trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A Novice Buddhist's Humble Experiences
by Will_Newsome — 2010-10-04T10:40:31.291Z

This is an introduction and description of vipassana meditation [edit: actually, anapanasati, not vipassana as such] more than Buddhism. Nonetheless I hope it serves as some testament to the value of Buddhist thought outside of meditation.

One day I hope more people take up the mantle of the Buddhist Conspiracy, the Bayesanga, and preach the good word of Bayesian Buddhism for all to hear. Until then, though, I'd like to follow in the spirit of fellow Bayesian Buddhist Luke Grecki, and describe some of my personal experiences with anapanasati meditation in the hopes that they'll convince you to check it out.

Nearly everything I've learned about anapanasati/vipassana comes from this excellent guide. It's easy to read and it actually explains the reasoning behind all of the things you're asked to do in vipassana. I heavily encourage you to give it a look. Meditation without instruction didn't lead me anywhere: I spent hours letting my mind get tossed about while I tried in vain to think of nothing. Trying to think of nothing is not a good idea. Vipassana is the practice of mindfulness, and it is recommended that you focus on your breath (focusing on breath is sort of a form of vipassana, and sort of its own thing; I haven't quite figured it out yet). I chose that as my anchor for meditation as recommended. Since reading the above linked guide on meditation, I've meditated a mere 4 times, for a total of 100 minutes. I'm a total novice! So don't confuse my experiences for the wisdom of a venerable teacher. But I think that maybe since you, too, will be a novice, hearing a novice's experiences might be useful. A mere 100 minutes of practice, and I've had many insights that have helped me think more clearly about mindfulness, compassion, self-improvement, the nature of feedback cycles and cascades, relationships between the body and cognition, and other diverse subjects.

The first meditation session was for 10 minutes, the second for 40 minutes, the third for 10 minutes, and the fourth for 40 minutes again. Below are descriptions of the two 40 minutes sessions. In the first, I experienced a state of jhana (the second jhana, to be precise; I'm about 70% confident), which was profoundly moving and awe-inspiring. In the the second, my mind was a little too chatty to reach a jhana, but I did accidentally have a few insights that I think are i...
(Some) politicians might be more rational than they appear.
by orthonormal — 2010-10-04T04:05:41.937Z

The following excerpt from an NPR story on TARP makes me feel that while the world is mad, I might have overestimated how much of that madness comes from our political leaders:

[Neel Kashkari, the Treasury official running TARP] became a sort of punching bag for legislators during his appearances at congressional hearings.

"When I went to testify, I was now one of the faces of this program. I had to do my best to explain what we were doing and why we were doing it, but I also had to represent us and show that I understood the American people's anger, I understood how deeply unfair this crisis is," he says. "But we had to stabilize the financial system, because if we failed, it would be the American people who bear the consequences of that."

Oftentimes, it meant he just had to sit there and absorb their verbal lashings.

"It was an opportunity for members of Congress to vent the anger they were hearing from their constituents. And because I was a young man at 35 years old, I think they felt it was appropriate for them to take it out on me — which is fine. I sat up there, I think, in total, for 25 hours of testimony — most of which was exceedingly hostile."

Throughout the testimony, Kashkari says one particularly biting moment sticks in his memory.

"I remember when Congressman [Elijah] Cummings from Maryland asked me if I was a chump," he says. "I remember just scratching my head, thinking to myself, 'Did he really just call me a chump? Or did I just imagine that?' "

But when the hearings were over, Kashkari says their attitudes switched from critical to congenial in a matter of moments.

"Oftentimes afterward, when the cameras were off, they would take you into a back room and tell you that they really appreciate how hard I was working or our team was working; that they support us and our programs, and let us know if they could be helpful," he says. "It was a 180-degree change from what they were showing in front of the camera. That obviously surprised me, but eventually I got used to it."

[...]

As for whether he'll go back to Washington? He's undecided for now.

"I am of two minds. On one hand, I am cynical of Washington and the politics and people more focused on maintaining their popularity or getting re-elected than doing the people's work," he says. "At the same time — in the depth of the national crisis in September of 2008

...
Are mass hallucinations a real thing?
by Scott Alexander — 2010-10-03T20:15:34.425Z

One of the explanations in the irrationality game thread for UFOs and other paranormal events seen by multiple people at once, like the was mass hysteria. This is also a common explanation given for any seemingly paranormal event that multiple people have independently witnessed.

But mass hysteria is mostly known from incidents where people hysterically believe they have some disease, or have some hysterical delusion (false belief). In cases where people report seeing something or having a hallucination, it tends to be a few people across a large society. For example, when reports of Spring-Heeled Jack were going around England, multiple people claimed to have seen Spring-Heeled Jack, but there were no cases of hundreds of people seeing him simultaneously; therefore, the hysteria could have selected for people who were already a little bit crazy, or it could just have been that out of millions of English people a few of them were willing to say anything to get attention.

Conformity pressures can cause people to misinterpret borderline perceptions - for example, if someone says a random pattern of dots form Jesus' face, I have no trouble believing that, thus primed, people will be able to find Jesus' face in the dots. But it's a much bigger leap to assert that if I say "Jesus is standing right there in front of you" with enough conviction, you'll suddenly see him too.

Does anyone have any evidence that mass hysteria can produce a vivid hallucination shared among multiple otherwise-sane people?
Understanding vipassana meditation
by  — 2010-10-03T18:12:59.408Z

Related to: The Trouble With "Good"

Followed by: Vipassana Meditation: Developing Meta-Feeling Skills

I describe a way to understand vipassana meditation (a form of Buddhist meditation) using the concept of affective judgment1. Vipassana aims to break the habit of blindly making affective judgments about mental states, and reverse the damage done by doing so in the past. This habit may be at the root of many problems described on LessWrong, and is likely involved in other mental issues. In the followup post I give details about how to actually practice vipassana.

The problem

Consider mindspace. Mindspace2 is the configuration space of a mind. Each mental state is identified with a position in mindspace, specified by its description along some dimensions. For human mindspace the affect of a mental state is a natural dimension to use, and it's the one that's most important for a conceptual understanding of vipassana meditation.

According to vipassana meditators, every time we pass through a point in mindspace we update its affect by judging3 whether that mental state is good or bad. On the other hand, the path we take through mindspace is strongly determined by this dimension alone, and we tend to veer towards clusters of positive affect and away from those with negative affect. The current judgment of a mental state is also strongly determined by its present affect. This can result in a dangerous feedback loop4, with small initial affective judgments compounding into deep mental patterns. It seems that this phenomenon is at the root of many problems mentioned here.5

Aside from causing systematic errors in thought and action it is claimed that this mechanism is also responsible for our mental suffering and restlessness. Vipassana aims to solve these problems by training us to observe and control our affective judgments, and break out of the pattern of blind reaction.

How it works

There are four aspects to the process:

Slowing the flood of affective judgments so one can distinctly observe them.

Learning to not compulsively make affective judgments.

Smoothing one's previously formed emotional gradients.

No longer forming strong emotional gradients.

They are synergistic practices and should be developed simultaneously. This will only be possible later on; at any given time you may only be able to practice one or more of them.

1) Slowing the flood

The ability to cal...
Berkeley LW Meet-up Saturday October 9
by LucasSloan — 2010-10-03T07:17:24.252Z

Last month, about 7 people showed up to the Berkeley LW meet-up. To build on that success, we will be meeting on Saturday, October 9 at 7 PM at the Starbucks at 2224 Shattuck Avenue. I'll be there with a sign saying "If you read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, come talk to me." Last time, we chatted at the Starbucks for about an hour then went somewhere for dinner, so don't feel like you have to eat before you come. Hope to see you there!
Slava!
by  — 2010-10-03T02:47:03.944Z

I want to begin with a musical example. The link is the Coronation Scene from Mussorsky's opera Boris Godunov, in which Boris is crowned Tsar while courtiers sing his praises. The tune is quoted from an old Russian hymn, "Slava Bogu" or "Glory to God." And, if I can trust the English subtitles, it's an apt choice, because the song in praise of the Tsar is not too far in tone from hymns in praise of God.

There is a mode of human expression that I'll call praise, though it is different from the ordinary sort of praise we give someone for a job well done. It glorifies its object; it piles glory upon glory; its aim is to uplift and exalt. Praise is given with pomp and majesty, with visual and musical and verbal finery. It is oddly circular: nobody is alluding to anything specific that's good about the Tsar, but only words like "supreme" and "glory." Praise, in Hansonian terms, raises the status of the singers by affiliating with the object of praise. But that curt description doesn't seem to capture the whole experience of praise, which is profoundly compelling, and very strange.

There are no more Tsars. I can derive no possible advantage from a song in praise of a long-dead Tsar. And yet I find the Mussorsky piece powerful, not just for the music but for the drama. Praise also seems to attract people to traditional medievalist fantasy, with its rightful kings and oaths of fealty -- Tolkien, perhaps not coincidentally, included a praise song in his happy ending. Readers gain no status from the glorification of imaginary kings. African praise songs were sung not only to kings, gods, and heroes, but to plants and animals, who obviously cannot grant anything to those who praise them.

I would suspect that there is a distinct human need filled by praise. We want very badly for something to be an unalloyed repository of good. It is not normally credible to conceive oneself as perfect, but we need at least something or someone to be worthy of praise. We want to look upwards, towards goodness and light; we want to be the kind of people who are capable of praise, capable of a reverent and appreciative frame of mind. Unappreciativeness is an ugly emotion. And it makes it much cognitively simpler if all the goodness and light is in one p...
The Irrationality Game
by Will_Newsome — 2010-10-03T02:43:35.917Z

Please read the post before voting on the comments, as this is a game where voting works differently.

Warning: the comments section of this post will look odd. The most reasonable comments will have lots of negative karma. Do not be alarmed, it's all part of the plan. In order to participate in this game you should disable any viewing threshold for negatively voted comments.

Here's an irrationalist game meant to quickly collect a pool of controversial ideas for people to debate and assess. It kinda relies on people being honest and not being nitpickers, but it might be fun.

Write a comment reply to this post describing a belief you think has a reasonable chance of being true relative to the the beliefs of other Less Wrong folk. Jot down a proposition and a rough probability estimate or qualitative description, like 'fairly confident'.

Example (not my true belief): "The U.S. government was directly responsible for financing the September 11th terrorist attacks. Very confident. (~95%)."

If you post a belief, you have to vote on the beliefs of all other comments. Voting works like this: if you basically agree with the comment, vote the comment down. If you basically disagree with the comment, vote the comment up. What 'basically' means here is intuitive; instead of using a precise mathy scoring system, just make a guess. In my view, if their stated probability is 99.9% and your degree of belief is 90%, that merits an upvote: it's a pretty big difference of opinion. If they're at 99.9% and you're at 99.5%, it could go either way. If you're genuinely unsure whether or not you basically agree with them, you can pass on voting (but try not to). Vote up if you think they are either overconfident or underconfident in their belief: any disagreement is valid disagreement.

That's the spirit of the game, but some more qualifications and rules follow.

If the proposition in a comment isn't incredibly precise, use your best interpretation. If you really have to pick nits for whatever reason, say so in a comment reply.

The more upvotes you get, the more irrational Less Wrong perceives your belief to be. Which means that if you have a large amount of Less Wrong karma and can still get lots of upvotes on your crazy beliefs then you will get lots of smart people to take your weird ideas a little more seriously.

Some poor soul is going to come along and post "I believe in ...
Learning through exercises
by snarles — 2010-10-03T00:58:04.666Z

One of the best aspects of mathematics is that it is possible for a student to reconstruct much of it on their own, given the relevant axioms, definitions, and some hints. Indeed, this style of education is usually encouraged for training mathematicians. Relatedly, it is also possible for a mathematician to give a quick impression of the relevance of their particular field by choosing an example of an interesting problem which can be efficiently solved using the methods of that specific specialty of mathematics.

To what extent do other academic fields share this property? How well can physics, chemistry, biology, etc. be taught "through exercises"?

EDIT: Note that the "exercises" I am referring to are not just matters of applying learned principles for solving random problems but rather are devices to lead the student to "rediscover" important principles in the field.
Why not be awful?
by  — 2010-10-02T23:30:48.332Z

I was going over the Sequences on metaethics, and it was leaving a bad taste in my mouth. The examples are all about killing or saving children (both of which are far outside my personal experience). The assumption is that the participants in a discussion about metaethics are, in fact, moral in the normal sense of the word. That they're talking about justifications behind beliefs they actually act on, like not killing babies. That, when the philosophical discussion is over, they will go back to being basically good people, and so part of the purpose of the philosophical discussion is to explain to them why they shouldn't stress out too much. If there were no "morality," you still wouldn't kill babies, Eliezer presumes. Philosophy is just so much verbal dressing on something basically secure.

But my situation is a little different. From time to time, like Pierre, I don't care. I get emotionally nihilistic. I find myself doing things that are morally awful in the conventional meaning of the word: procrastinating, sneaking other people's food out of the communal fridge, being casually unkind and unhelpful, breaking promises. I don't doubt that these are awful things to do. I figure any moral theory worth its salt will condemn them -- except the moral theory "I don't care," which sometimes seems strangely compelling. In an "I don't care" mood, I generally don't care about the truth or falsehood of factual claims either. What does it matter? Penguins are green and they are a deadly menace to human society.

What I want to know is: what goes through people's heads when they're motivated not to be awful? What could you tell someone as a reason not to be awful? If you are, in fact, not awful, why aren't you awful?

Edit: the kind of why I mean is not a justification (Humans have natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) or an explanation (Humans care about the things evolution leads them to care about.) I'm talking about an internal heuristic or a gesture at an intuition. What do you think, or feel, when you care about things? What would you tell someone who claims "I just don't care" if you wanted to get her to care? What would you tell yourself, in your nihilistic moments?
Break your habits: be more empirical
by Academian — 2010-10-02T21:04:13.452Z

tl;dr: The neurotypical attitude that "You think too much" might be better parsed as "You don't experiment enough." Once you have an established procedure for living optimally in «setting», be a good scientist and keep trying to falsify your theory when it's not too costly to do so.

(Note: in aspects of life where you're impulsive, don't introspect enough, or have poor self discipline, this post is probably advice in the wrong direction.)

Alice is highly analytically minded. She always walks the same most-efficient route to work, only dances tango and salsa, and refuses to deviate even on rare occasions from her carefully planned schedule. She has judged carefully from experience that the expected value of dating is too low to be worth her time, and will only watch a movie if at least 3 of her 5 closest friends recommend it. She travels only when it relates to her job, to ensure the trip has a purpose and to minimize unnecessary transportation costs. Oh, and she also thinks a lot. About everything.

Bob often tells Alice that she "thinks too much", advice that rarely if ever resonates. But consider that Bob may be sensing a legitimate imbalance: Alice may be doing too much analysis with not enough data. He can tell she thinks way more than he does, and blames that for the imbalance, suggesting that Alice should "turn off her brain". But Alice can't agree. Why would she ever waste a resource as constantly applicable and available as her mind? That seems like a terrible idea. So here's a better one: Alice, if you're reading this, don't turn your mind off... turn it outward.

When (analysis:data) looks too big, just try turning up the data. There's no need to get stupider or anything. When it's not overly costly, you should deviate from your usual theories of optimal behavior for the sake of expected information gain. Even in theory, empiricism is necessary... For a Bayesian optimizing agent in an uncertain world, information has positive expected utility, and experiments have positive expected information. Ergo, do them sometimes! And what sort of experiment do I mean?

I mean that once in a while, Alice should dance freestyle. She should leave early and take a scenic route sometimes, and try some new food along the way. She should visit somewhere she's never been for a vacation, and try meeting some locals. And she shouldn't be discouraged when experime...
Call for Volunteers
by alyssavance — 2010-10-02T17:43:04.690Z

I've recently been appointed Program Coordinator of Humanity+ (http://www.humanityplus.org), which is another big organization in the SIAI/FHI/Kurzweilian/futurist space. If you're interested in volunteering to help us out, you can contact me at pphysics141@gmail.com. If you're interested in volunteering to help out the Singularity Institute, you can also contact SIAI Volunteer Coodinator Louie Helm at seventeenorbust@gmail.com. Thanks for your help!
Cambridge Less Wrong Meetup 
by jimrandomh — 2010-10-02T17:21:07.534Z

We'll be having a Less Wrong meetup on Tuesday, October 12 at 7:00pm at Green Street Grill 280 Green Street Cambridge, MA, to coincide with SIAI President Mike Vassar's visit to Boston. See the meetup.com page. This is in addition to the monthly meetups, which are on October 17th and on the third Sunday of every month.
Rational Terrorism or Why shouldn't we burn down tobacco fields?
by  — 2010-10-02T14:51:13.384Z

Related: Taking ideas seriously

Let us say hypothetically you care about stopping people smoking.

You were going to donate $1000 dollars to givewell to save a life, instead you learn about an anti-tobacco campaign that is better. So you chose to donate $1000 dollars to a campaign to stop people smoking instead of donating it to a givewell charity to save an African's life. You justify this by expecting more people to live due to having stopped smoking (this probably isn't true, but for the sake of argument)

The consequences of donating to the anti-smoking campaign is that 1 person dies in africa and 20 live that would have died instead live all over the world.

Now you also have the choice of setting fire to many tobacco plantations, you estimate that the increased cost of cigarettes would save 20 lives but it will kill likely 1 guard worker. You are very intelligent so you think you can get away with it. There are no consequences to this action. You don't care much about the scorched earth or loss of profits.

If there are causes with payoff matrices like this, then it seems like a real world instance of the trolley problem. We are willing to cause loss of life due to inaction to achieve our goals but not cause loss of life due to action.

What should you do?

Killing someone is generally wrong but you are causing the death of someone in both cases. You either need to justify that leaving someone to die is ethically not the same as killing someone, or inure yourself that when you chose to spend $1000 dollars in a way that doesn't save a life, you are killing. Or ignore the whole thing.

This just puts me off being utilitarian to be honest.

Edit: To clarify, I am an easy going person, I don't like making life and death decisions. I would rather live and laugh, without worrying about things too much.

This confluence of ideas made me realise that we are making life and death decisions every time we spend $1000 dollars. I'm not sure where I will go from here.
Utility function estimator
by apophenia — 2010-10-02T14:05:35.159Z

I am writing a program to estimate someone's utility function in various common situations. My primary application is to find out how average humans actually devalue utility over time--is it hyperbolic as claimed?

However, the same program could be used to make a proxy for yourself in various situations.

Someone requested a top-level post going into more detail on how I'm working on it (if people donate money I'll work faster), what exactly it does, and what you might use it for. I'm a slow writer and don't really want to put the effort into a top-level article unless more than one person is interested. I thought the new discussion forum would be ideal to gauge interest.
Humanity becomes more untilitarian with time
by NancyLebovitz — 2010-10-02T12:06:13.341Z

I would think there'd be evolutionary pressure to focus more and more on having descendants. What's actually happened so far is that people do more for signalling and fun and limit the number of their children. Is this just a blip, and the Mormons (perhaps with a simplified religion) will inherit the earth?