trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday July 6
by JGWeissman — 2011-07-04T19:07:27.946Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday July 6

WHEN:
06 July 2011 06:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
4187 Campus Dr, University Center, Irvine, CA 92612

This continues the weekly meetups in Irvine. As always the meetup at the outdoor food court in the University Center near UCI, from 6:00 to 8:00 (or whenever we actually decide to leave). Look for the sign with naive neural classifiers for bleggs and rubes.

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday July 6
Richard Dawkins on vivisection: "But can they suffer?"
by XiXiDu — 2011-07-04T16:56:20.407Z

The great moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism, famously said,'The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but rather, "Can they suffer?" Most people get the point, but they treat human pain as especially worrying because they vaguely think it sort of obvious that a species' ability to suffer must be positively correlated with its intellectual capacity.

[...]

Nevertheless, most of us seem to assume, without question, that the capacity to feel pain is positively correlated with mental dexterity - with the ability to reason, think, reflect and so on. My purpose here is to question that assumption. I see no reason at all why there should be a positive correlation. Pain feels primal, like the ability to see colour or hear sounds. It feels like the sort of sensation you don't need intellect to experience. Feelings carry no weight in science but, at the very least, shouldn't we give the animals the benefit of the doubt?

[...]

I can see a Darwinian reason why there might even be be a negative correlation between intellect and susceptibility to pain. I approach this by asking what, in the Darwinian sense, pain is for. It is a warning not to repeat actions that tend to cause bodily harm. Don't stub your toe again, don't tease a snake or sit on a hornet, don't pick up embers however prettily they glow, be careful not to bite your tongue. Plants have no nervous system capable of learning not to repeat damaging actions, which is why we cut live lettuces without compunction.

It is an interesting question, incidentally, why pain has to be so damned painful. Why not equip the brain with the equivalent of a little red flag, painlessly raised to warn, "Don't do that again"?

[...] my primary question for today: would you expect a positive or a negative correlation between mental ability and ability to feel pain? Most people unthinkingly assume a positive correlation, but why?

Isn't it plausible that a clever species such as our own might need less pain, precisely because we are capable of intelligently working out what is good for us, and what damaging events we should avoid? Isn't it plausible that an unintelligent species might need a massive wallop of pain, to drive home a lesson that we can learn with less powerful inducement?

At very least, I conclude that we have no general reason to think that non-human animals feel pain less acutely t

...
[LINK] "The Limits of Intelligence"
by Richard_Kennaway — 2011-07-04T16:29:44.004Z

Article in current Scientific American (first para and bullet points, rest is paywalled).

Podcast by the author (free).

The author, Douglas Fox, argues that there may be physical limits to how intelligent a brain made of neurons can become, limits that may not be very distant from where we are now.

He makes evolutionary arguments at a couple of points, suggesting that he is talking about how smart an organism could have evolved, rather than how smart we might make ourselves; he certainly isn't talking about how smart a machine we might create out of different materials.

From the podcast (I don't have access to the article):

Four routes to higher intelligence, which he argues won't get us very far:

Increase the speed of axons. But that means making them fatter, which drives the neurons further apart, neutralising the gain.

Increase brain size. That needs more energy, and before long you get something unsustainable. You get longer pathways in a larger brain, which slows them down. The neurons will make more connections, which makes them bigger, so the number of neurons scales slower than the volume of the brain. And anyway, whales and elephants have bigger brains than us but don't seem to be more intelligent, and cows have brains a hundred times the size of a mouse brain but aren't a hundred times smarter. So brain size doesn't seem to matter; at best the relationship with intelligence is unclear.

Packing more neurons into the existing volume by making them smaller. You run into signal to noise problems. The ion channels involved in generating action potentials are a certain size, and you must have fewer in a smaller neuron, hence more random variation. The result is neurons spontaneously firing.

Offload intelligence support. Books and the internet will remember things for you and help you tap the collective intelligence of your social network. Compare social insects doing things that they couldn't do individually. But by alleviating the necessity of intelligence this may even have reduced the evolutionary pressure to get smarter.

He's described simply as an "award-winning author", but I don't know if he has any scientific background, and there are too many people of the same name to Google him.
Personal Examples of using Bayes' Theorem
by Raemon — 2011-07-04T15:56:58.060Z

I only have a tenuous grasp of Bayes' Theorem. I get the concept. But I haven't internalized it enough to make use of it in real world situations. I'm trying to decide whether it really makes sense for me to put in the effort to understanding it when I could be putting that effort into other things. I'm curious what examples people here have of making use of it in a concrete way in real life? (In particular, real life examples that weren't contingent on you being a scientist)
Meetup : Melbourne's first Friday of the month meetup
by matt — 2011-07-04T07:43:09.199Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne's first Friday of the month meetup

WHEN:
05 August 2011 07:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
55 Walsh St, West Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

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

We meet on the first Friday of each month. We formally start at 7pm, but I'll be here from 6pm and you're all welcome. You're all also welcome to BYO liquid refreshments.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne's first Friday of the month meetup
Recent site changes, Mon 4th July
by matt — 2011-07-04T07:25:40.646Z

We've pushed out some new changes, including a front page. Promoted articles are now available at http://lesswrong.com/promoted/ and from the MAIN link in the top nav.

Most of the recent changes were requested here or here.

This is the place to comment on the new changes… but please remember that:

we're watching this thread, and if we've done anything really horrible, you or someone else will tell us, and we'll fix it; so

be polite, and explain clearly what we need to do to make you happy.

Front page "Featured Articles" are edited here. I humbly suggest that willing featured article editors nominate themselves in the comments, and everyone who doesn't get a lot of support forgets this link and leaves that page alone.

And if spam becomes a problem for the front page, the about page, or the comment markup help, poke a wiki admin and ask them to "protect" the special pages.
Hype Aversion/Backlash as an Immune Response?
by lucidfox — 2011-07-04T05:58:02.489Z

"Check out this book/movie/show! It's got everything! Everyone and their mother is talking about it, and it seems just your type!"

Sounds familiar? Chances are, more than once such hype made you, if anything, more reluctant to approach the work in question, and if you do, you may be up for bitter disappointment; the work may not even be that bad per se, and fairly enjoyable if you just heard about it on your own, but it simply fails in your mind to live up to the massive hype that positions it as the best thing to happen to the universe since the Big Bang.

I know that in such situations, my mental energy is often channeled in the opposite direction: into venting bitter disappointment, into arguing that it's not as great as everyone seems to think it is, into looking for just about anything critical anyone has to say about it, anywhere. Finding refuge in knowing that at least I'm not lonely in my dissent. Except when I apparently am.

Typically, I expect any work of fiction, community, or social movement to have its share of praisers and critics. When a healthy balance of positive and negative opinions is preserved, I'm calm about it, regardless of my personal opinion on the subject. When something is universally critically panned, it sometimes sparks my curiosity. ("Come on, it can't possibly be that bad!" Except when it occasionally is.) But when something is unanimously liked, and criticism is next to nonexistant, and I just plain "don't get it"... then things get ugly.

"What in the blazes did everyone find in it? Why am I not affected by this outbreak of unanimous praise?" I've had this feeling before about Neon Genesis Evangelion (which by now has got its own share of skepticism and criticism), about the Haruhi Suzumiya franchise (which I now actually like, although its obsessive fandom still rubs me the wrong way); the current contenders are Twitter, Steven Moffat's grip over Doctor Who, and My Little Pony.

I suspect that in my case, the backlash is an automatic response that is a part of my "defense mechanism", so to speak, against hostile memes. I can usually detect not-so-subtle attempts at mind manipulation, such as loaded questions, biased presentation and dodging inconvenient subjects; this is why, for example, I don't watch TV news and feel uncomfortable when someone else does, as if I can feel it trying to invade my brain...
Are search engines perpetuating our biases?
by TCB — 2011-07-04T01:29:30.887Z

One of the great things about the internet is that there is a social group for almost every interest. Pick an unusual hobby or ideology, and there is probably an online community centered around it. This is especially wonderful for those of us who never quite fit in to mainstream society.

But there's also a downside to this aspect of the internet, which is that the more we immerse ourselves in these small online communities, the less exposure we get to the rest of the world. And the less exposure we get to the rest of the world, the easier it is for us to hold onto false beliefs that the rest of the world rejects. (Of course, it's also easier to hold onto true beliefs that the rest of the world rejects.)

For instance, suppose you believe that pasteurizing milk makes it less healthy, and we should all drink our milk raw. (I picked this example because it's something decidedly non-mainstream that I believe with high probability.) I'm fairly susceptible to social pressures, so at least for me, my belief in this proposition goes up when I'm hanging out with intelligent people who agree with me, and it goes down when I'm hanging out with intelligent people who look at me like I'm insane when I claim such a thing. They don't need to state evidence in either direction to influence my belief-probability, though that certainly helps. The important thing is that I think they're smart and therefore I trust their opinions.

Unsurprisingly, if I spend most of my time hanging out with normal, intelligent, scientifically-minded Americans, I start to question my beliefs regarding raw milk, but if I spend all my time on raw-milk-promoting websites, then my belief that raw milk is good for us is reaffirmed.

We like having our beliefs affirmed; it makes us happy when other people think we are right about things. We'd rather seek out people who agree with us and can relate to our mindsets than seek out groups where everyone disagrees with us strongly. This is normal and reasonable, and it's why all of us rationalists are hanging out here on LessWrong instead of lurking in creationist forums. However, it does put us at risk of creating feedback loops: unusual ideas are proposed by people we respect, we affirm those ideas, others repeat those ideas, and so their prevalence and repetition causes them to be repeated more....
Triangle NC Meetup July 6th
by curiousepic — 2011-07-04T00:36:05.517Z

hwc and I have tried submitting this meetup through the new function, but it seems to break the link. Please let us know if anyone knows what's going on.

In any case,

Location:

Caribou Coffee‎, 1406 E Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC

Date:
2011-07-06, 7:00 PM EDT

(Proposed) Agenda:
The game of Nomic.
Rational discussion.
What are LessWrong's thoughts on Venkatesh Rao, Gregory Rader, and Daniel Lemire?
by InquilineKea — 2011-07-03T23:00:28.606Z

Venkatesh Rao (who is amazing because he literally constantly challenges our definitions of everything):

http://www.quora.com/Venkatesh-Rao/Quora-Portfolio-Year-1

http://www.quora.com/Venkatesh-Rao

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/be-slightly-evil/

http://www.ribbonfarm.com

Gregory Rader:

http://www.quora.com/Gregory-Rader

http://onthespiral.com/

Daniel Lemire:

http://www.quora.com/Daniel-Lemire and http://lemire.me/blog/ are also super-super-super interesting

==

I tried doing google searches of site:lesswrong.com + their names (or websites), but ended up with little. I'd like to see what LessWrong thinks of Rao in particular. I have NEVER seen posts that were as amazingly insightful as his. It's worth it just to sacrifice a day just to see all his amazing posts. The others were also amazing and really make you think about everything.

==

E.g. with Rao, you have

My favorites:

http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-benefits-to-obtaining-a-PhD-in-the-field-of-Education/answer/Venkatesh-Rao?srid=0WH

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/05/19/intellectual-gluttony/

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/04/07/extroverts-introverts-aspies-and-codies

http://www.quora.com/What-careers-or-industries-are-the-most-meritocratic/answer/Venkatesh-Rao?srid=0WH

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2008/09/11/how-to-measure-information-work

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-tips-for-advanced-writers/answer/Venkatesh-Rao

http://www.quora.com/Children/Why-do-some-humans-not-want-children/answer/Venkatesh-Rao

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-motivate-oneself-to-finish-a-PhD/answer/Venkatesh-Rao

http://www.quora.com/History/What-is-the-most-important-human-decision-ever-made/answer/Venkatesh-Rao

http://www.quora.com/Is-the-following-follower-model-the-new-standard-of-social-connection/answer/Venkatesh-Rao

http://www.quora.com/What-discipline-specific-principles-help-reframe-activities-so-as-to-provide-useful-insights-and-or-improvement

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" -- Knuth, computer science

Never design a law with the worst case in mind -- law/legislation

Rader:

http://onthespiral.com/stop-wasting-time-and-effort-developing-fragile-capabilities

http://onthespiral.com/unifying-value-universe

http://onthespiral.com/principles-disruptive-learning-environments

Lemire:

http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2010/08/16/working-long-hours-is-stupid

http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2010/02/08/tradi...
[SEQ RERUN] The Virtue of Narrowness
by Tyrrell_McAllister — 2011-07-03T19:47:09.286Z

Today's post, The Virtue of Narrowness, was originally published on 07 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It was perfectly all right for Isaac Newton to explain just gravity, just the way things fall down - and how planets orbit the Sun, and how the Moon generates the tides - but not the role of money in human society or how the heart pumps blood. Sneering at narrowness is rather reminiscent of ancient Greeks who thought that going out and actually looking at things was manual labor, and manual labor was for slaves.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we're 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 Proper Use of Doubt, 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.
Has SIAI/FHI considered putting up prizes for contributions to important problems?
by jsalvatier — 2011-07-03T17:26:41.282Z

Because of my interest in reducing LessWrong's public goods problem, I've been reading about prizes. Prizes seem like they could be very useful for shifting the perception of the scientific and mathematical public on the importance of existential risk.

Prizes have a couple of attractive properties

Shift public perception about what is important and possible

Draw submissions from non-traditional sources

Mobilize existing resources to work on your problem (e.g. people use grants to try to win prizes)

It seems to me that there are several open problems related to existential-risk that might be amenable to prizes. Three prizes seem immediately attractive:

Reflective Decision Theory - This is an important unsolved problem, and the criteria seem like they could be fairly objective (a set of problems the decision theory must handle 'well', plus some judging). Of course, perhaps SIAI/FHI do not want reflective decision theory to be public; in that case a prize would be a bad idea. This prize should probably be called The Good Prize after I.J. Good.

Contributions towards a Theory of Friendliness - Shifting public opinion on this issue is very important, so I think a prize is attractive. The criteria for strong contributions are fuzzier, so you would need especially respected and trusted judges.

Contributions towards understanding existential risks - Same as above.

Is my enthusiasm for this approach unwarranted? Are there other related topics amenable to prizes?

Disclosure: I have only recently read up on prizes and I think I am in fanboy mode, so take my excitement with a grain of salt.
Hanson Debating Yudkowsky, Jun 2011
by XiXiDu — 2011-07-03T16:59:29.894Z

On Wednesday I debated my ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky at a private Jane Street Capital event (crude audio here, from 4:45; better video here [as of July 14]).

I “won” in the sense of gaining more audience votes — the vote was 45-40 (him to me) before, and 32-33 after the debate. That makes me two for two, after my similar “win” over Bryan Caplan (42-10 before, 25-20 after). This probably says little about me, however, since contrarians usually “win” such debates.

Our topic was: Compared to the farming and industrial revolutions, intelligence explosion first-movers will quickly control a much larger fraction of their new world. He was pro, I was con. We also debated this subject here on Overcoming Bias from June to December 2008. Let me now try to summarize my current position.

[...]

It thus seems quite unlikely that one AI team could find an architectural innovation powerful enough to let it go from tiny to taking over the world within a few weeks.

Link: overcomingbias.com/2011/07/debating-yudkowsky.html
Gender and Libido
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-07-03T14:20:40.660Z

There was a historical shift in beliefs.

But the one we’re concerned with is that women’s libidos went from being considered as powerful or more so than men’s to being essentially erased. Pre-Renaissance examples of horny ladies abound, from the Greeks onward; make your own list, but do include Chaucer. He’s such fun. This change in attitudes appears to have been religiously motivated, and based on the idea that women are more spiritual and sacred than men, meaning less horny. Again, make your own list of contemporary leftovers of this attitude; there are plenty.

By the 18th century, it was taken as read that a woman who did experience (or at least express) sexual desire was suffering from a disorder. One important 1775 study of the subject linked the problem to “secret pollutions”, i.e. wanking, and (I swear I am not making this up) eating too much chocolate. I guess that’d go a ways toward explaining this advertisement. Women were diagnosed with, treated for, and often operated upon for “nymphomania”, the dread condition that causes a woman to want sex. (Talk to your doctor; you may suffer from it yourself!) And yes, by “operated upon”, I mean clitoridectomy. And yes, that’s fucking appalling.

I find this very odd. How could a major cultural lineage be wrong about something so much a part of ordinary experience?

When I say wrong, I don't necessarily mean that we're right, or the ancients were right, though there's a lot of evidence that the Victorians were wrong.

My favorite theory is that people's amount of desire for sex varies sufficiently that there's enough noise to make it easy to see patterns that aren't there. I leave the possibility open that there was a change (possibly dietary) which affected libido levels differently between men and women.

People are sufficiently punitive about sex that there's going to be lies and misdirection to support the current theory about how people are supposed to be.
Consequences of increased ability to kill
by DataPacRat — 2011-07-03T06:52:03.041Z

At present, if one person chooses to, they can kill a few dozen to a few hundred people. As we discover new technologies, that number is, most likely, only going to go up - to the point where any given individual has the power to kill millions. (And this isn't a very distant future, either; it's entirely possible to put together a basement biology lab of sufficient quality to create smallpox for just a few thousand dollars.)

If we want to avoid human extinction, I can think of two general approaches. One starts by assume that humans are generally untrustworthy, and involves trying to keep any such technology out of peoples' hands, no matter what other possible benefits such knowledge may offer. This method has a number of flaws, the most obvious being the difficulty in keeping such secrets contained, another being the classic "who watches the watchers?" problem.

The other doesn't start with that assumption - and, instead, is to try to figure out what it takes to keep people from /wanting/ to kill large numbers of other people... a sort of "Friendly Human Problem". For example, we might start with a set of societies in which every individual has the power to kill any other at any moment, seeing what particular social norms allow people to at least generally get along with each other, and then encouraging those norms as the basis for when those people gain increasingly potentially-lethal knowledge.

Most likely, there will be (or already are) some people who try the first approach, and some who try the second - which seems very likely to cause friction when they rub against each other.

In the medium-to-long term, if we do establish viable off-Earth colonies, an important factor to consider is that once you're in Earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system; including to asteroids which can be nudged into Earth orbit to mine... or nudged to crash into Earth itself. Any individual who has the power to move around the solar system, such as to create a new self-sufficient colony somewhere (which, I've previously established to my own satisfaction, is the only way for humanity to survive a variety of extinction-level events), will have the power to kill billions. If sapience is to survive, we will /have/ to deal with people having lethal power undreamt of by today's worst tyrannical regimes - which would seem to make the first approach /entirely/ un...