trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Melbourne Less Wrong Meetup
by Patrick — 2010-09-20T09:14:08.508Z

There seems to be enough Melburnian Less Wrong visitors to justify having monthly meetups. Just the other day, I ran into some at my local restaurant, and the thread Where are we? lists four (not including me). There's probably more out there.

Details

Time: 6pm, Saturday 2nd October

Place: Don Tojo

I'll be there with a Less Wrong sign.

List of people attending:

Patrick

toner

luminosity

Ppeach

wedrifid

Byron

Yurifury

ShardPhoenix
Rationality Power Tools
by Nic_Smith — 2010-09-19T06:20:05.481Z

Summary: Rationalists should win; however, it could take a really long time before a technological singularity or uploading provide powerful technology to aid rationalists in achieving their goals. It's possible today to create assistant computer software to help direct human effort and provide "hints" for clearer thinking. We should catalog such software when it exists and create it when it doesn't.
The Problem
We may be waiting awhile for a Friendly AI or similar “world changing” technology to appear. While technology continues to improve, the process of creating a Friendly AI seems extremely tricky, and there’s no solid ETA on the program. Uploading is still years to decades away. In the meantime, aspiring rationalists still have to get on with our lives.
Rationality is hard. Merely knowing about a bias is often not enough to overcome it. Even in cases where the steps to act rationally are known, the algorithm required may be more than can be done manually, or may require information which itself is not immediately at hand. However, a lot of things that are difficult become easier when you have the right tools. Could there be tools that supplement the effort involved in making a good decision? I suspect that this is the case, and will give several examples of programs that the community could work to create -- computer software to help you win. Because a lot of software is specifically created to address problems as they come up, it would also be worthwhile to maintain an index of already available software with special usefulness and applicability to Less Wrong readers.

The Opportunity
Some people have expressed concern that Less Wrong should be more focused on “doing things” rather than “knowing things” -- instrumental rather than epistemic rationality. Computer software, as a set of instructions for “doing something” fall closer to the “instrumental” end of this spectrum (although for a very good program, it’s possible to learn a thing or two from the source code, or at least the documentation). The concept of open-source software is well-tested, and platforms for open-source projects are freely available and mature -- see Google Code, SourgeForge, GitHub, etc. Additionally, many of us on Less Wrong already have the skills to contribute to such an effort directly. By my count, the 2009 ...
Popular morality: spare those on the left
by KatjaGrace — 2010-09-18T20:55:28.000Z

Jen Wright at Experimental Philosophy:

… I’m writing this post because I found something even more interesting…and puzzling. Leaving people’s actual looking behavior aside, I found a very powerful effect — consistent across all the vignettes — for which side of the screen the potential victim (the fat guy or the baby) was on. When the victims were on the right-side of the screen, people’s would and should judgements were significantly higher (i.e., they were more willing to, and thought more strongly that they should, kill the victim to save the others), than when they were on the left-side of the screen.

So, does anyone have any suggestions as to what might explain this finding?

My guess is that it’s related to the previous findings that people tend to place active people on the left of passive people in pictures (though it seems to vary across languages). The easiest interpretation is that it seems more moral to sacrifice passive people than active ones. That would also fit with the pattern I pointed out before in our moral intuitions, that moral concern is highly contingent on whether we can be rewarded or punished by the beneficiary of our ‘compassion’.
Rational Health Optimization
by jacob_cannell — 2010-09-18T19:47:02.687Z

Possibly Related To: Diseased Thinking, Thou Art Godshatter

There are 8760 hours in a typical year. A typical 30-year old will spend about 2900 of those hours sleeping, around 160 of them impaired or incapacitated by illness and will experience perhaps 2000 hours of peak mental function.

As one ages, the fraction of hours spent sleeping decreases slightly, but eventually the annual hours of peak mental function declines as well, and the annual hours spent ill increases nonlinearlly until one eventually makes that final hospital visit.

There is a hope that medical technology, accelerated via a Singularity, will advance to the point where we have full mastery over biology and can economically repair organ and cellular damage faster than aging accumulates it. There is sufficient evidence to put a reasonable bet on that happening by mid-century.

But for most of us that still leaves an unnaceptably high risk of death in the cumulative years between now and then. Cyronics enrollment offers a further hope, but in practice probably only results in a modest improvement in long term survival odds after full discounting for the technical risks and uncertainties.

In the end it all comes down to a die roll. Wouldn't you like to get an extra +1 or two?

With a simple evolutionary health optimization, one can:

achieve perhaps a 10% increase in peak mental hours per year

slow aging and prolong expected lifespan by at least ten years (before considering future medical advances)

significantly reduce chance of death before mid-century

shift body weight to a healthier equilibrium, increase attractiveness, general mood and happiness

Evolution and Health

Our bodies are the collective result of countless layers of mindless complex adaptations, evolutionary godshatter from a bygone history. The current sub-species or races of humans today are just a small sampling of a much larger space of genetically related human ancestors who roamed the earth for hundreds of thousands of years before the modern era. Our modern genomes are a wide and highly irregular sampling of this diverse set of historical adaptations.

For most of that time the earth was considerably colder and very different than it is today - we currently live in a warm peak between large glaciations. These wide climate swings created complex dynamic patterns of shifting ecolo...
The Meaning of Life
by b1shop — 2010-09-17T19:29:01.743Z

Fifteen thousand years ago, our ancestors bred dogs to serve man. In merely 150 centuries, we shaped collies to herd our sheep and pekingese to sit in our emperor's sleeves. Wild wolves can't understand us, but we teach their domesticated counterparts tricks for fun. And, most importantly of all, dogs get emotional pleasure out of serving their master. When my family's terrier runs to the kennel, she does so with blissful, self-reinforcing obedience.

When I hear amateur philosophers ponder the meaning of life, I worry humans suffer from the same embarrassing shortcoming.

It's not enough to find a meaningful cause. These monkeys want to look in the stars and see their lives' purpose described in explicit detail. They expect to comb through ancient writings and suddenly discover an edict reading "the meaning of life is to collect as many paperclips as possible" and then happily go about their lives as imperfect, yet fulfilled paperclip maximizers.

I'd expect us to shout "life is without mandated meaning!" with lungs full of joy. There are no rules we have to follow, only the consequences we choose for us and our fellow humans. Huzzah!

But most humans want nothing more than to surrender to a powerful force. See Augustine's conception of freedom, the definition of the word Islam, or Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies." When they can't find one overwhelming enough, they furrow their brow and declare with frustration that life has no meaning.

This is part denunciation and part confession. At times, I've felt the same way. I worry man is a domesticated species.

I can think of several possible explanations:

1. Evo Psych

Our instincts were formed in an ancient time when not knowing the social norms and kow-towing to the political leaders resulted in literal and/or genetic extinction. Perhaps altruistic humans who served causes other than our own were more likely to survive Savannah politics.

2. Signaling

Perhaps we want to signal our capability to put our nose to the grindstone and work for your great cause. Hire me!

3. Memetic Hijacking

Growing up, I was often told to publicly proclaim things like "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you." Perhaps spending years on my knees weakened my ability to choose and complete my own goals.

4. Misplaced Life Dissatisfaction

Perhaps it's easier for an unemployed loser to lament the meaninglessness of life than to ...
Compartmentalization in epistemic and instrumental rationality 
by AnnaSalamon — 2010-09-17T07:02:19.041Z

Related to: Humans are not automatically strategic, The mystery of the haunted rationalist, Striving to accept, Taking ideas seriously

I argue that many techniques for epistemic rationality, as taught on LW, amount to techniques for reducing compartmentalization. I argue further that when these same techniques are extended to a larger portion of the mind, they boost instrumental, as well as epistemic, rationality.

Imagine trying to design an intelligent mind.

One problem you’d face is designing its goal.

Every time you designed a goal-indicator, the mind would increase action patterns that hit that indicator[1]. Amongst these reinforced actions would be “wireheading patterns” that fooled the indicator but did not hit your intended goal. For example, if your creature gains reward from internal indicators of status, it will increase those indicators -- including by such methods as surrounding itself with people who agree with it, or convincing itself that it understood important matters others had missed. It would be hard-wired to act as though “believing makes it so”.

A second problem you’d face is propagating evidence. Whenever your creature encounters some new evidence E, you’ll want it to update its model of “events like E”. But how do you tell which events are “like E”? The soup of hypotheses, intuition-fragments, and other pieces of world-model is too large, and its processing too limited, to update each belief after each piece of evidence. Even absent wireheading-driven tendencies to keep rewarding beliefs isolated from threatening evidence, you’ll probably have trouble with accidental compartmentalization (where the creature doesn’t update relevant beliefs simply because your heuristics for what to update were imperfect).

Evolution, AFAICT, faced just these problems. The result is a familiar set of rationality gaps:

I. Accidental compartmentalization

a. Belief compartmentalization: We often fail to propagate changes to our abstract beliefs (and we often make predictions using un-updated, specialized components of our soup of world-model). Thus, learning modus tolens in the abstract doesn’t automatically change your answer to the Wason card test. Learning about conservation o...
The conscious tape
by PhilGoetz — 2010-09-16T19:55:51.997Z

This post comprises one question and no answers. You have been warned.

I was reading "How minds can be computational systems", by William Rapaport, and something caught my attention. He wrote,

Computationalism is - or ought to be - the thesis that cognition is computable ... Note, first, that I have said that computationalism is the thesis that cognition is computable, not that it is computation (as Pylyshyn 1985 p. xiii characterizes it). ... To say that cognition is computable is to say that there is an algorithm - more likely, a collection of interrelated algorithms - that computes it. So, what does it mean to say that something 'computes cognition'? ... cognition is computable if and only if there is an algorithm ... that computes this function (or functions).

Rapaport was talking about cognition, not consciousness. The contention between these hypothesis is, however, only interesting if you are talking about consciousness; if you're talking about "cognition", it's just a choice between two different ways to define cognition.

When it comes to consciousness, I consider myself a computationalist. But I hadn't realized before that my explanation of consciousness as computational "works" by jumping back and forth between those two incompatible positions. Each one provides part of what I need; but each, on its own, seems impossible to me; and they are probably mutually exclusive.

Option 1: Consciousness is computed

If consciousness is computed, then there are no necessary dynamics. All that matters is getting the right output. It doesn't matter what algorithm you use to get that output, or what physical machinery you use to compute it. In the real world, it matters how fast you compute it; but surely you can provide a simulated world at the right speed for your slow or fast algorithm. In humans today, the output is not produced all at once - but from a computationalist perspective, that isn't important. I know "emergence" is wonderful, but it's still Turing-computable. Whatever a "correct" sequence of inputs and outputs is, even if they overlap in time, you can summarize the inputs over time in a single static representation, and the outputs in a static representation.

So what is conscious, in this view? Well, the algorithm doesn't matter - remember, we're not asking for O(consciousn...
LW's first job ad
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2010-09-16T10:04:42.394Z

A friend of the Singularity Institute is seeking to hire someone to research trends and surprises in geopolitics, world economics, and technology - a brainstorming, think-tank type job at a for-profit company. No experience necessary, but strong math and verbal skills required; they're happy to hire out of college and would probably hire out of high school if they find a math-Olympiad type or polymath. This is a job that requires you to think all day and come up with interesting ideas, so they're looking for people who can come up with lots of ideas and criticize them without much external prompting, and enough drive to get their research done without someone standing over their shoulder. They pay well, and it obviously does not involve sales or marketing. They're interested in Less Wrong readers because rationality skills can help. Located in San Francisco. Send résumé and cover letter to yuanshotfirst@gmail.com. Writing sample optional.
Bayes' rule =/= Bayesian inference
by neq1 — 2010-09-16T06:34:08.815Z

Related to: Bayes' Theorem Illustrated, What is Bayesianism?, An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem

(Bayes' theorem is something Bayesians need to use more often than Frequentists do, but Bayes' theorem itself isn't Bayesian. This post is meant to be a light introduction to the difference between Bayes' theorem and Bayesian data analysis.)

Bayes' Theorem

Bayes' theorem is just a way to get (e.g.) p(B|A) from p(A|B) and p(B). The classic example of Bayes' theorem is diagnostic testing. Suppose someone either has the disease (D+) or does not have the disease (D-) and either tests positive (T+) or tests negative (T-). If we knew the sensitivity P(T+|D+), specificity P(T-|D-) and disease prevalence P(D+), then we could get the positive predictive value P(D+|T+) using Bayes' theorem:

For example, suppose we know the sensitivity=0.9, specificity=0.8 and disease prevalence is 0.01. Then,

This answer is not Bayesian or frequentist; it's just correct.

Diagnostic testing study

Typically we will not know P(T+|D+) or P(T-|D-). We would consider these unknown parameters. Let's denote them by Θsens and Θspec. For simplicity, let's assume we know the disease prevalence P(D+) (we often have a lot of data on this).

Suppose 1000 subjects with the disease were tested, and 900 of them tested positive. Suppose 1000 disease-free subjects were tested and 200 of them tested positive. Finally, suppose 1% of the population has the disease.

Frequentist approach

Estimate the 2 parameters (sensitivity and specificity) using their sample values (sample proportions) and plug them in to Bayes' formula above. This results in a point estimate for P(D+|T+) of 0.043. A standard error or confidence interval could be obtained using the delta method or bootstrapping.

Even though Bayes' theorem was used, this is not a Bayesian approach.

Bayesian approach

The Bayesian approach is to specify prior distributions for all unknowns. For example, we might specify independent uniform(0,1) priors for Θsens and Θspec. However, we should expect the test to do at least as good as guessing (guessing would mean randomly selecting 1% of people and calling them T+). In addition, we expect Θsens>1-Θspec. So, I might go with a Beta(4,2.5) distribution for Θsens and Beta(2.5,4) for &The...
Perfect procrastination
by KatjaGrace — 2010-09-16T00:35:01.000Z

Perfectionism is often blamed for procrastination. John Perry explains:

Many procrastinators do not realize that they are perfectionists, for the simple reason that they have never done anything perfectly, or even nearly so… Perfectionism is a matter of fantasy, not reality. Here’s how it works in my case. I am assigned some task, say, refereeing a manuscript for a publisher… Immediately my fantasy life kicks in. I imagine myself writing the most wonderful referees report. I imagine giving the manuscript an incredibly thorough read, and writing a report that helps the author to greatly improve their efforts. I imagine the publisher getting my report and saying, “Wow, that is the best referee report I have ever read.” I imagine my report being completely accurate, completely fair, incredibly helpful to author and publisher.

At first Perry seems to suggest that the perfectionist tries to do the job too well and gets sidetracked on tangential stepping stones, which doesn’t sound accurate. Then he says:

Procrastinating was a way of giving myself permission to do a less than perfect job on a task that didn’t require a perfect job. As long as the deadline was a ways away, then, in theory, I had time to go the library, or set myself up for a long evening at home, and do a thorough, scholarly, perfect job refereeing this book. But when the deadline is near, or even a bit in the past, there is no longer time to do a perfect job. I have to just sit down and do an imperfect, but adequate job.

But why would you be so willing to give yourself permission to do something else unproductive for six weeks so you will have to do an imperfect job if you aren’t willing to permit an imperfect job straight off? If you’re such a perfectionist, wouldn’t you want to get started straight away and do a perfect job?

Here’s an alternative theory. The link between procrastination and perfectionism has to do with construal level theory. When you picture getting started straight away the close temporal distance puts you in near mode, where you see all the detailed impediments to doing a perfect job. When you think of doing the task in the future some time, trade-offs and barriers vanish and the glorious final goal becomes more vivid. So it always seems like you will do a great job in the future, whereas right now progress is depressing...
Intelligence Amplification Open Thread
by Will_Newsome — 2010-09-15T08:39:24.609Z

A place to discuss potentially promising methods of intelligence amplification in the broad sense of general methods, tools, diets, regimens, or substances that boost cognition (memory, creativity, focus, etc.): anything from SuperMemo to Piracetam to regular exercise to eating lots of animal fat to binaural beats, whether it works or not. Where's the highest expected value? What's easiest to make part of your daily routine? Hopefully discussion here will lead to concise top level posts describing what works for a more self-improvement-savvy Less Wrong.

Lists of potential interventions are great, but even better would be a thorough analysis of a single intervention: costs, benefits, ease, et cetera. This way the comment threads will be more structured and organized. Less Wrong is pretty confused about IA, so even if you're not an expert, a quick analysis or link to a metastudy about e.g. exercise could be very helpful.

Added: Adam Atlas is now hosting an IA wiki: BetterBrains! Bookmark it, add to it, make it awesome.
Link: "You're Not Being Reasonable"
by CronoDAS — 2010-09-15T07:19:46.694Z

Thanks to David Brin, I've discovered a blogger, Michael Dobson, who has written, among other things, a fourteen-part series on cognitive biases. But that's not what I'm linking to today.

This is what I'm linking to:

You're Not Being Reasonable

I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve been getting myself into more online arguments about politics and religion lately, and I’m not happy with either my own behavior or others. All the cognitive biases are on display, and hardly anyone actually speaks to the other side. Unreasonableness is rampant.

The problem is that what’s reasonable tends to be subjective. Obviously, I’m going to be biased toward thinking people who agree with me are more reasonable than those lunkheads who don’t. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t objective standards for being reasonable.

...

I learned some of the following through observation, and most of it through the contrary experience of doing it wrong. You’ve heard some of the advice elsewhere, but a reminder every once in a while comes in handy.

Yes, much of it is pretty basic stuff, but as he says, a reminder every once in a while comes in handy, and this is as good a summary of the rules for having a reasonable discussion as I've seen anywhere.

And the rest of the blog seems pretty good, too. (Did I mention the fourteen-part series on cognitive biases?)