trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A Viable Alternative to Typing
by fowlertm — 2013-06-06T05:38:17.885Z

I'm thinking about writing a more substantive post about how humans work and how we can work better, a little like this one. As is common with these sorts of things, once I started to do research and pull on various threads, it turned out that the field was pretty deep and would require time to understand. But in the meantime, I just thought I would link to this video of someone programming using only their voice.

As I suffer with symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome, this is of particular interest to me. Once I watched it I decided to start looking at different voice recognition software so that I could still get some work done while typing less. I'm happy to say that even the default software for speech recognition which came with windows is actually very able and accurate. I dictated almost this entire post using that software.

As far as I can tell, Dragon Naturally Speaking is the gold standard in voice recognition software. It does come with a pretty hefty price tag, but it may be worth it if you have serious repetitive stress injuries, or as a preventative measure if you're someone who spends a lot of time at their computer. And if that doesn't work, chances are good your computer has adequate software pre-installed.
Meetup : Zendo and discussion
by evand — 2013-06-05T00:35:23.107Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Zendo and discussion

WHEN:
06 June 2013 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Cocoa Cinnamon, 420 W Geer St, Durham, NC

We will talk about assorted things of interest over Zendo!

If you have not played the game before, it is a fun game of inductive logic. It is good for critical thinking, demonstrating some common cognitive biases, and is generally good for prompting rationality related discussion.

It's also very friendly to newcomers.

Suggested things to think about before coming:

What is your favorite recent LW article, and why?
What changes have you made in your life recently, and what role did rationality play in them?
What would you like to see more of in future meetups, and why?

Meetup runs until 9, but there will probably be people having beers at Fullsteam after.

Discussion article for the meetup : Zendo and discussion
Applied art of rationality: Richard Feynman steelmanning his mother's concerns
by Shmi — 2013-06-04T17:31:24.675Z

First, imagine your parents disapproving of your first love. Imagine your mother inventing a whole whack of reasons why you shouldn't marry him/her. Now imagine being rational enough to acknowledge and address all her concerns while remaining a loving and caring son/daughter. If you can imagine, let alone do all that, you are better person than I am. But then I am not Feynman, who did just that in the following excerpt from the book Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track. It is also a great example of Luminosity. Now, if you think that you can be that good, look through your replies on LW to people whose comment irk you in the worst way. How charitable were you? Granted, you probably don't care about anonymous online posters nearly as much as Feynman cared about his mother, but I suspect that caring about someone makes you more emotional, not less in your reply.

Comments by the book's author:

The following letter is in response to one from Lucille, Richard’s mother, in which she lovingly but forcefully outlined her concerns about Richard’s intent to marry Arline. Arline’s illness, she feared, would compromise not only his own health but his career. She was also concerned about the high cost of treatment (for oxygen, specialists, hospitalization, and so on).

Lucille suggested that his desire to marry stemmed from his desire to please someone he loved (“just as you used to occasionally eat spinach to please me”) and recommended that they stay “engaged.”

The letter itself:

With regard to (1) and (2) I went to see Prof. Smyth at Pop’s suggestion and the doctor here at the university.The doctor said I have less chance of getting T.B. in the sanatorium when visiting her than when I am walking around in the street. I think he was exaggerating (all this is in detail in a letter to Pop, so I won’t repeat it all here). He said T.B. is infectious but not contagious—I didn’t understand the distinction he made, however. Ask Dr. Sarrow. He said in sanatoriums the patients take care of their sputum by cups or Kleenex for the purpose, but on the streets people are careless and just spit all around and when it dries the germs float into the air. He said the germs are not floating around in the air in a sanatorium. He said a lot has been found out about this in the last 25, and in particular t...
Meetup : Berkeley: Board games
by Nisan — 2013-06-04T16:21:17.574Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Board games

WHEN:
05 June 2013 07:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Berkeley, CA

Dear all, this week's Berkeley meetup will be a board games night. Zendo's games library includes:

Dominion (two basic sets, Prosperity, Intrigue, Seaside)

Scotland Yard

Puerto Rico

Thrun and Taxis

Settlers of Catan (6 players)

Ticket to Ride Europe

Smallworld

Robo Rally

San Juan

Zendo

Two Go sets

1 Chess set

Poker

Citadels

Pandemic

Race for the Galaxy

Set

Illuminati

Carcasonne

And many things besides. Feel free to bring your favorite game if we don't have it! The meetup will begin on Wednesday at 7:30pm. For directions to Zendo, see the mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/bayarealesswrong

or call me at:

http://i.imgur.com/Vcafy.png

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Board games
Other prespective on resolving the Prisoner's dilemma
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-06-04T16:13:50.225Z

Sometimes I see new ideas that, without offering any new information, offers a new perspective on old information, and a new way of thinking about an old problem. So it is with this lecture and the prisoner's dilemma.

Now, I worked a lot with the prisoners dilemma, with superrationality, negotiations, fairness, retaliation, Rawlsian veils of ignorance, etc. I've studied the problem, and its possible resolutions, extensively. But the perspective of that lecture was refreshing and new to me:

The prisoner's dilemma is resolved only when the off-diagonal outcomes of the dilemma are known to be impossible.

The "off-diagonal outcomes" are the "(Defect, Cooperate)" and the "(Cooperate, Defect)" squares where one person walks away with all the benefit and the other has none:

(Baron, Countess)
Cooperate
Defect

Cooperate

(3,3)
(0,5)

Defect

(5,0)
(1,1)

Facing an identical (or near identical) copy of yourself? Then the off-diagonal outcomes are impossible, because you're going to choose the same thing. Facing Tit-for-tat in an iterated prisoner's dilemma? Well, the off-diagonal squares cannot be reached consistently. Is the other prisoner a Mafia don? Then the off-diagonal outcomes don't exist as written: there's a hidden negative term (you being horribly murdered) that isn't taken into account in that matrix. Various agents with open code are essentially publicly declaring the conditions under which they will not reach for the off-diagonal. The point of many contracts and agreements is to make the off-diagonal outcome impossible or expensive.

As I said, nothing fundamentally new, but I find the perspective interesting. To my mind, it suggests that when resolving the prisoner's dilemma with probabilistic outcomes allowed, I should be thinking "blocking off possible outcomes", rather than "reaching agreement".
Why economics is not a morality tale
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-06-04T15:20:46.927Z

Example nicked from this online Berkeley lecture.

Monopolies are bad (morality and economics agree here).

Firms that pollute are bad (morality and economics agree here).

What about monopolies that pollute?

What about strong monopolies that pollute and receive government subsidies?

Well...

Pollution, and other negative externalities, cause firms to produce too much of their product. That's because they don't pay the full cost of the product, including the impact of pollution.

The equilibrium behaviour for monopolies is to produce too little of their product, to keep prices and profits high.

So a monopoly that pollutes is subject to two opposite tendencies: the unpriced-pollution tendency to produce too much, and the monopolistic tendency to produce too little. If the effects are of comparable magnitude, then the monopoly might be much closer to social optimum than a free market would be (the social optimum, incidentally, will generally involve some pollution: we need to accept some pollution in the production of fertiliser, for instance, in order to have enough food to stop people starving).

In fact, if the monopolistic effect is too strong, then the firm may under-produce, even taken the pollution effect into account. In that case, we can approach closer to the social optimum by... subsidising the polluting monopoly to produce more!!

And that, my friends, is why economics is not a morality tale.
David Brooks from the NY Times writes on earning-to-give
by AnthonyC — 2013-06-04T15:15:26.992Z

Just wanted to highlight an article. David Brooks from the NY Times writes on earning-to-give by working at a hedge fund:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/opinion/brooks-the-way-to-produce-a-person.html?ref=opinion

Basically, he claims that working in an amoral environment will eventually turn you into a worse person than you would otherwise be, and weaken your resolve and desire to fulfill your original goal. Psychologically he may be right, and today's me may not like the me I would become after a decade on Wall Street, but at first glance it seems like even if I could only maintain my resolve for a few years, the payoff far outweighs my own well being. He is also opposed to valuing the far - life in general - over the near - people in your own home or community. Or even valuing them equally, AFAICT.

As a matter of history, though, I did not in fact choose such a career. Suboptimal or not, given what I did choose (consulting firm that helps companies invest and grow effectively in clean tech, nanotech, and biotech) I do not think I chose wrongly.
2013 June-August Life Hacks Thread 
by diegocaleiro — 2013-06-04T14:29:27.435Z

Why don't we have Life Hack thread like we do have Media Threads and Rationality Quote Threads?

Well, now we do.

I'm copying in the comments some hacks previously written about by others for your convenience, also check out the Munchkin post if you haven't, there are many interesting hacks there. Timewise, I've made it quarterly because it is harder to face a life hack than it is to face o quote, so less frequency may improve average quality. Below is a suggested description for them with structure taken from media threads. Any further ideas on how to improve the thread are welcome and should be made at the Metathread tree.

This is the quarterly thread for posting Life Hacks of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Four main thread-trees will be in the comment section.

1) There is substantial evidence for it (please post pointers to it)

2) I tried/ Friends tried/ There is some small evidence for it

3) Seems like a cool idea

4) Metathread

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please use the comment trees for level of certainty regarding effectiveness. There is a Metathread for comments about future threads.

Please post all Hacks separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Many Weak Arguments vs. One Relatively Strong Argument
by JonahS — 2013-06-04T03:32:04.987Z

My epistemic framework has recently undergone some major shifts, and I believe that my current epistemic framework is better than my previous one. In the past, I tended to try to discover and rely on a single relatively strong argument in favor or against a position. Since then, I’ve come to the conclusion that I should shift my focus toward discovering and relying on many independent weak arguments. In this post, I attempt to explain why. After I posted this article, I got lots of comments in response, and responded to them in this discussion post.

My previous reliance on an individual relatively strong argument

I’m a mathematician by training, and by inclination. In the past, I tried to achieve as much certainty as possible when I'd evaluate an important question.

An example: Something that I’ve thought a lot about is AI risk reduction effort as a target for effective philanthropy. In the past, I attempted to discover a single relatively strong argument for, or against, focus on AI risk reduction. Such an argument requires a number of inputs. An example of an input is an argument as to what kind of AI one should expect to be built by default. I spent a lot of time thinking about this and talking with people about it. What I found was that my views on the question were quite unstable, altering frequently and substantially in response to incoming evidence.

The phenomenon of [my position altering frequently and substantially in response to incoming evidence] was not limited to AI risk. It was characteristic of much of my thinking about important questions that could not be answered with clear-cut evidence. I recognized this as bad, but felt that I had no choice in the matter — I didn’t see another way to think about such questions, and I thought that some such questions are sufficiently important so as to warrant focus. My hope was that my views on these questions would gradually stabilize, but this didn’t happen with the passage of time.

An alternative — reliance on many weak independent arguments

While my views on various questions were bouncing around, I started to notice that some people seemed to be systematically better at answering questions that could not be answered with clear-cut evidence, in the sense that new data supported their prior views more often than new data supported my own prior views.

This puzzled me, as I hadn’t thought...
Meetup : West LA Meetup - Quantifying and Measuring for Self-Experimentation
by  — 2013-06-03T06:05:22.275Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Quantifying and Measuring for Self-Experimentation

WHEN:
05 June 2013 11:00:53PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7:00pm Wednesday, June 5th.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Discussion: We will review and brainstorm methods for measuring the effects of changes when doing self-experimentation (trying a new medication, work environment, life policy, etc.), and consider what failure modes might exist for different sorts of self-experiments. Very abstract, but we will start off with a few useful working examples!

No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible and useful to everyone who values thinking for themselves. There will be open general conversation until 7:30, and that's always a lot of good, fun, intelligent discussion!

I will bring a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Quantifying and Measuring for Self-Experimentation
The Use of Many Independent Lines of Evidence: The Basel Problem
by JonahS — 2013-06-03T04:42:02.380Z

This post describes how one can use many independent arguments to justifiably develop very high confidence in the truth of a statement. It ends with a case study: Euler’s use of several independent lines of evidence to develop confidence in the validity of his unrigorous solution to the Basel Problem.

Justifiably high confidence

In Einstein’s Arrogance, Eliezer described how Einstein could have been justifiably confident in the correctness of the theory of general relativity, even if it were to fail an empirical test:

In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington led expeditions to Brazil and to the island of Principe, aiming to observe solar eclipses and thereby test an experimental prediction of Einstein's novel theory of General Relativity. A journalist asked Einstein what he would do if Eddington's observations failed to match his theory. Einstein famously replied: "Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct."

[…]

If Einstein had enough observational evidence to single out the correct equations of General Relativity in the first place, then he probably had enough evidence to be damn sure that General Relativity was true.

[…]

"Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord; the theory is correct," doesn't sound nearly as appalling when you look at it from that perspective. And remember that General Relativity was correct, from all the vast space of possibilities.

Limits on the confidence conferred by a single argument

In Confidence levels inside and outside an argument Yvain described how one can't develop very high confidence in a statement based on a single good argument that makes the prediction with very high confidence, because there’s a sizable (even if small) chance that the apparently good argument is actually wrong.

How can this be reconciled with Einstein's justifiably high confidence in the truth of general relativity?

The use of many independent lines of evidence to develop high confidence

Something that I’ve always admired about Carl Shulman is that he often presents many different arguments in favor of a position, rather than a single argument. In Maximizing Cost-effectiveness via Critical Inquiry Holden Karnofsky wrote about how one can improve one’s confidence in a true statement by examining the statement from many different angles. Even though one can’t gain very high c...
Does model theory [psychology] predict anything? (book: "How We Reason" (2009)) 
by Jonathan_Graehl — 2013-06-03T03:11:39.898Z

Has anyone read "How We Reason" by Philip Johnson-Laird? He and others in his field (the "model theory" of psychology/cognitive science) claim that their studies refute the naive claim that human brains often operate in terms of logic or Bayesian reasoning (probablistic logic). I gather they'd say that we are not Jaynes' perfect Bayesian reasoning robot or even something resembling a computationally bounded approximation to it.

I'm intrigued by this recommendation:

... formal logic cannot be the basis for human reason. Johnson-Laird reviews evidence to this effect. For example, there are many valid conclusions that we never bother to draw because they are of no practical use to us. We also make systematic errors in reasoning that we would not make using logic. The content of logic problems used in research studies greatly affects their difficulty; it would not if logic were the primary process. We use knowledge to help us imagine possibilities and then evaluate the possibilities for consistency with other evidence.
Constrained by the span of short term memory, the strength of our general intellectual abilities, and our level of expertise, we construct and manipulate mental models of the problems we reason about. "...[F]rom the meanings of sentences in connected discourse, the listener implicitly sets up a much abbreviated and not especially linguistic model of the narrative ... Where the model is incomplete, material may even be unwittingly invented to render the memory more meaningful or more plausible." We can manipulate these models in a number of ways, including updating them with new information, combining two models when appropriate, searching for confirming evidence or information, and using counterexamples to challenge a model's validity.
Mental model theory explains a number of systematic errors human beings make when reasoning. For example, the difficulty of reasoning problems is related to the number of models that must be held simultaneously in memory to work through them. And we exhibit a recurring bias to use a single model to reason about situations that have more possibilities than we can keep track of. We oversimplify. Consistent with model theory, we have difficulty reasoning with information about what is false about a situation.

The real key to human rationality is our ability to recognize and grasp the implications of counte

...
Rationality Quotes June 2013
by Thomas — 2013-06-03T03:08:50.803Z

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Meetup : Bratislava Meetup IV.
by Viliam_Bur — 2013-06-02T20:11:18.085Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava Meetup IV.

WHEN:
24 June 2013 06:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Malewill Cafe, Uršulínska 9, Bratislava

We will see each other at Malewill café.

Because of many new members, this time the meetup will be unstructured -- the goal is to meet each other, and talk about us, our goals and expectations from our community.

Any questions? Call: +421-908-158110 (Viliam)

Stretneme sa v pondelok o šiestej v Malewill café na rohu Primaciálneho námestia, v zadnej nefajčiarskej miestnosti. Keďže minule prišlo veľa nových ľudí a mali sme nabitý program, tentokrát nie je formálny program žiaden, cieľom je zoznámiť sa, porozprávať sa o svojich plánoch, a pouvažovať, čo môžeme spolu dosiahnuť.

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava Meetup IV.
Risques existentiels en Français
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-06-02T17:19:57.957Z

I've just been interviewed by Radio-Canada (in French) for their program "Dessine moi un Dimanche". There really wasn't enough time (the interview apparently lasted nine minutes; it felt like two), but I managed to touch upon some of the technology risks of the coming century (including AI).

The segment can be found here: http://www.radio-canada.ca/emissions/dessine_moi_un_dimanche/2012-2013/chronique.asp?idChronique=295886