trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[SEQ RERUN] Is Morality Given?
by MinibearRex — 2012-06-25T04:30:45.809Z

Today's post, Is Morality Given? was originally published on 06 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A dialogue on the idea that morality is an absolute external truth.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Is Morality Preference?, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Empirical Sleep Time
by rlpowell — 2012-06-24T19:09:29.002Z

I'm thinking that it should be possible to decide when to sleep based on reduced performance.

Can anyone suggest a tool for that purpose? Perhaps some reaction time testing software?

I guess I would have to track myself during the day to make a baseline, which is fine.

But without some sort of test I end up staying up way pass effectiveness, which is a waste of my time.

-Robin
Your existence is informative
by KatjaGrace — 2012-06-24T17:51:18.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

Warning: this post is technical.

Suppose you know that there are a certain number of planets, N. You are unsure about the truth of a statement Q. If Q is true, you put a high probability on life forming on a given arbitrary planet. If Q is false, you put a low probability on this. You have a prior probability for Q. So far you have not taken into account your observation that the planet you are on has life. How do you update on this evidence, to get a posterior probability for Q? Since you don’t know which is ‘this’ planet, with respect to the model, you can’t update directly on ‘there is life on this planet’, by excluding worlds where this planet doesn’t have life. And you can’t necessarily treat ‘this’ as an arbitrary planet, since you wouldn’t have seen it if it didn’t have life.

I have an ongoing disagreement with an associate who suggests that you should take ‘this planet has life’ into account by conditioning on ‘there exists a planet with life’. That is,

P(Q|there is life on this planet) = P(Q|there exists a planet with life).

Here I shall explain my disagreement.

Nick Bostrom argues persuasively that much science would be impossible if we treated ‘I observe X’ as ‘someone observes X’. This is basically because in a big world of scientists making measurements, at some point somebody will make most mistaken measurements. So if all you know when you measure the temperature of a solution to be 15 degrees is that you are not in a world where nobody ever measures its temperature to be 15 degrees, this doesn’t tell you much about the temperature.

You can add other apparently irrelevant observations you make at the same time – e.g. that the table is blue chipboard – in order to make your total observations less likely to arise once in a given world (at its limit, this is the suggestion of FNC). However it seems implausible that you should make different inferences from taking a measurement when you can also see a detailed but irrelevant picture at the same time than those you make with limited sensory input. Also the same problem re-emerges if the universe is supposed to be larger. Given that the universe is thought to be very, very large, this is a problem. Not to mention, ...
Resolving Paradoxes of Intuition
by KatjaGrace — 2012-06-24T17:25:11.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

Shelly Kagan gave a nice summary of some problems involved in working out whether death is bad for one. I agree with Robin’s response, and have postedbefore about some of the particular issues. Now I’d like to make a more general observation.

First I’ll summarize Kagan’s story. The problems are something like this. It seems like death is pretty bad. Thought experiments suggest that it is bad for the person who dies, not just their friends, and that it is bad even if it is painless. Yet if a person doesn’t exist, how can things be bad for them? Seemingly because they are missing out on good things, rather than because they are suffering anything. But it is hard to say when they bear the cost of missing out, and it seems like things that happen happen at certain times. Or maybe they don’t. But then we’d have to say all the people who don’t exist are missing out, and that would mean a huge tragedy is happening as long as those people go unconceived. We don’t think a huge tragedy is happening, so lets say it isn’t. Also we don’t feel too bad about people not being born earlier, like we do about them dying sooner. How can we distinguish these cases of deprivation from non-existence from the deprivation that happens after death? Not in any satisfactorily non-arbitrary way. So ‘puzzles still remain’.

This follows a pattern common to other philosophical puzzles. Intuitions say X sometimes, and not X other times. But they also claim that one should not care about any of the distinctions that can reasonably be made between the times when they say X is true and the times when they say X is false.

Intuitions say you should save a child dying in front of you. Intuitions say you aren’t obliged to go out of your way to protect a dying child in Africa. Intuitions also say physical proximity, likelihood of being blamed, etc shouldn’t be morally relevant.

Intuitions say you are the same person today as tomorrow. Intuitions say you are not the same person as Napoleon. Intuitions also say that whether you are the same person or not shouldn’t depend on any particular bit of wiring in your head, and that changing a bit of wiring doesn’t make you slightly less you.

Of course not everyone shares all of these intuitions (I don’t). But for those who do, there are problems. These problems can be responded to by trying to think of other ...
Minimum Viable Workout Routine is Dangerously Misinformative
by betterthanwell — 2012-06-24T13:02:42.468Z

Edit: Dangerously misleading on one crucial point.

This started out as a short reply to the Less Wrong post Minimum Viable Workout Routine. Unfortunately I was unable to summarise my points sufficiently, so this reply grew into a post of it's own. I realize that the following is a bit rude to the original poster, and I apologize. Minimum Viable Workout Routine seems to be backed solely by anecdotal personal experience. The majority of the post, which addresses strength training seems decent, and not obviously wrong. However, the following paragraph is dangerously wrong:

A note about cardio: Cardiovascular capacity (V02 max) has shown a high degree of correlation to all cause mortality. Why aren't I recommending cardio? Because the only way to increase V02 max is with high intensity exercise. Between high intensity weight lifting and high intensity cardio, high intensity weightlifting easily wins for a newbie. A newbie, especially a significantly out of shape one, will not be capable of a level of cardio exertion that results in a significant adaptation. This can result in a lot of effort with very little in the way of improvement. This is soul-destroyingly frustrating.

Leaving this uncontested could be dangerous to your health. As we shall see, cardiovascular capacity is indeed important to survival and longevity. It is also quite easily trainable, it needs not be soul crushingly frustrating, and it should not be overlooked.

A couple of cool findings from the physiology of exercise:

Instead of having me trying to convince you, we'll take a look at the science, and see what we find.

You can assume with reasonable confidence that the findings are valid, well-corroborated, and furthermore, the findings quoted in this post have been found to apply to the general population, to the untrained, the athlete, the elderly, and the ill, even though I'm only able to present here a selection of these results.

Human physiology, and its response to exercise is surprisingly stable across genders, race, age and physical fitness. What works for the well trained athlete will also work for the utter newbie, the obese, and patients with heart disease.

Strength training is also important to health, increases in maximal strength of the large muscle groups tends to cause large increases in endurance, as...
[SEQ RERUN] Is Morality Preference?
by MinibearRex — 2012-06-24T04:46:58.978Z

Today's post, Is Morality Preference? was originally published on 05 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A dialogue on the idea that morality is a subset of our desires.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Moral Complexities, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Web of Trust lists Singularity.org as having a bad reputation
by RobertLumley — 2012-06-23T16:28:05.536Z

I'm not too sure who is familiar with Web of Trust, so I'll start with a brief description. It's basically a browser app that inserts a circle next to text links in websites. The color of the circle indicates whether or not it's average rating by users rates it as having a "good reputation" (green) or a "bad reputation" (red). There are four criteria: Trustworthiness, Vendor Reliability, Privacy, and Child Safety.

Singularity.org's printout is here. As you may have guessed from the title, Web of Trust lists Singularity.org as "poor" in trustworthiness, vendor reliability, and privacy. There's a comment that, when translated (via Google translate) says "Mass mailing of non-thematic Forums". It's also commented under the category "malicious content/viruses".

I'm not entirely sure how these ratings are generated, (How Ratings Work, related) but I've used it for several years, and this is only the second time I've disagreed with a rating. I've always found WOT to be very reliable, and a decent way of warning me if a site is unsafe so I don't have to think about it. So I was fairly alarmed when I saw the red circle there, since I'd imagine it's turning away people that don't know any better. If LW had a red circle, I never would have come here. I'm not sure what SI or LW can do about it, but there's a "click here if you are the owner of this site" button, although I don't know what that does. I've left my own rating on there, but it didn't seem to change the overall rankings.

Edit: When I made this post, the scorecard read Trustworthiness 30, Vendor Reliability 31, Privacy 31, Child Safety 100.
[Link] RSA Animate: extremely entertaining LW-relevant cartoons
by Multiheaded — 2012-06-23T13:51:21.039Z

It's a brilliant idea: a lecture by a cool modern thinker, illustrated by word-by-word doodles on a whiteboard. Excellent at pulling you along the train of thought and absolutely disallowing boredom.

The lectures' content is pretty great too, although there's a definite left-wing, populist bent that's exploting today's post-crisis hot button issues (they got Zizek, for god's sake) - some might not like it. Regardless, it's all very amusing and enlightening. Been linked to before in a comment or to, but it deserves a headline.

You can start here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI&feature=relmfu (But they're all worth watching!)
Meetup : Pittsburgh: Belief in Belief
by KatjaGrace — 2012-06-23T09:57:48.545Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh: Belief in Belief

WHEN:
30 June 2012 11:30:00AM (+0100)

WHERE:
EatUnique, Craig St, Pittsburgh, PA

Come and eat lunch and talk about those things you don't believe in believing in believing.

Suggested reading: http://lesswrong.com/lw/i4/belief_in_belief/

Eatunique serves salads, wraps, sandwiches, drinks, and that kind of thing. Call 412-304-6258 if you can't find us.

Our mailing list is at https://groups.google.com/group/lw-pgh?pli=1

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh: Belief in Belief
Wes Weimer from Udacity presents his list of things you should learn
by Solvent — 2012-06-23T07:04:43.203Z

I've just gotten to the end of Udacity's CS262 course in programming languages. It's been pretty good. Wes Weimer, the lecturer, seems to be a really cool guy. There's a quote from HPMOR in the final exam, which I thought was pretty cool.

In the last part of the last lecture, Weimer gives advice on what we should learn next. You can watch it here.

He advises that you learn the following (paraphrased):

Philosophy until you've covered epistemology, formal logic, free will, the philosophy of science, and what it's like to be a bat.

Cognitive psychology until you've covered perception, consciousness, and the Flynn effect.

Speech or rhetoric until you've covered persuasion.

Anthropology and gender studies, to get an idea of what behaviors are socially constructed and which are essential

Statistics, until you can avoid being fooled by either others or yourself

Religion or ethics until you've covered the relationship between unhappiness and unrealized desires

Physics and engineering until you can explain how a microphone, speaker, and radio all work

Government until you have an opinion about legislating morality and the relative importance of freedom and equality.

History until you are not condemned to make the mistakes of the past.

Life until you are happy. They say ignorance is bliss, but they are wrong all but finitely often.

I thought that was all really useful (except maybe the last two). I've learned up to his required level of philosophy, cognitive psychology, and religion and ethics. I'm working on the physics and gender studies.

(Incidentally, I strongly recommend Udacity for learning programming. It's really good.)
[SEQ RERUN] Moral Complexities
by MinibearRex — 2012-06-23T05:53:41.592Z

Today's post, Moral Complexities was originally published on 04 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Key questions for two different moral intuitions: morality-as-preference, and morality-as-given.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Bedrock of Fairness, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Draft of Edwin Jaynes' "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science" online, with lost chapter 30
by buybuydandavis — 2012-06-23T05:48:16.443Z

http://thiqaruni.org/mathpdf9/(86).pdf

The book didn't include Chapter 30 - "MAXIMUM ENTROPY: MATRIX FORMULATION"

Opening in adobe seems to work out better for me.
Balancing Costs to Ourselves with Benefits to Others
by jefftk — 2012-06-22T22:31:55.112Z

Once you accept the idea that we have some obligation to try to help other people you are faced with the question of how to trade off costs for yourself against benefits for others. Questions like how much should I give?, should I avoid slave-created chocolate?, and should I become a doctor? are facets of this broader question of "how much should I give up to help others?"

The simplest approach to this, which comes pretty naturally to me and to most people, is to compartmentalize. You figure out how much you can afford to donate, whether there are foods you're willing to give up, how often to give blood or other body parts, and how much time you can spend volunteering. Within each category you do the best you can to find the right balance. For example, Alexander Berger writes:

I have a policy on how much money I give to charity, and I decided to donate a kidney, but both decisions depended on the specific circumstances of what would be asked of me.

The problem with this approach is that sometimes you can do better, both for yourself and for others, by trading off between categories. Say the positive effect of giving $1200 to the AMF is about the same as of donating a kidney. Perhaps if I looked at things in terms of having a policy for monetary donation and another for organ donation I might decide to give $X and also donate a kidney, but I'm really not that excited about donating the kidney. I might be happier if I gave $X+$1200 but kept my kidney, which would be neutral from the perspective of benefit to others.

I'm think the right framework for thinking about this sort of thing is to decide that there's a certain amount of happiness you're willing to forgo for the sake of others, and then do the most good you can within that bound. [1] This doesn't have to be even a very large amount of happiness; you can do a lot of good by giving future income raises to effective charity.

(This still doesn't answer the question of how much you should be willing to sacrifice for others. I don't have a good answer for that yet.)

I also posted this on my blog.

[1] Technically, this is the knapsack problem, which is NP-hard. But in practice the actually difficult bit is getting good estimates for the value of all the competing good choices and their likely effects on your happiness.
Questions for shminux
by Thomas — 2012-06-22T19:35:38.437Z

As mister shminux mentioned somewhere, he is happy and qualified to answer questions in the field of the Relativity. Here is mine:

A long rod (a cylinder) could have a large escape velocity in the direction of its main axe. From its end, to the "infinity". Larger than the speed of light. While the perpendicular escape velocity is lesser than the speed of light.

Is this rod then an asymmetric black hole?
Regression To The Mean [Draft][Request for Feedback]
by faul_sname — 2012-06-22T17:55:51.917Z

"Rewarding good performance leads to faster improvement than punishing bad performance"

"In general, unusually bad performance improves after punishment, but good performance tends not to improve and sometimes even gets worse after praise is administered."

These statements seem contradictory, yet both describe real effects. The apparent contradiction is caused by a phenomenon known as "regression to the mean," which states that the measurement after an exceptional measurement will be closer to average. The improvement after a reprimand is caused not by any effect that reprimand had, nor was the worsening after praise due to the praise. Both observations were due to regression to the mean.

Regression to the mean is caused by two things.

1. Exceptionally good performance is far above average, and exceptionally bad performance is far below average.

2. Most performance is about average.

Let's put this in concrete terms. Let's say we are trying to teach our friend Bob to play darts. He's not very good yet, and while he almost always hits the board, he can't really get a higher level of accuracy than that.

On his 12th throw, Bob misses the dartboard entirely. This is extraordinarily bad, even for him. On his next throw, he gets an 8, which is fairly typical, and much better.

On his 57th throw, your friend manages to get a bullseye. You slap him on the back, congratulating him on his improvement. It seems your friend really is getting the hang of this after all. Proud of his accomplishment, Bob lines up his next attempt. He cocks his arm, throws, and...

Gets a 12.

This is regression to the mean. Since there is a large random factor in darts, especially for unskilled players, a good throw will probably not be followed up with another good throw (since good throws are rare, and one shot is independent of another). This effect shows up whenever there is a large random component in performance.

It's important to be aware of when an exceptional observation was likely due to random variation in measurement, not an exceptional characteristic of the thing being measured. For example, stock performance is mostly random. If one of your stocks does extremely well this year, you should expect it to perform much closer to average next year. If your kid scores 160 on his/her first IQ test, you should expect lower performance on lat...
Weekly LW Meetups: Brussels, Cambridge MA, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Helsinki, Phoenix, Sao Paulo, Tucson, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2012-06-22T16:15:04.618Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

São Paulo Meet Up 3: 15 June 2012 02:00PM
Phoenix, Arizona: 15 June 2012 07:00PM
Brussels meetup: 16 June 2012 12:00PM
Washington DC Meetup: 17 June 2012 03:00PM
Tucson, Arizona: 20 June 2012 07:00PM
Helsinki Meetup: 21 June 2012 07:00PM
Berlin Meetup: 26 June 2012 07:30PM
First Cali, Colombia meetup: 02 July 2012 07:00PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

(Cambridge UK) Punt Trip: 16 June 2012 12:00PM
Less Wrong Cambridge (MA) third-Sundays meetup: 17 June 2012 02:00PM
Chicago games at Harold Washington Library (Sun 6/17): 17 June 2012 02:00PM
Summer Festival Megameetup at NYC: 23 June 2012 02:00PM
Less Wrong Sydney - June: 28 June 2012 06:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd...