trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
E.T. Jaynes and Hugh Everett - includes a previously unpublished review by Jaynes of a published short version of Everett's dissertation
by buybuydandavis — 2012-07-02T04:49:25.558Z

E.T. Jaynes had a brief exchange of correspondence with Hugh Everett in 1957. The exchange was initiated by Everett, who commented on recently published works by Jaynes. Jaynes responded to Everett's comments, and finally sent Everett a letter reviewing a short version of Everett's thesis published that year.

Jaynes reaction was extremely positive at first: "It seems fair to say that your theory is the logical completion of quantum theory, in exactly the same sense that relativity was the logical completion of classical theory." High praise. But Jaynes swiftly follows up the praise with fundamental objections: "This is just the fundamental cause of Einstein's most serious objections to quantum theory, and it seems to me that the things that worried Einstein still cause trouble in your theory, but in an entirely new way." His letter goes on to detail his concerns, and insist, wtih Bohm, that "Einstein's objections to quantum theory have never been satisfactorily answered.

The Collected Works of Everett has some narrative about their interaction:

http://books.google.com/books?id=dowpli7i6TgC&lpg=PA261&dq=jaynes%20everett&pg=PA261#v=onepage&q&f=false

Hugh Everett marginal notes on page from E. T. Jaynes' "Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics"

http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu/handle/10575/1140

Hugh Everett handwritten draft letter to E.T. Jaynes, 15-May-1957

http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu/handle/10575/1186

Hugh Everett letter to E. T. Jaynes, 11-June-1957

http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu/handle/10575/1124

E.T. Jaynes letter to Hugh Everett, 15-October-1957 - Never before published

https://sites.google.com/site/etjaynesstudy/jaynes-documents/Jaynes-Everett_19571015.pdf?

Directory at Google site with all the links and docs above. Also links to Washington University at St. Louis copyright form for this doc, Everett's thesis, long and short forms, and Jaynes' paper (the papers they were discussing in their correspondence). I hope to be adding the final letter in this exchange, Jaynes to Hewitt 17-June-1957, within a couple of weeks. , and maybe some documents from the Yahoo Group ETJaynesStudy as well.

https://sites.google.com/site/etjaynesstudy/jaynes-documents

For perspective on Jaynes more recent thoughts on quantum theory:

Jaynes paper on EPR and Bell's Theorem: http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/cmyster...
[SEQ RERUN] Probability is Subjectively Objective
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-02T04:29:39.000Z

Today's post, Probability is Subjectively Objective was originally published on 14 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Is probability subjective or objective? Better question: what does "subjective" and "objective" mean?

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 Rebelling Within Nature, 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.
Meetup : Salt Lake City: The Really Getting Bayes Game
by hamnox — 2012-07-02T03:56:20.818Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Salt Lake City: The Really Getting Bayes Game

WHEN:
08 July 2012 03:00:53PM (-0600)

WHERE:
1558 Palo Verde Way #12, Cottonwood Heights, Utah 84121

This meetup will be 3pm Sunday, July 8th at Kip's house: 1558 Palo Verde Way, Cottonwood Heights (or SLC), Utah 84121
I'll be presenting a basic reintroduction to Bayes Rule, and then we can start playing The Really Getting Bayes Game! There will be a discussion afterwards, with an eye to whether or not this sort of practice is useful in training Real Life bayesian reasoning and worth repeating, and/or potential variations on the game.
Please feel free to bring an interesting or unusual snack you think others might like to try. Variety is the spice of life!
Info on Really Getting Bayes Game: http://math.berkeley.edu/~critch/mphd/rgb.pdf

Discussion article for the meetup : Salt Lake City: The Really Getting Bayes Game
[Event] Symposium on Cryonics and Brain-Threatening Disorders
by lsparrish — 2012-07-01T23:09:04.621Z

Upcoming event:

On Saturday July 7, 2012, the Institute for Evidence Based Cryonics and Cryonics Northwest will organize a symposium on cryonics and brain-threatening disorders in Portland, Oregon. The symposium will start at 09:00 am at the offices of Kaos Softwear. Entrance to the event is free.

This symposium is the first event of its kind in the history of cryonics and concerns one of the most important challenges facing aging cryonicists. Please register for the event on our Facebook page so we know how many attendees to expect.

The following speakers and presentations are confirmed and more speakers / activities may be added in the future:

Chana de Wolf – Neurogenesis in the Adult Brain and Alzheimer’s Disease

Early neuroanatomists considered the adult brain fixed and incapable of neurogenesis. Chana de Wolf will review the emerging evidence for adult neurogenesis and its implications for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other identity-destroying disorders.

Chana de Wolf has a master’s degree in Neuroscience and is the President of Advanced Neural Biosciences, Inc.

Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D. – Repairing the Aging Brain: The SENS Approach

Like all other organs, the brain accumulates molecular and cellular alterations throughout life that are eventually deleterious to its function. Unlike all other organs, it cannot be replaced wholesale by a new one created in the lab; the damage must be repaired piecemeal. In this talk I will survey the current status of repairing the three major forms of damage seen in the brain of elderly people: the amyloid plaques that accumulate in the extracellular space in Alzheimer’s disease, the various intracellular proteinaceous aggregates seen in all the major forms of neurodegeneration, and the loss of neurons of various types seen in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and in aging in general. Relevance to revival of cryonics patiends and to certain schemes for uploading will also be discussed.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in agi

...
Meetup : Washington DC Meetup-Post-Minicamp edition
by rocurley — 2012-07-01T22:55:04.932Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Meetup-Post-Minicamp edition

WHEN: 08 July 2012 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: Portrait Gallery Courtyard

We'll be discussing some of the topics covered at the recent rationality minicamp: using fungibility and value of information estimates in particular.

If you have any feedback on this choice of topic, please post here or to the list. Thanks!

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Meetup-Post-Minicamp edition
Wisdom of the Crowd: not always so wise
by tgb — 2012-07-01T20:55:36.230Z

I have a confession to make: I have been not "publishing" my results to an experiment because the results were uninteresting. You may recall some time ago that I made a post asking people to take a survey so that I could look at a small variation of the typical "Wisdom of the Crowds" experiment where people make estimates on a value and the average of crowd's estimates is better than that of all or almost all of the individual estimates. Since LessWrong is full of people who like to do these kinds of things (thank you!), I got 177 responses - many more than I was hoping for!

I am now coming back to this since I happened upon an older post by Eliezer saying the following

When you hear that a classroom gave an average estimate of 871 beans for a jar that contained 850 beans, and that only one individual student did better than the crowd, the astounding notion is not that the crowd can be more accurate than the individual. The astounding notion is that human beings are unbiased estimators of beans in a jar, having no significant directional error on the problem, yet with large variance. It implies that we tend to get the answer wrong but there's no systematic reason why. It requires that there be lots of errors that vary from individual to individual - and this is reliably true, enough so to keep most individuals from guessing the jar correctly. And yet there are no directional errors that everyone makes, or if there are, they cancel out very precisely in the average case, despite the large individual variations. Which is just plain odd. I find myself somewhat suspicious of the claim, and wonder whether other experiments that found less amazing accuracy were not as popularly reported.

(Emphasis added.) It turns out that I myself was sitting upon exactly such results.

The results are here. Sheet 1 shows raw data and Sheet 3 shows some values from those numbers. A few values that were clearly either jokes or mistakes (like not noticing the answer was in millions) were removed. In summary: (according to Wikipedia) 1000 million people in Africa (as of 2009) whereas the estimate from LessWrong was 781 million and the first transatlantic telephone call happened in 1926 whereas the average from the poll was 1899.

There! I've come clean!

I had deferred making this public because I thought the result that I was trying to test wasn't real...
July 2012 Media Thread
by RobertLumley — 2012-07-01T18:06:11.054Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

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

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

Please use the comment trees for genres, which I was apparently too dumb to do.

If you have a thread to add, such as a video game thread or an Anime thread, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.
Hope Function
by gwern — 2012-07-01T15:40:19.708Z

Yesterday I finished transcribing "The Ups and Downs of the Hope Function In a Fruitless Search". This is a statistics & psychology paper describing a simple probabilistic search problem and the sheer difficulty subjects have in producing the correct Bayesian answer. Besides providing a great but simple illustration of the mind projection fallacy in action, the simple search problem maps onto a number of forecasting problems: the problem may be looking in a desk for a letter that may not be there, but we could also look at a problem in which we check every year for the creation of AI and ask how our beliefs change over time - which turns out to defuse a common scoffing criticism of past technological forecasting. (This last problem was why I went back and used it, after I first read of it.)

The math is all simple - arithmetic and one application of Bayes's law - so I think all LWers can enjoy it, and it has amusing examples to analyze. I have also taken the trouble to annotate it with Wikipedia links, relevant materials, and many PDF links (some jailbroken just for this transcript). I hope everyone finds it as interesting as I did.

I thank John Salvatier for doing the ILL request which got me a scan of this book chapter.
[SEQ RERUN] Rebelling Within Nature
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-01T04:27:17.533Z

Today's post, Rebelling Within Nature was originally published on 13 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When we rebel against our own nature, we act in accordance with our own nature. There isn't any other way it could be.

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 Fundamental Doubts, 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.
New York Less Wrong: Expansion Plans
by alyssavance — 2012-07-01T01:20:09.534Z

Followup To: New York City, Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter; Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians

Last week, the New York Less Wrong group hosted the Summer Solstice Megameetup. Everyone had a huge amount of fun, and we met a lot of new people who didn't normally come to meetups. I've recently moved to New York, and we all enjoyed the solstice events so much that I'd like to host more of them.

So, in addition to the regular Tuesday evening New York meetups, I'm going to start hosting Saturday afternoon meetups - it seems a lot of people are free on the weekends, but can't come to events during the work week. We also plan to host larger parties once a month or so, to just have fun, talk, and blow off steam. Parties are also useful as a Schelling point for those who are interested, but live far away or otherwise can't come every week.

If anyone here lives in New York, but doesn't come to local meetups, we'd like to meet you! You can contact me at pphysics141@gmail.com.

New York events this July, and relevant contact info:

Pool Party, Saturday, July 7th

Location: New Jersey, about an hour west of Manhattan by train

(Some of us are meeting up in Manhattan, and taking the train together)

Contact: Geoff Cameron, gscshoyru@gmail.com

Hiking and Camping Trip, Saturday, July 14th and Sunday, July 15th

Location: Undecided, but likely the woods of New Jersey or Connecticut

(Meet up Saturday in Manhattan before heading out)

Contact: Raymond Arnold, raemon777@gmail.com

Nomic Game and Evening Dance Party, Saturday, July 21st

Location: Private residence, midtown Manhattan, New York, NY

Nomic game and discussion will start at 3 PM, party will start at 7 PM

Contact: Tom McCabe, pphysics141@gmail.com

Tuesday Evening Meetups, and General Questions

Contact: Zvi Mowshowitz, thezvi@gmail.com

On a longer term basis, we're thinking about the question of how to grow the group well beyond its present size. Once things get big enough, like in the Bay Area, you start to get bigger than Dunbar's Number and lose the "everyone knows everyone else" feel. But that can happen in a good way (smaller groups form, and each one is its own tight-knit community) or a bad way (a swamp of people forms, and people lose close connections to each other). The Less Wrong Meetup Guide has a lot of extremely useful info on how to create and maintai

...
Summary of "How to Win Friends and Influence People"
by Cosmos — 2012-06-30T20:49:08.313Z

In the very back of Kaj's excellent How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup Group booklet, he has a recommended reading section, including the classic book How to Win Friends and Influence People.

It just so happens that not only have I read the book myself, but I have written up a concise summary of the core advice here. Kaj suggested that I post this on the discussion section because others might find it useful, so here you go!

I suspect that more people are willing to read a summary of a book from the 1930s than an actual book from the 1930s. What I will say about reading the long-form text is that it can be more useful for internalizing these concepts and giving examples of them. It is far too easy to abstractly know what you need to do, much harder to actually take action on those beliefs...
Aubrey de Grey has responded to his IAMA - Now with Transcript!
by Username — 2012-06-30T06:47:40.455Z

Watch the video response here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tsI_28O3Ws

This was posted here on lesswrong a while ago, but they recently uploaded a new version of the video and I took the liberty of typing up a transcript.

The video is fairly long, about 25 minutes. But it's incredibly engaging and I highly recommend watching it. For those who prefer text (because it's faster or because you are a computer), you can read the transcript in this google doc, or below in the comments. Enjoy!
Thoughts on moral intuitions
by Kaj_Sotala — 2012-06-30T06:01:48.565Z

The style in the following article is slightly different from most LW articles, due to the fact that I originally posted this on my blog. Some folks on #lesswrong liked it, so I thought it might be liked here as well.

Our moral reasoning is ultimately grounded in our moral intuitions: instinctive "black box" judgements of what is right and wrong. For example, most people would think that needlessly hurting somebody else is wrong, just because. The claim doesn't need further elaboration, and in fact the reasons for it can't be explained, though people can and do construct elaborate rationalizations for why everyone should accept the claim. This makes things interesting when people with different moral intuitions try to debate morality with each other.
---
Why do modern-day liberals (for example) generally consider it okay to say "I think everyone should be happy" without offering an explanation, but not okay to say "I think I should be free to keep slaves", regardless of the explanation offered? In an earlier age, the second statement might have been considered acceptable, while the first one would have required an explanation.
In general, people accept their favorite intuitions as given and require people to justify any intuitions which contradict those. If people have strongly left-wing intuitions, they tend to consider right-wing intuitions arbitrary and unacceptable, while considering left-wing intuitions so obvious as to not need any explanation. And vice versa.
Of course, you will notice that in some cultures specific moral intuitions tend to dominate, while other intuitions dominate in other cultures. People tend to pick up the moral intuitions of their environment: some claims go so strongly against the prevailing moral intuitions of my social environment that if I were to even hypothetically raise the possibility of them being correct, I would be loudly condemned and feel bad for even thinking that way. (Related: Paul Graham's What you can't say.) "Culture" here is to be understood as being considerably more fine-grained than just "the culture in Finland" or the "culture in India" - there are countless of subcultures even within a single country.
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Social psychologists distinguish between two kinds of moral rules: ones which people consider absolute, and ones which people consider to be social conventions. For example, if a group of people all bullied a...
[SEQ RERUN] Fundamental Doubts
by MinibearRex — 2012-06-30T04:13:20.367Z

Today's post, Fundamental Doubts was originally published on 12 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

There are some things that are so fundamental, that you really can't doubt them effectively. Be careful you don't use this as an excuse, but ultimately, you really can't start out by saying that you won't trust anything that is the output of a neuron.

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 Genetic Fallacy, 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.
Backward Reasoning Over Decision Trees
by Scott Alexander — 2012-06-30T03:17:13.241Z

Game theory is the study of how rational actors interact to pursue incentives. It starts with the same questionable premises as economics: that everyone behaves rationally, that everyone is purely self-interested1, and that desires can be exactly quantified - and uses them to investigate situations of conflict and cooperation.

Here we will begin with some fairly obvious points about decision trees, but by the end we will have the tools necessary to explain a somewhat surprising finding: that giving a US president the additional power of line-item veto may in many cases make the president less able to enact her policies. Starting at the beginning:

The basic unit of game theory is the choice. Rational agents make choices in order to maximize their utility, which is sort of like a measure of how happy they are. In a one-person game, your choices affect yourself and maybe the natural environment, but nobody else. These are pretty simple to deal with:

Here we visualize a choice as a branching tree. At each branch, we choose the option with higher utility; in this case, going to the beach. Since each outcome leads to new choices, sometimes the decision trees can be longer than this:

Here's a slightly more difficult decision, denominated in money instead of utility. If you want to make as much money as possible, then your first choice - going to college or starting a minimum wage job right Now - seems to favor the more lucrative minimum wage job. But when you take Later into account, college opens up more lucrative future choices, as measured in the gray totals on the right-hand side. This illustrates the important principle of reasoning backward over decision trees. If you reason forward, taking the best option on the first choice and so on, you end up as a low-level manager. To get the real cash, you've got to start at the end - the total on the right - and then examine what choice at each branch will take you there.

This is all about as obvious as, well, not hitting yourself on the head with a hammer, so let's move on to where it really gets interesting: two-player games.

I'm playing White, and it's my move. For simplicity I consider only two options: queen takes knight and queen takes rook. The one chess book I've read values pieces in number of pawns: a knight is worth three pawns, a rook five, a queen nine. So at first glance, it looks like my best move is to take ...