trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Ace Attorney: pioneer Rationalism-didactic game?
by Raw_Power — 2011-05-23T23:28:58.595Z

This article aims to prove that Ace Attorney is possibly the first rationalist game in the lesswrongian sense, or at least a remarkable proto-example, and that it subliminally works to raise the sanity waterline in the general population, and might provide a template on which to base future works that aim to achieve a similar effect.

The Ace Attorney series of games for the Nintendo DS console puts you in the shoes of Phoenix Wright, an attorney who, in the vein of Perry Mason, takes on difficult cases to defend his clients from a judicial system that is heavily inspired by that of Japan, in which the odds are so stacked against the defense it's practically a Kangaroo Court where your clients are guilty until proven innocent.

For those unfamiliar with the game, and those who want to explore the "social criticism" aspect of the game, I wholeheartedly recommend this most excellent article from The Escapist. Now that that's out of the way, we can move on to what makes this relevant for Less Wrong. What makes this game uniquely interesting from a Rationalist POV is that the entire game mechanics are based on

gathering material evidence

finding the factual contradictions in the witnesses' testimonies

using the evidence to bust the lies open and force the truth out

That the judicial system is Japanese-inspired also means the legal system is inquisitorial: the court has an active role in the case (whereas the adversarial system in the West reduces the role of the court to a form of referee) and its (alleged) mission is to dig out the truth. That and the lack of in dubio pro reo mean you can't just be content with putting your client's guilt in reasonable doubt, you have to thoroughly prove their innocence and find the true culprit and get them imprisoned. That means you have to find out the entire story and you can't leave any threads hanging.

Additionally, the fact that you are a lame attorney facing an unsympathetic judge and egomaniacal, dirty-playing, high-status prosecutors who *have led the police investigation and only prosecute when they think they have all the cards in their hand* means you will. not. catch. a break. Every single move you make will be scrutinized, you will face constant sarcasm, dismissal, condescending and ridicule, and sometimes a single mistake on your part (presenting the wrong piece of evidence) can cost you the entire case. This ...
Analogies and learning
by lessdazed — 2011-05-23T22:44:53.138Z

I told someone that I learn best by first hearing a general principle and only afterward being given examples and analogies. She replied that my explanations are hard to follow when my analogies are not from subjects already familiar to and well understood by her. She went further and said that sometimes she understood novel things I was trying to explain, only to be confounded by my subsequent analogies. I immediately replied that in my opinion, analogies to familiar topics are of course much better teaching tools than those to unfamiliar ones, but obscure analogies primarily function as tests to ensure understanding rather than tools to convey it. Someone fully understanding a concept ought to be able to use that understanding as a guide to understand analogous unfamiliar topics.

I am very interested in what others have to say about my last point in particular and would appreciate comments.
Las Vegas LW Meetup!
by Duke — 2011-05-23T19:25:58.934Z

What: First Las Vegas/Henderson Less Wrong meetup

When: Saturday, May 28, 2011 7:00 PM

Where: Putters Bar & Grill
6945 S. Rainbow Blvd
Las Vegas, NV

Look for a bitcoin sign and ask for Duke.

For personal convenience I am piggybacking on this Bitcoin meetup. A bitcoiner will be giving an informal presentation on cryptology and computer security. I don't have specific ideas for the LW aspect of the meetup so come prepared with your own.

**Edit: Location changed**
Algorithm-dependent problems with self-modification
by Manfred — 2011-05-23T18:59:39.436Z

Imagine you're a self-modifying intelligent agent, and your mother is taking you out to lunch. Over coffee, she offers you a deal: if you will self-modify to be repulsed by eating animals to the extent that you become a vegetarian, she will pay for your lunch. Don't try to cheat - she can tell when you're lying. So you compare the total utility of changing with the total utility of not-changing, and you decide that you would rather continue to eat meat than have your lunch paid for.

This is an example of an algorithm-dependent problem, a more general type than causal problems or Newcomb-like problems. Someone can see inside your brain to some extent and rewards you based not just on your actions or your decisions, but on your values or your patterns of thought. It's sort of interesting, but they seem unlikely to happen because it's difficult for us to modify our own algorithms and it's difficult for some external observer to verify that we've really done so. AIs, on the other hand, can fulfill both of these requirements, and so might run into them on rare occasions.

More difficult modifications:

The vegetarian/omnivore tradeoff seems fairly comprehensible because of its nice properties. It's fairly time-symmetrical since being a vegetarian is pretty much the same day to day. It's familiar to us so that we don't have to guess too much about what it's like being a vegetarian. And since we don't feel like wanting to eat animals is an inherently valuable belief, we can just evaluate the utility of the consequences.

What sort of modifications would be trickier? Well, going back to that last point, do we have inherently valuable beliefs? I'd argue that I do - I would not want to want to kill people even if God promised to keep an eye on me and stop me before I made any outward sign of trying. But it's fairly simple to extend our utility function over our own brains.

Worse is when you have multiple modifications. If you modified to be a vegetarian, and then modified to enjoy skydiving, it wouldn't be a big deal - those are mostly independent. But what if your mom wanted you to modify something that impacted your self-modification system?

So:

I think it's not too hard to take an algorithm-determined problem, even with self-modification, and find the optimal classes of algorithms. &n...
How to Dissolve the Problem of Free Will and Determinism (Video)
by beriukay — 2011-05-23T15:34:33.696Z

Here is a pretty good lecture posted on YouTube about dissolving the question of Free Will. It struck me how similar his thoughts were to some of the points that have been made on Less Wrong, like how some answers may seem like explanations without having any content. It may not have much in the way of new content, but it is stated pretty clearly and concisely, and they way he flat-out rejects Free Will as unscientific is bold and refreshing, especially coming from a Philosopher.
Naive Decision Theory
by snarles — 2011-05-23T14:55:11.745Z

I am posting this is because I'm interested in self-modifying agent decision theory but I'm too lazy to read up on existing posts. I want to see a concise justification as to why a sophisticated decision theory would be needed for the implementation of an AGI. So I'll present a 'naive' decision theory, and I want to know why it is unsatisfactory.

The one condition in the naive decision theory is that the decision-maker is the only agent in the universe who is capable of self-modification. This will probably suffice for production of the first Artificial General Intelligence (since humans aren't actually all that good at self-modification.)

Suppose that our AGI has a probability model for predicting the 'state of the universe in time T (e.g. T= 10 billion years)' conditional on what it knows, and conditional on one decision it has to make. This one decision is how should it rewrite its code at time zero. We suppose it can rewrite its code instantly, and the code is limited to X bytes. So the AGI has to maximize utility at time T over all programs with X bytes. Supposing it can simulate its utility at the 'end state of the universe' conditional on which program it chooses, why can't it just choose the program with the highest utility? Implicit in our set-up is that the program it chooses may (and very likely) will have the capacity to self-modify again, but we're assuming that our AGI's probability model accounts for when and how it is likely to self-modify. Difficulties with infinite recursion loops should be avoidable if our AGI backtracks from the end of time.

Of course our AGI will need a probability model for predicting what a program for its behavior will do without having to simulate or even completely specify the program. To me, that seems like the hard part. If this is possible, I don't see why it's necessary to develop a specific theory for dealing with convoluted Newcomb-like problems, since the above seems to take care of those issues automatically.
[SEQ RERUN] The Majority Is Always Wrong
by badger — 2011-05-23T13:53:38.400Z

Today's post, The Majority Is Always Wrong was originally published on April 3, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

Anything worse than the majority opinion should get selected out, so the majority opinion is rarely strictly superior to existing alternatives.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments of the original post).
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 The Error of Crowds, 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, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki, or creating exercises. Go here for more details, or to discuss the Sequence Reruns.
Any LWers in UK West Midlands?
by sixes_and_sevens — 2011-05-23T11:54:08.597Z

After seeing LW meetups pop up in London, Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge, I thought I'd see if there was any interest in kicking one off somewhere I might reasonably be able to get to.

I know it's not something people like to readily admit to, but I've not seen anyone else mention being in a West-Midlands-y location. That said, I've not seen anyone say they were from Edinburgh, Oxford or Cambridge either, and Birmingham alone has a larger population than all those cities combined, so I figure the odds can't be that bad.

Anyway, I'm in Birmingham. Is there anyone round the Brum/Worcester/Coventry/Warwick area on here, and if so would you be interested in attending a meetup?
What makes Less Wrong awesome?
by Will_Newsome — 2011-05-23T06:27:26.365Z

Recently I asked "What bothers you about Less Wrong?". It might be worth going back and checking out what people had to say, to see if there's something you can do to make Less Wrong more fun for everyone. (A few people made cool posts in response to complaints about lack of technical discussion, for instance.)

Let's hear the other side. What is cool about Less Wrong? What drew you in, what makes you stay, what makes you obsessively read every comment of every post? Is they're something we're doing right that we should be doing more? Bonus points for pointing out how we can make our awesome traits even more awesome, or how to make our awesomeness more obvious to outside folk who'd appreciate it. Whatever it is, add it to the comments.
Melbourne Meetup: Friday 3rd June, 7pm
by matt — 2011-05-23T04:00:25.142Z

When: Friday 3rd June, 19:00 (and the first Friday of each following month)
Where: TrikeApps office, lvl 2, 55 Walsh St, West Melbourne 3003 (http://trikeapps.com/contact)

Directions:
Enter the somewhat unfriendly building, climb the stairs to the top (2 floors), and turn left.
No wheelchair access (sorry - if you need help there and dignity and safety are not important to you I'm sure we can help you get to the top; if they are important then please speak up - we can at least move the next one to a more accessible venue).

Discussion:

http://groups.google.com/group/melbourne-less-wrong

http://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=6a317
Evolution, bias and global risk
by Giles — 2011-05-23T00:32:08.087Z

Sometimes we make a decision in a way which is different to how we think we should make a decision. When this happens, we call it a bias.

When put this way, the first thing that springs to mind is that different people might disagree on whether something is actually a bias. Take the bystander effect. If you're of the opinion that other people are way less important than yourself, then the ability to calmly stand around not doing anything while someone else is in danger would be seen as a good thing. You'd instead be confused by the non-bystander effect, whereby people (when separated from the crowd) irrationally put themselves in danger in order to help complete strangers.

The second thing that springs to mind is that the bias may exist for an evolutionary reason, and not just be due to bad brain architecture. Remember that evolution doesn't always produce the behavior that makes the most intuitive sense. Creatures, including presumably humans, tend to act in a way as to maximize their reproductive success; they don't act in the way that necessarily makes the most intuitive sense.

The statement that humans act in a fitness-maximizing way is controversial. Firstly, we are adapted to our ancestral environment, not our current one. It seems very likely that we're not well adapted to the ready availability of high-calorie food, for example. But this argument doesn't apply to everything. A lot of the biases appear to describe situations which would exist in both the ancestral and modern worlds.

A second argument is that a lot of our behavior is governed by memes these days, not genes. It's certain that the memes that survive are the ones which best reproduce themselves; it's also pretty plausible that exposure to memes can tip us from one fitness-maximizing behavioral strategy to another. But memes forcing us to adopt a highly suboptimal strategy? I'm sceptical. It seems like there would be strong selection pressure against it; to pass the memes on but not let them affect our behavior significantly. Memes existed in our ancestral environments too.

And remember that just because you're behaving in a way that maximizes your expected reproductive fitness, there's no reason to expect you to be consciously aware of this fact.

So let's pretend, for the sake of simplicity, that we're all acting to maximize our expected reproductive success (and all the things that we know lea...
The Ultraviolet
by CuSithBell — 2011-05-22T23:59:00.212Z

Suppose that you're a bee. Perhaps, even, an extremely rational bee. And yet, as you go through your life, you can't shake the feeling that you're missing something - the other bees live so effortlessly, alighting on flowers bursting with pollen as if by chance. Try as you might, you can't seem to figure out the patterns that they're unconsciously drawn to. Are you overanalyzing? Are you overwhelmed by sensory data? But the others seem to defy thermodynamics in their ability to extract useful information, all the while wasting so much effort on suboptimal patterns of thought.

Perhaps they have access to different data? Perhaps, where you see a uniform field of yellow, they see bullseyes.

Less Wrong seems to have a problem with socializing. Not just an unusual share of the people, but the community's character (as if it were a person). We should suspect ourselves (as a collective) of overlooking the ultraviolet, those facts about the world that are so easily accessed by some others. We should be suspicious of simplistic or monolithic explanations of social reality that don't allow sweeping social success on the same scale as their claims. We should be suspicious of dismissals of social concerns.

Am I off the mark? Am I worried over nothing? Am I overreaching? I am tossing this idea out into the sandstorm of doubt so that it can be worn down and honed to the razor edge at its core, if such a thing exists. I ask you to be my wind and sand.

Disclaimers: I don't intend this as an insult. It's a reminder - as a collective intelligence, we have a blind spot. We shouldn't conclude that there's nothing behind it. I myself am pretty dang "manualistic" (or whatever the other side of neurotypical is called). I am not an apiarist.

Edit: I've removed the focus on Autism. I was wrong, and I apologize. The post may be further edited in the near future.
How To Be More Confident... That You're Wrong
by Wei Dai — 2011-05-22T23:30:23.992Z

One of the main Eliezer Sequences, consisting of dozens of posts, is How To Actually Change Your Mind. Looking at all those posts, one gets the feeling that changing one’s mind must be Really Hard. But maybe it doesn't have to be that hard. I think it would much easier to change your mind, if you instinctively thought that your best ideas are almost certainly still far from the truth. Most of us are probably aware of the overconfidence bias, but there hasn't been much discussion on how to practically reduce overconfidence in our own ideas.

I offer two suggestions in that vein for your consideration.

1. Take the outside view. Recall famous scientists and philosophers of the past, and how far off from the truth their ideas were, and yet how confident they were in their ideas. Realize that they are famous because, in retrospect, they were more right than everyone else of their time, and there are countless books filled with even worse ideas. How likely is it that your ideas are the best of our time? How likely is it that the best ideas of our time are fully correct (as opposed to just a bit closer to the truth)?

2. Take a few days to learn some cryptology and then design your own cipher. Use whatever tricks you can find and make it as complicated as you want. Feel your confidence in how unbreakable it must be (at least before the Singularity occurs), and then watch it taken apart by an expert in minutes. Now feel the sense of betrayal against your “self-confidence module” and vow “never again”.
A summary of Savage's foundations for probability and utility.
by Sniffnoy — 2011-05-22T19:56:27.952Z

Edit: I think the P2c I wrote originally may have been a bit too weak; fixed that. Nevermind, rechecking, that wasn't needed.

More edits (now consolidated): Edited nontriviality note. Edited totality note. Added in the definition of numerical probability in terms of qualitative probability (though not the proof that it works). Also slight clarifications on implications of P6' and P6''' on partitions into equivalent and almost-equivalent parts, respectively.

One very late edit, June 2: Even though we don't get countable additivity, we still want a σ-algebra rather than just an algebra (this is needed for some of the proofs in the "partition conditions" section that I don't go into here). Also noted nonemptiness of gambles.

The idea that rational agents act in a manner isomorphic to expected-utility maximizers is often used here, typically justified with the Von Neumann-Morgenstern theorem. (The last of Von Neumann and Morgenstern's axioms, the independence axiom, can be grounded in a Dutch book argument.) But the Von Neumann-Morgenstern theorem assumes that the agent already measures its beliefs with (finitely additive) probabilities. This in turn is often justified with Cox's theorem (valid so long as we assume a "large world", which is implied by e.g. the existence of a fair coin). But Cox's theorem assumes as an axiom that the plausibility of a statement is taken to be a real number, a very large assumption! I have also seen this justified here with Dutch book arguments, but these all seem to assume that we are already using some notion of expected utility maximization (which is not only somewhat circular, but also a considerably stronger assumption than that plausibilities are measured with real numbers).

There is a way of grounding both (finitely additive) probability and utility simultaneously, however, as detailed by Leonard Savage in his Foundations of Statistics (1954). In this article I will state the axioms and definitions he gives, give a summary of their logical structure, and suggest a slight modification (which is equivalent mathematically but slightly more philosophically satisfying). I would also like to ask the question: To what extent can these axioms be grounded in Dutch book arguments or other more basic principles? I warn the reader that I have not worked through all the proofs myself and I sug...
[SEQ RERUN] The Error of Crowds
by badger — 2011-05-22T14:21:20.490Z

Today's post, The Error of Crowds was originally published on April 1, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

Mean squared error drops when we average our predictions, but only because it uses a convex loss function. If you faced a concave loss function, you wouldn't isolate yourself from others, which casts doubt on the relevance of Jensen's inequality for rational communication. The process of sharing thoughts and arguing differences is not like taking averages.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments of the original post).
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 Useful Statistical Biases, 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, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki, or creating exercises. Go here for more details, or to discuss the Sequence Reruns.
Rationalist horoscopes: A low-hanging utility generator.
by AdeleneDawner — 2011-05-22T09:37:33.620Z

The other day, I had an idea. It occurred to me that daily horoscopes - the traditional kind - might not be as useless as they seem at first glance: They usually give, or at least hint at, suggestions for specific things to do on a given day, which can be a useful cue, allowing the user to put less effort into finding something useful to do with their time. They can also act as a reminder of important concepts, rather like spaced repetition, and have the possibility of serendipitously giving the perfect advice in a situation where the user would otherwise not have thought to apply a particular concept.

This seems like something that many people here would find useful, if they weren't so vague, and if they were better calibrated to make useful suggestions. So, after getting some feedback, and with the help of PeerInfinity (who did most of the coding and is currently hosting the program), I put together a tool to provide us with a daily 'horoscope', chosen from a list provided by us and weighted toward advice that has been reported to work. The horoscopes are displayed here, with an RSS feed available here. Lists of the horoscopes in the program's database can be found here, with various sorting options.

One of the features of this program is that the chance of a given horoscope being displayed are affected by how well it has worked in the past. Every day, there is an option to vote on the previous day's horoscope, rating it as 'harmful', 'useless', 'sort of useful', 'useful', or 'awesome'. The 'harmful' and 'useless' options give the horoscope -15 and -1 points respectively, while the other three give it 1, 3, or 10 points. If a horoscope's score becomes negative, it is removed from the pool of active horoscopes; otherwise, its chance of being chosen is based on the average value of the votes it has received compared to the other horoscopes, disregarding recently-used ones.

There is still a need for good horoscopes to be added to the database. Horoscopes should offer a specific suggestion for something to do that will take less than an hour of sustained effort (all-day mindfulness-type exercises or 'be on the lookout for X' are fine) and that can be accomplished on the same day that the horoscope is read. Horoscopes should not make actual predictions, but may make prediction-like statements that are likely to be true on any given day, like "you will talk to a fr...