trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Paraconsistency and relevance: avoid logical explosions
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-04-04T11:57:43.352Z

EDIT: corrected from previous version.

If the moon is made of cheese, then Rafael Delago was elected president of Ecuador in 2005.

If you believe that Kennedy was shot in 1962, then you must believe that Santa Claus is the Egyptian god of the dead.

Both of these are perfectly sound arguments of classical logic. The premise is false, hence the argument is logically correct, no matter what the conclusion is: if A is false, then A→B is true.

It does feel counterintuitive, though, especially because human beliefs do not work in this way. Consider instead the much more intuitive statement:

If you believe that Kennedy was shot in 1962, then you must believe that Lee Harry Oswald was also shot in 1962.

Here there seems to be a connection between the two clauses; we feel A→B is more justified when "→" actually does some work in establishing a relationship between A and B. But can this intuition be formalised?

One way to do so is to use relevance logics, which are a subset of "paraconsistent" logics. Paraconsistent logics are those that avoid the principle of explosion. This is the rule in classical logic that if you accept one single contradiction - one single (A and not-A) - then you can prove everything. This is akin to accepting one false belief that contradict your other beliefs - after that, anything goes. The contradiction explodes and takes everything down with it. But why would we be interested in avoiding either the principle of explosion or unjustified uses of "→"?

There seems to be three groups that could benefit from avoiding this. Firstly, those who are worried about the potential for the occasional error in their data or their premises, or a missed step in their reasoning, and don't want to collapse into incoherence because of a single mistake (paraconsistency has had application in database management, for instance). These generally need only 'weakly' paraconsistent theories. Secondly, the dialethics, who believe in the existence of true contradictions. The liar's paradox is an example of this: if L="L is false", then a dialethic would simply say that L is true, and not-L is also true, accepting the contradiction (L and not-L). This has the advantage of allowing a language to talk about its own truth: arithmetic truths can be defined in arithmetic, if we accept a few contradictions along the way.

For Le...
Rationality anecdotes for the homepage?
by John_Maxwell — 2012-04-04T06:33:32.097Z

In the comments for The Cognitive Science of Rationality, Spurlock said

The beginning of this post (the list of concrete, powerful, real/realistic, and avoidable cases of irrationality in action), is probably the best introduction to x-rationality I've read yet. I can easily imagine it hooking lots of potential readers that our previous attempts at introduction (our home page, the "welcome to LW" posts, etc) wouldn't.

In fact, I'd nominate some version of that text as our new home page text, perhaps just changing out the last couple sentences to something that encompasses more of LW in general (rather than cogsci specifically). I mean this as a serious actionable suggestion.

There are couple problems with using the specific anecdotes from the post:

It would make the beginning of the post seem boring for anyone who had read the homepage.

There has been discussion on LW that the sunk cost fallacy may not be much of a fallacy in practice, and commenters on the post were also skeptical of the rare disease example.

But the idea of starting our website off with concrete examples, the way Eliezer recently recommended starting off essays, seems like a good one.

So what are some quick, concrete, compelling stories about how irrationality sucks/rationality rocks that we could put on the homepage? Bonus points if the story is straight from a study, or is a true story that happened to you or someone you know.
[SEQ RERUN] Classical Configuration Spaces
by MinibearRex — 2012-04-04T04:32:07.652Z

Today's post, Classical Configuration Spaces was originally published on 15 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

How to visualize the state of a system of two 1-dimensional particles, as a single point in 2-dimensional space. Understanding configuration spaces in classical physics is a useful first step, before trying to imagine quantum configuration spaces.

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 Can You Prove Two Particles Are Identical?, 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.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 14, chapter 82
by FAWS — 2012-04-04T02:53:41.790Z

The new discussion thread (part 15) is here.

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 82. The previous thread passed 1000 comments as of the time of this writing, and so has long passed 500. Comment in the 13th thread until you read chapter 82.

There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.

As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
Chess Analyst "solves" King's Gambit
by  — 2012-04-03T23:36:37.551Z

Edit: it was unfortunately a prank. I definitely checked the date of the article (which is dated Apr. 2), before posting on it. Kind of mean to make an April Fool's prank after April Fool's. I didn't realize I'd have a chance to practice what I preach so soon.

I guess I need to just say oops.

Original Post:

Chess analyst Vasik Rajlich had some big news today: solving the King’s Gambit.

I know that this doesn’t add much new to the complexity theory aspects of games like chess, but I would say it’s a beautiful result, very much like the recent improvement on the complexity of matrix multiplication, and it certainly emphasizes the role computation plays as the King’s Gambit is a pretty popular, classical opening. By most any human standard it’s a respectable opening, and yet we can conclusively say it is unequivocally bad for White assuming two rational players.

I wrote up a short blurb about it at my blog.
The efficiency of prizes
by lukeprog — 2012-04-03T21:45:14.024Z

Several commenters on SoTW: Be Specific suggest that prizes may not be a good idea because they might be counterproductive. As a counterpoint, Tony Barrett of GCRi pointed me to this piece at NYT blogs:

While awards for past achievement can spur innovation — a significant amount of American investigative journalism might not take place without prizes like the Pulitzer — forward-looking prizes for specific challenges are far more efficient. They are extraordinarily cost-effective. Look at Harrison and his clock: the £20,000 he won was enormous for him, but it was a tiny sum compared to what the British government might have spent to solve the longitude problem by giving grants to various astronomers or cartographers. The fact that prizes pay only for success also makes them attractive to those who finance them, whether they are taxpayers, shareholders or charitable donors.

More important, prizes work where other methods do not. A lot of problems aren’t new — someone has already solved them or has solved something similar. By casting a very wide net, prizes find these people.

Winners tend not to be the people you expect. The principal scientific adviser to the Board of Longitude — someone to be reckoned with, as it was Isaac Newton — had said that the only solutions possible for the longitude problem would come from astronomy. No one thought the answer would be found in a new kind of clock. If the British had spent money on grants to the usual suspects, it would have been wasted. The conventional wisdom is that if you want to solve a molecular biology problem you ask only molecular biologists. Big mistake.

At Harvard Business School, Lakhani led a study of hundreds of scientific problems posted on InnoCentive. These were problems that the laboratories of science-driven companies had mostly failed to solve, which is why they turned to InnoCentive. They found that InnoCentive’s network solved nearly 30 percent of them.

What made for success? InnoCentive asks solvers to check boxes indicating the different scientific fields that interest them. The more diverse the interests of the base of solvers, the more likely the problem was to be solved. The study also found that expertise in the field of the problem actually hurt a solver’s chances. “The further the problem from the solver’s expertise, the

...
[LINK] Neil deGrasse Tyson on killer asteroids
by David_Gerard — 2012-04-03T18:32:15.520Z

LessWrong is not big on discussion of non-AI existential risks. But Neil deGrasse Tyson notes killer asteroids not just as a generic problem, but as a specific one, naming Apophis as an imminent hazard.

So treat this as your exercise for today: what are the numbers, what is the risk, what are the costs, what actions are appropriate? Assume your answers need to work in the context of a society that's responded to the notion of anthropogenic climate change with almost nothing but blue vs. green politics.
Meetup : Atlanta
by hankx7787 — 2012-04-03T16:00:10.251Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta

WHEN:
07 April 2012 06:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
2094 North Decatur Road, Decatur, GA 30033-5367

The next Atlanta meetup will be Saturday, April 7th at 6:30pm at Chocolate Coffee in Decatur:

http://www.mychocolatecoffee.com/

2094 North Decatur Road, Decatur, GA 30033-5367

(404) 982-0790

We will be starting the next sequence, "A Human's Guide To Words" with the main post "37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong":

http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/

We will also be discussing any current articles on LessWrong at the time, as well as continuing meta discussions on improving our meetup.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments! I hope to see all of you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta
Evidence for the orthogonality thesis
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-04-03T10:58:21.502Z

One of the most annoying arguments when discussing AI is the perennial "But if the AI is so smart, why won't it figure out the right thing to do anyway?" It's often the ultimate curiosity stopper.

Nick Bostrom has defined the "Orthogonality thesis" as the principle that motivation and intelligence are essentially unrelated: superintelligences can have nearly any type of motivation (at least, nearly any utility function-bases motivation). We're trying to get some rigorous papers out so that when that question comes up, we can point people to standard, and published, arguments. Nick has had a paper accepted that points out the orthogonality thesis is compatible with a lot of philosophical positions that would seem to contradict it.

I'm hoping to complement this with a paper laying out the positive arguments in favour of the thesis. So I'm asking you for your strongest arguments for (or against) the orthogonality thesis. Think of trying to convince a conservative philosopher who's caught a bad case of moral realism - what would you say to them?

Many thanks! Karma and acknowledgements will shower on the best suggestions, and many puppies will be happy.
SotW: Be Specific
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2012-04-03T06:11:40.184Z

(The Exercise Prize series of posts is the Center for Applied Rationality asking for help inventing exercises that can teach cognitive skills. The difficulty is coming up with exercises interesting enough, with a high enough hedonic return, that people actually do them and remember them; this often involves standing up and performing actions, or interacting with other people, not just working alone with an exercise booklet and a pencil. We offer prizes of $50 for any suggestion we decide to test, and $500 for any suggestion we decide to adopt. This prize also extends to LW meetup activities and good ideas for verifying that a skill has been acquired. See here for details.)

Exercise Prize: Be Specific

During YCombinator's Startup School 2011, Paul Graham and Harj Tagger did "office hours" onstage. One pair of entrepreneurs were doing a matchmaking (dating) startup, and Paul and Harj were trying to figure out what their startup did, exactly - for example, what their startup could do that the existing low-tech solution couldn't. (Video.)

Harj: Low-tech like, you know, just like word of mouth, telling someone "hey, you should like, meet up with my friend" or "we're getting drinks, why don't you come along?" Like, what can the software do that's specifically better than that?

Entrepreneur: I think that our software specifically is providing the better connections for people, um...

Paul: Providing the better connections for people...?

Entrepreneur: I mean, one way you can think about it, I don't know if this is the right answer, but... there's a lot of things that are happening in real life that they're trying to mimic online, maybe that's not the correct way to... Look at it like this: to give them an online tool to also do this, like they're already doing in real life, maybe they could reach, uh expand their reach through the online website.

This had been happening with most of the startups Paul and Harj were interrogating - they just could not seem to provide a customer use-case - and I couldn't stand it any more; which is why at this point I whispered audibly enough for a few nearby people to hear, "Be specific! Be specific!"

A moment later, on stage:

Paul: Hm. Not very specific.

I got some strange looks from the ...
Advice for an isolated Rationalist?
by Goobahman — 2012-04-03T04:40:22.254Z

Hello fellow readers.
I've been enjoying LW for a while now, and I can confidently say that many of the ideas on in this community have done much to better my life.

However, I live in some isolation from like-minded individuals. I lack social groups that aspire to the same values of rationality that I have come to treasure. My nearest meet-up is Melbourne, but that takes approximately a hour and a half to get to, and would require more time and money than I can reasonably afford at the moment.
I find it difficult to immerse myself and live out many of these ideas when I do not have the social support to back me.
Anyone have any tips for managing rationalist isolation?
LessWrong downtime 2012-03-26, and site speed
by matt — 2012-04-03T04:15:09.856Z

Our investigation into last week's LW downtime is complete: here (Google Docs).

Executive summary:

We failed to update our AWS configuration after changes at Amazon, which caused a cycle of servers being spawned then killed before they could properly boot. Our automated testing should have notified us of this failure immediately, but included a predictable failure mode (identified by us last year but not fixed). We became aware of the downtime when I checked my email and worked on it until it was resolved.

I personally feel very bad about our multiple failures leading to this incident.

ref. the last time I did this to you: http://lesswrong.com/lw/29v/lesswrong_downtime_20100511_and_other_recent/

Actions:

We have reconfigured AWS and the tools we use to communicate with it to avoid this failure in the future.

Improvements to our automated site testing system (Nagios) are underway (expected to be live before 2012-04-13 - these tests will detect greater-than-X-failures-from-Y-trials, rather than the current detect zero-successes-from-Z-trials).

We have changed our staffing in part in recognition that some systems (including this one) had been allowed to fall out of date, and allocated a developer to review our system administration project planning.

Further actions - site speed:

We're unhappy with the site's speed. We plan on spending some time next week doing what we can to improve it.

(If you upvote this post, please downvote my "Karma sink" comment below - I would prefer not to earn karma from an event like this.)
John Danaher on 'The Superintelligent Will'
by lukeprog — 2012-04-03T03:08:48.937Z

Philosopher John Danaher has written an explication and critique of Bostrom's "orthogonality thesis" from "The Superintelligent Will." To quote the conclusion:

Summing up, in this post I’ve considered Bostrom’s discussion of the orthogonality thesis. According to this thesis, any level of intelligence is, within certain weak constraints, compatible with any type of final goal. If true, the thesis might provide support for those who think it possible to create a benign superintelligence. But, as I have pointed out, Bostrom’s defence of the orthogonality thesis is lacking in certain respects, particularly in his somewhat opaque and cavalier dismissal of normatively thick theories of rationality.

As it happens, none of this may affect what Bostrom has to say about unfriendly superintelligences. His defence of that argument relies on the convergence thesis, not the orthogonality thesis. If the orthogonality thesis turns out to be false, then all that happens is that the kind of convergence Bostrom alludes to simply occurs at a higher level in the AI’s goal architecture.

What might, however, be significant is whether the higher-level convergence is a convergence towards certain moral beliefs or a convergence toward nihilistic beliefs. If it is the former, then friendliness might be necessitated, not simply possible. If it is the latter, then all bets are off. A nihilistic agent could do pretty anything since, no goals would be rationally entailed.
[SEQ RERUN] Can You Prove Two Particles Are Identical?
by MinibearRex — 2012-04-03T01:42:15.905Z

Today's post, Can You Prove Two Particles Are Identical? was originally published on 14 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You wouldn't think that it would be possible to do an experiment that told you that two particles are completely identical - not just to the limit of experimental precision, but perfectly. You could even give a precise-sounding philosophical argument for why it was not possible - but the argument would have a deeply buried assumption. Quantum physics violates this deep assumption, making the experiment easy.

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 Where Philosophy Meets Science, 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.
Rationality Quotes April 2012
by Oscar_Cunningham — 2012-04-03T00:42:04.135Z

Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes 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.)

Do not quote yourself

Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Partly-baked ideas
by lukeprog — 2012-04-02T21:21:38.043Z

I.J. Good, from the opening of 1962's The Scientist Speculates (a collection of partly-baked ideas):

A partly-baked idea or PBI is either a speculation, a question of some novelty, a suggestion for a novel experiment, a stimulating analogy, or (rarely) a classification. It has a bakedness of p that is less than unity, or even negative. The bakedness of an idea should be judged by its potential value, the chance that it can be completely baked, its originality, interest, stimulation, conciseness, lucidity, and liveliness. It is often better to be stimulating and wrong than boring and right.

A very rough guide to the maximum length that a PBI should have is given by the formula

10^(9px/2) words

where x, the importance of the topic, is between 0 and 1. For example, the maximum length for a negatively-baked idea is less than one word. An idea can compensate in importance what it lacks in bakedness, and conversely. The formula is applicable to each sentence and to each paragraph, as well as to the whole of a contribution. For the non-specialist, the formula makes sense even when px = 1, but in this anthology px rarely exceeds 7/9.

A possible justification for the exponential or antilogarithmic form is that if an idea is developed to a certain length d, then the size of the expository tree increases roughly exponentially with d, if the multifurcation of the tree is the same at every level.

(Note that I changed the formatting a bit for readability.)
Cryonics on LessWrong vs at LessWrong meetups
by jefftk — 2012-04-02T18:27:20.780Z

When I've brought up cryonics on LessWrong [1][2], most commenters have said I'm being too pessimistic. When I brought it up yesterday at the Cambridge MA meetup, most people thought I was too optimistic. (I think it could work, but there are enough things that could go wrong that it's ~1000:1 against.) What makes the groups so different on this?

[1] Brain Preservation

[2] How Likely is Cryonics to Work
Generic Modafinil sales begin? 
by jsalvatier — 2012-04-02T15:53:15.967Z

Due to agreements with the patent holder, Cephalon, that were made in 2005-2006 several generics manufacturers are now allowed to sell generic Modafinil. I have found confirmation that the manufacturer Teva has begun selling generic Modafinil, though I haven't seen news about other manufacturers. However, the article also, says that Cephalon is a subsidiary of Teva, so perhaps this won't have an effect? The Modafinil patent is set to expire in April 2015.