebo effect, and to that I would add cognitive dissonance - people spent all this time learning x-rationality, so it MUST have helped them! - and the same sort of confirmation bias that makes Christians swear that their prayers really work.
I find my personal experience in accord with the evidence from Vladimir's thread. I've gotten countless clarity-of-mind benefits from Overcoming Bias' x-rationality, but practical benefits? As...
"Stuck In The Middle With Bruce"
by CronoDAS — 2009-04-09T00:24:02.553Z

I was somewhat disappointed to find a lack of Magic: the Gathering players on LessWrong when I asked about it in the off-topic thread. You see, competitive Magic is one of the best, most demanding rationality battlefields that I know about. Furthermore, Magic is discussed extensively on the Internet, and many articles in which people try to explain how to become a better Magic player are, essentially, describing how to become more rational: how to better learn from experience, make judgments from noisy data, and (yes) overcome biases that interfere with one's ability to make better decisions.

Because people here don't play Magic, I can't simply link to those articles and say, "Here. Go read." I have to put everything into context, because Magic jargon has become its own language, distinct from English. Think I'm kidding? I was able to follow match coverage written in French using nothing but my knowledge of Magic-ese and what I remembered from my high school Spanish classes. Instead of simply linking, in order to give you the full effect, I'd have to undertake a project equivalent to translating a work in a foreign language.

So it is with great trepidation that I give you, untranslated, one of the "classics" of Magic literature.

Stuck In The Middle With Bruce by John F. Rizzo.

Now, John "Friggin'" Rizzo isn't one of the great Magic players. Far from it. He is, however, one of the great Magic writers, to the extent that the adjective "great" can be applied to someone who writes about Magic. His bizarre stream-of-consciousness writing style, personal stories, and strongly held opinions have made him a legend in the Magic community. "Stuck in the Middle with Bruce" is his most famous work, as incomprehensible as it may be to those who don't speak our language (and even to those that do).

So, why am I choosing to direct you to this particular piece of writing? Well, although Rizzo doesn't know much about winning, he knows an awful lot about what causes people to lose, and that's the topic of this particular piece - people's need to lose.

Does Bruce whisper into your ear, too?
Less Wrong IRC Meetup
by jimrandomh — 2009-04-08T22:16:28.907Z

Less Wrong will be having a meetup on Saturday at 7pm UTC (convert to other time zones), in the #lesswrong IRC channel on Freenode. If all goes well, this will be a recurring event. If you haven't used IRC before, Mibbit provides a web-based client you can use.

We may do some Paranoid Debating. Discuss rules and procedures here. A few people should bring questions, but avoid looking at the answers if you can avoid it. Depending how many people show up, we'll may need to break into multiple groups. Once we've finalized the rules and done it a few times, I (or someone else) can write a bot to assign roles and keep score.

(Edit: Downgraded Paranoid Debating from being the purpose of the meetup to being a likely activity.)
Rationality, Cryonics and Pascal's Wager
by Roko — 2009-04-08T20:28:48.644Z

This has been covered by Eliezer on OB, but I the debate will work better with the LW voted commenting system, and I hope I can add something to the OB debate, which I feel left the spectre of Pascalian religious apology clinically dead but not quite information theoretically dead. Anna Salamon writes:

The “isn’t that like Pascal’s wager?” response is plausibly an instance of dark side epistemology, and one that affects many aspiring rationalists.

Many of us came up against the Pascal’s wager argument at some point before we gained much rationality skill, disliked the conclusion, and hunted around for some means of disagreeing with its reasoning. The overcoming bias thread discussing Pascal’s wager strikes me as including a fair number of fallacious comments aimed at finding some rationale, any rationale, for dismissing Pascal’s wager.

This really got me worried: do I really rationally believe in the efficacy of cryonics and not of religion? Or did I write the bottom line first and then start thinking of justifications?

Of course, it is easy to write a post justifying cryonics in a way that shuns religion. That's what everyone wants to hear on this forum! What is hard is doing it in a way that ensures you're not just writing even more justification with no chance of retracting the bottom line. I hope that with this post I have succeeded in burying the Pascalian attack on cryonics for good; and in removing a little more ignorance about my true values.

To me, the justification for wanting to be cryopreserved is that there is, in fact, a good chance (more than the chance of rolling a 5 or a 6 on a six sided die)1 that I will be revived into a very nice world indeed, and that the chance of being revived into a hell I cannot escape from is less than or equal to this (I am a risk taker). How sensitive is this to the expected goodness and length-in-time of the utopia I wake up in? If the utopia is as good as Iain M Banks' culture, I'd still be interested in spending 5% of my income a year and 5% of my time getting frozen if the probability was around about the level of rolling two consecutive sixes.

Does making the outcome better change things? Suppose we take the culture and "upgrade it" by fulfilling all of my fantasies: The Banksian utopia I have described is analogous to the utopia of the t

...
Mandatory Secret Identities
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-04-08T18:10:20.193Z

Previously in series: Whining-Based Communities

"But there is a reason why many of my students have achieved great things; and by that I do not mean high rank in the Bayesian Conspiracy. I expected much of them, and they came to expect much of themselves." —Jeffreyssai

Among the failure modes of martial arts dojos, I suspect, is that a sufficiently dedicated martial arts student, will dream of...

...becoming a teacher and having their own martial arts dojo someday.

To see what's wrong with this, imagine going to a class on literary criticism, falling in love with it, and dreaming of someday becoming a famous literary critic just like your professor, but never actually writing anything. Writers tend to look down on literary critics' understanding of the art form itself, for just this reason. (Orson Scott Card uses the analogy of a wine critic who listens to a wine-taster saying "This wine has a great bouquet", and goes off to tell their students "You've got to make sure your wine has a great bouquet". When the student asks, "How? Does it have anything to do with grapes?" the critic replies disdainfully, "That's for grape-growers! I teach wine.")

Similarly, I propose, no student of rationality should study with the purpose of becoming a rationality instructor in turn. You do that on Sundays, or full-time after you retire.

And to place a go stone blocking this failure mode, I propose a requirement that all rationality instructors must have secret identities. They must have a life outside the Bayesian Conspiracy, which would be worthy of respect even if they were not rationality instructors. And to enforce this, I suggest the rule:

Rationality_Respect1(Instructor) = min(Rationality_Respect0(Instructor), Non_Rationality_Respect0(Instructor))

That is, you can't respect someone as a rationality instructor, more than you would respect them if they were not rationality instructors.

Some notes:

• This doesn't set Rationality_Respect1 equal to Non_Rationality_Respect0. It establishes an upper bound. This doesn't mean you can find random awesome people and expect them to be able to teach you. Explicit, abstract, cross-domain understanding of rationality and the ability to teach it to others is, unfortunately, an additional discipline on top of domain-specific life success. N...
E-Prime
by CannibalSmith — 2009-04-08T13:01:01.604Z

I found this and thought we could find a use for it.

Wikipedia describes E-Prime, short for English-Prime, as a modified form of English. E-Prime uses very slightly simplified syntax and vocabulary, eliminating all forms of the verb to be.

Some people use E-Prime as a mental discipline to filter speech and translate the speech of others. For example, the sentence "the movie was good", translated into E-Prime, could become "I liked the movie". The translation communicates the speaker's subjective experience of the movie rather than the speaker's judgment of the movie. In this example, using E-Prime makes it harder for the writer or reader to confuse a statement of opinion with a statement of fact.

Discuss! In E-Prime!
Obvious identity fail
by KatjaGrace — 2009-04-08T06:00:00.000Z

Paul Graham points out something important: religion and politics are generally unfruitful topics of discussion because people have identities tied to them.

An implication:

The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it’s right, is that it explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but how to have better ideas. If people can’t think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.

This seems obvious. For one thing, if you are loyal to anything that incorporates a particular view of the world rather than to truth per se, you have to tend away from believing true things.

Ramana Kumar says this is not obvious, and (after discussion of this and other topics) that I shouldn’t care if things seem obvious, and should just point them out anyway, as they’re often not, to him at least (so probably to most). This seems a good idea, except that a microsecond’s introspection reveals that I really don’t want to say obvious things. Why? Because my identity fondly includes a bit about saying not-obvious things. Bother.

Is it dangerous here? A tiny bit, but I don’t seem very compelled to change it. And nor, I doubt, would be many others with more important things. If you identify with being Left or Right more than being correct to begin with, what would make you want to give it up?

Ramana suggests that if having an identity is inescapable but the specifics are flexible, then the best plan is perhaps to identify with some small set of things that impels you to kick a large set of other things out of your identity.

What makes people identify with some things and use/believe/be associated with/consider probable/experience others without getting all funny about it anyway?

As a side note, I don’t fully get the concept. I just notice it happens, including in my head sometimes, and that it seems pretty pertinent to people insisting on being wrong. If you can explain how it works or what it means, I’m curious.
Zero-based karma coming through
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-04-08T01:19:18.700Z

Our friends at Tricycle will push through a zero-based karma system (no self-voting possible) sometime this evening. At present this will only cover future posts/comments - they may go back and revise history some time in the indefinite future (or not), but apparently that would be overly complicated for now. We'll see how this works.
Help, help, I'm being oppressed!
by Scott Alexander — 2009-04-07T23:22:21.112Z

Followup to: Why Support the Underdog?
Serendipitously related to: Whining-Based Communities

Pity whatever U.N. official has to keep track of all the persecution going on. With two hundred plus countries in the world, there's just so much of it.
Some places persecute Christians. Here's a Christian writer from a nation we'll call Country A:

Global reports indicate that over 150,000 Christians were martyred last year, chiefly in foreign countries. However, statistics are changing: persecution of Christians is on the increase at home. What's happening to bring about this change? According to some experts a pattern is emerging reminiscent of Jewish persecution in post war Germany. "Isolation of, and discrimination against Christians is growing almost geometrically" says Don McAlvany in The Midnight Herald. "This is the way it started in Germany against the Jews. As they became more isolated and marginalized by the Nazi propaganda machine, as popular hatred and prejudice against the Jews increased among the German people, wholesale persecution followed. Could this be where the growing anti-Christian consensus in this country is taking us?"

And some countries persecute atheists. Here's an atheist activist describing what we'll call Country B.

Godless atheists are the most despised and distrusted minority in our country. The growing attention to atheism and atheists has given rise to increased anti-atheist bigotry in the media. Circumstances for them can be difficult enough that they have to stay in the closet and hide their atheism from friends and family. Atheists have to fear discrimination on the job, in the community, and even in their own families if their atheism is made known. Some even have to contend with harassment and vandalism. Distrust and hatred of atheists is widespread enough through our society that they have plenty of reasons to be concerned.

Some countries persecute Muslims. A Muslim youth in Country C:

The government has continuously persecuted Arabs and Muslims with extremist and unpopular views, charging them with terrorism and criminal acts related to terrorism. I am proud of [Muslims] who stand up to this system of injustice and to our country's gulag. They may beat them, but they will continues to suffer because in this country, Arabs are never innocent, they are merely guilty of lesser crimes. Even if they are proven innoce

...
Whining-Based Communities
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-04-07T20:31:50.409Z

Previously in series: Selecting Rationalist Groups
Followup to: Rationality is Systematized Winning, Extenuating Circumstances

Why emphasize the connection between rationality and winning? Well... that is what decision theory is for. But also to place a Go stone to block becoming a whining-based community.

Let's be fair to Ayn Rand: There were legitimate messages in Atlas Shrugged that many readers had never heard before, and this lent the book a part of its compelling power over them. The message that it's all right to excel—that it's okay to be, not just good, but better than others—of this the Competitive Conspiracy would approve.

But this is only part of Rand's message, and the other part is the poison pill, a deadlier appeal: It's those looters who don't approve of excellence who are keeping you down. Surely you would be rich and famous and high-status like you deserve if not for them, those unappreciative bastards and their conspiracy of mediocrity.

If you consider the reasonableness-based conception of rationality rather than the winning-based conception of rationality—well, you can easily imagine some community of people congratulating themselves on how reasonable they were, while blaming the surrounding unreasonable society for keeping them down. Wrapping themselves up in their own bitterness for reality refusing to comply with the greatness they thought they should have.

But this is not how decision theory works—the "rational" strategy adapts to the other players' strategies, it does not depend on the other players being rational. If a rational agent believes the other players are irrational then it takes that expectation into account in maximizing expected utility. Van Vogt got this one right: his rationalist protagonists are formidable from accepting reality swiftly and adapting to it swiftly, without reluctance or attachment.

Self-handicapping (hat-tip Yvain) is when people who have been made aware of their own incompetence or probable future failure, deliberately impose handicaps on themselves—on the standard model, in order to give themselves an excuse for failure. To make sure they had an excuse, subjects reduced preparation times for athletic events, studied less, exerted less effort, gave opponents an advantage, lowered their own expectations, eve...
Of Lies and Black Swan Blowups
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-04-07T18:26:41.675Z

Judge Marcus Einfeld, age 70, Queen’s Counsel since 1977, Australian Living Treasure 1997, United Nations Peace Award 2002, founding president of Australia’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, retired a few years back but routinely brought back to judge important cases . . .

. . . went to jail for two years over a series of perjuries and lies that started with a $77, 6-mph-over speeding ticket.

That whole suspiciously virtuous-sounding theory about honest people not being good at lying, and entangled traces being left somewhere, and the entire thing blowing up in a Black Swan epic fail, actually does have a certain number of exemplars in real life, though obvious selective reporting is at work in our hearing about this one.