trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[LINK]: Interview with Daniel Kahneman
by bradm — 2011-11-29T20:02:55.119Z

Here is a Q & A with Daniel Kahneman. He gives a brief answer to a question about heuristics and AI:

Q.With the launch of Siri and a stated aim to be using the data collected to improve the performance of its AI, should we expect these types of quasi-intelligences to develop the same behavioral foibles that we exhibit, or should we expect something completely different? And if something different, would that something be more likely to reflect the old “rational” assumptions of behavior, or some totally other emergent set of biases and quirks based on its own underlying architecture? My money’s on emergent weirdness, but then, I don’t have a Nobel Prize.-Peter Bennett

A.Emergent weirdness is a good bet. Only deduction is certain. Whenever an inductive short-cut is applied, you can search for cases in which it will fail. It is always useful to ask “What relevant factors are not considered?” and “What irrelevant factors affect the conclusions?” By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.
[LINKS] New GiveWell Top Charities
by jefftk — 2011-11-29T18:40:35.859Z

As of today, GiveWell has two new top charities:

1. Against Malaria Foundation

2. Schistosomiastis Control Initiative

Their previous top charity, Village Reach, no longer has much room for more funding. Which is a good thing: partly through givewell's influence they now have as much money as they can put to good use.
Meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Wedneday 7pm
by EvelynM — 2011-11-29T18:06:36.193Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Wedneday 7pm

WHEN:
30 November 2011 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
144 North College Avenue, Fort Collins, CO 80524

Meet some very cool people.

Discussion article for the meetup : Fort Collins, Colorado Meetup Wedneday 7pm
Meetup : Waterloo Meetup: Nomic
by Paamayim — 2011-11-29T17:10:14.946Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Waterloo Meetup: Nomic

WHEN:
05 December 2011 09:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
2-4 King Street North Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

The second meeting of our newly founded LW Waterloo chapter. Suggested activity is a game of nomic, with a discussion topic to be decided.

Join our mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/lesswrongwaterloo) for more announcements and a better venue for discussion.

Hope to see everyone there! Slight edit: This week's meetup is at Symposium (http://www.symposiumcafe.com/waterloorestaurants.html).

EDIT: Tonight's meetup is at 9pm, not 8pm. Sorry!

Discussion article for the meetup : Waterloo Meetup: Nomic
All free Stanford classes, continually updated
by XFrequentist — 2011-11-29T16:41:39.265Z

[The Stanford-class.org scheme seems to be adding new courses every few days. Instead of a new post each time a new class is added, I commit to keeping this post stocked with links to all current course offerings until at least January 2012.]

Complex Systems

Model Thinking

Electrical Engineering

Information Theory

Civil Engineering

Making Green Buildings

Medicine

Anatomy

[Cancelled] Entrepreneurship

The Lean Launchpad

Technology Entrepreneurship

Computer Science

Computer Science 101

Software as a Service

Human-Computer Interfaces

Natural Language Processing

Game Theory

Probabilistic Graphical Models

Machine Learning

Cryptography

Design and Analysis of Algorithms

Computer Security

[Ran Sept-Dec] Machine Learning

[Ran Sept-Dec] Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

[Ran Sept-Dec] Introduction to Databases
Meetup : West LA Meetup 11-30-2011
by  — 2011-11-29T05:22:35.104Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup 11-30-2011

WHEN:
30 November 2011 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7:00pm - 9:00pm Wednesday, November 2nd.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar, located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters.

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Recommended Reading:

Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People

The Skeptics Trilema

Conservation Of Expected Evidence

Whether you're a regular reader or totally new, here for the theoretical musings or the practical things, come by and say hello! The conversation is largely unstructured and casual, and the people are awesome. If we have a large group, we may also play a game!

I will bring a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup 11-30-2011
[SEQ RERUN] Politics and Awful Art
by MinibearRex — 2011-11-29T03:47:27.155Z

Today's post, Politics and Awful Art was originally published on 20 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When producing art that has some sort of political purpose behind it (like persuading people, or conveying a message), don't forget to actually make it art. It can't just be politics.

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 Litany Against Gurus, 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.
[Link]: GiveWell is aiming to have a new #1 charity by December 
by Normal_Anomaly — 2011-11-29T03:11:34.662Z

GiveWell, LessWrong's most cited organization for optimal philanthropy, is currently re-evaluating its charity rankings with the goal of naming a new #1 charity by December 2011. Essentially, VillageReach (the current top charity) has met all of its short-term funding needs, to the point where it no longer has the greatest marginal return.

Our current top-rated charity is VillageReach. In 2010, we directed over $1.1 million to it, which met its short-term funding needs (i.e., its needs for the next year or so).

VillageReach still has longer-term needs, and in the absence of other giving opportunities that we consider comparable, we’ve continued to feature it as #1 on our website. However, we’ve also been focusing most of our effort this year on identifying and investigating other potential top-rated charities, with the hope that we can refocus attention on an organization with shorter-term needs this December. (In general, the vast bulk of our impact on donations comes in December.) We believe that we will be able to do so. We don’t believe we’ll be able to recommend a giving opportunity as good as giving to VillageReach was last year, but given VillageReach’s lack of short-term (1-year) room for more funding, we do expect to have a different top recommendation by this December.

EDIT: The new charities are up! They are the Against Malaria Foundation and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative.
Several Topics that May or May Not deserve their own Post
by EphemeralNight — 2011-11-29T01:59:20.969Z

Topic the First - Asking "Why?"

There is a certain cliche of a young child asking "why?", getting an answer, asking "why?" to that, and so on until the adult finally dismisses them out of frustration. And we all smile and laugh at how ignorant the child is and pat ourselves on the back for being so grown up.

But I don't think this story is very funny. This story, told in countless variations, has the rather repugnant moral that it is rude and childish to ask that most important of questions. "Why?"

So why do parents near-universally admonish their children when they persist with the questions? What is motivating parents all over the world to teach their children not to ask "why?"? Do parents simply not want to admit to their ignorance? I thought so at first, but I suspect it is deeper than that.

It seems more likely to me, that this practice is a defense against acknowledging that one's answers are mysterious. It is easier for a parent to attribute a young child's lack of understanding to a lack of intelligence, than to comprehend that their own answer is a curiosity stopper and not an answer at all.

In essence, children are being trained to accept curiosity-stoppers without hesitation, by being reprimanded for continuing to ask "why?" I find this more than a little alarming; it would seem that for parents in particular, it is especially dangerous not to notice when they're confused.

Topic the Second - The Behavior of Hope

Is tenuous hope more emotionally taxing than certain doom?

I wouldn't think so, but whenever the subject of death comes up (among those who don't believe in an afterlife) I've noticed a very curious pattern.

I have only a guess, but it seems possible that when doom is certain, when there's no escape for you or anyone, it is easier to numb the emotions. Accepting the possibility of escape makes the doom not-certain, which forces fear of the doom to the surface.

Topic the Third - Abuse of the word "Love"

On another site I happened to be perusing, someone posted a bit of a rant about teenagers not knowing the difference between love and lust, to which I gave this response:

The word "love" is abused so much because we live in a society that looks down on pursuing relationships based on lust. A society that goes out of its way to make us feel bad about ourselves if we want to be intimate with someone we don't love. So of course the emotiona

...
How rationality can make your life more awesome
by Julia_Galef — 2011-11-29T01:23:26.980Z

I'm currently working with Lukeprog on a crash course in rationality. It's essentially a streamlined version of the Sequences, but one area we want to beef up is the answer to the question, "Why learn about rationality?"

I've gone through all of the previous threads I can find on this topic -- Reflections on rationality a year out, Personal benefits from rationality, What has rationality done for you?, and The benefits of rationality -- but most of the examples people give of rationality helping them are a little too general. People cite things like "I hold off on proposing solutions," or "I ask myself if there's a better way to be doing this."

To someone who's not already sold on this whole rationality thing, general statements like that won't mean very much. What I think we really need is a list of concrete examples of how the tools of epistemic rationality, as they're taught in the Sequences, can improve your health, your career, your love life, the causes you care about, your psychological well-being, and so on.

Below, my first attempt at doing just that. (I explain what rationality is, and how to practice it, elsewhere in the guide -- this section is just about benefits.) I'd appreciate feedback: Is it clear? Can you think of any other good examples in this vein? Would it be convincing to someone who isn't intrinsically interested in epistemic rationality for its own sake?

...

For some people, rationality is an end in itself – they value having true beliefs. But rationality’s also a powerful tool for achieving pretty much anything else you care about. Below, a survey of some of the ways that rationality can make your life more awesome:
Rationality alerts you when you have a false belief that’s making you worse off.

You’ve undoubtedly got beliefs about yourself – about what kind of job would be fulfilling for you, for example, or about what kind of person would be a good match for you. You’ve also got beliefs about the world – say, about what it’s like to be rich, or about “what men want” or “what women want.” And you’ve probably internalized some fundamental maxims, such as: When it’s true love, you’ll know. You should always follow your dreams. Natural things are better. Promiscuity reduces your worth as a person.

Those beliefs shape your decisions about your ca...
[POLL] LessWrong group on YourMorals.org
by InquilineKea — 2011-11-29T01:22:07.828Z

Here's the news article on this: http://www.yourmorals.org/blog/2011/11/how-to-use-groups-at-yourmorals-org/

And here's the group that the LW community just created: http://www.yourmorals.org/setgraphgroup.php?grp=623d5410f705f6a1f92c83565a3cfffc

I think it will be very interesting to see what we can all get on this.
Meetup : Austin, TX
by Vaniver — 2011-11-28T23:29:16.303Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX

WHEN:
03 December 2011 01:30:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
2222B Guadalupe St Austin, Texas 78705

Once again, the Austin LW meetup is meeting at Caffe Medici. We sit on the second floor to the left, near (or often on) the stage.

I, unfortunately, will be in Maryland for the weekend, but I hope you have a good time without me!

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX
Probability puzzle
by malthrin — 2011-11-28T21:33:36.850Z

I came up with this puzzle after reading Vaniver's excellent post on the Value of Information. I enjoyed working it out over Thanksgiving and thought I'd share it with the rest of you.

Your friend holds up a curiously warped coin. "Let's play a game," he says. "I've tampered with this quarter. It could come up all heads, all tails, or any value in between. I want you to predict a coin flip; if you get it right, I'll pay you $1, and if you're wrong, you pay me $3."

"Absolutely, on one condition," you reply. "We repeat this bet until I decide to stop or we finish N games."

What is the minimum value of N that lets you come out ahead on average?

Each game, you may choose heads or tails, or to end the sequence of bets with that coin. Assume that all heads:tails ratios are equally likely for the coin.

edit: since a couple people have gotten it, I'll link my solution: http://pastebin.com/XsEizNFL
Large scale problems, cognitive biases, and existential risk
by JoshuaZ — 2011-11-28T20:32:19.231Z

There's a recent paper(PDF) which finds that people who don't know much about a problem are more inclined to not find out more about that problem. Moreover, the larger scale and more complex a problem looked like, the more likely people were to try to avoid learning more about it, and the more likely they were to trust that pre-existing institutions such as the government could handle the problem. This looks like a potentially interesting form of cognitive bias. It may also explain why people are so unwilling to look at existential risk. There's essentially no issue that occurs on a larger scale than existential risk. This suggests that in trying to get people to understand existential risk, it may make sense to first address the easier to understand existential risks like large asteroids.
Statisticsish Question
by damang — 2011-11-28T16:03:17.389Z

This is a question really, not a post, I just can't find the answer formally. Does laplace's rule of succession work when you are taking from a finite population without replacement? If I know that some papers in a hat have "yes" on them, and I know that the rest don't, and that there is a finite amount of papers, and every time I take a paper out I burn it, but I have no clue how many papers are in the hat, should I still use laplace's rule to figure out how much to expect the next paper to have a "yes" on it? or is there some adjustment you make, since every time I see a yes paper the odds of yes papers:~yes papers in the hat goes down.
LW Philosophers versus Analytics
by Ronny Fernandez — 2011-11-28T15:40:15.138Z

By and large, I would bet money that the devoted, experienced, and properly sequenced LWer, is a better philosopher than the average current philosophy majors concentrating in the analytic tradition. I say this because I have regular philosophical conversations with both populations, and notice many philosophical desiderata lacking in my conversations with my classmates, from my school and others, that I find abundantly on this website. Those desiderata, which are roughly the twelve virtues. I find that though my classmates have healthy doses of curiosity, empiricism and even scholarship, they lack in, evenness, lightness, relinquishment, precision, perfectionism and true humility.

How could that be? LW has built a huge positivized reductionist metaphysics, and a Bayesian epistemology which can almost be read as a self improvement manual. These are unprecedented, and in some circles, outrageous truths. This is not to mention the original work that has been done in LW posts and comment trees on, meta-ethics, ethics, biases, mathematics, rationality, quantum physics, economics, self-hack, etc. We have here a self-updating reliably transmittable well oiled machine, the likes of which philosophy has only so rarely seen.

What is even more impressive to me about LW as a philosophical movement, is that it seems to be nearly self contained when it comes to philosophy. I mean most experienced LWers probably really haven't read very much Kant, maybe some Wittgenstein or Quine; but LWers can still somehow solve the problems philosophers spend their lives solving by building disconnected and competing philosophical systems specifically designed for each task, by the use of roughly one rather generally successful epistemology and metaphysics, which can be called together LWism.

So if you agree that LW does better philosophy than analytic philosophers, let's put our money where our mouths are, as our own philosophy suggests we should. I will post a series of discussion posts each concentrating only on one currentish question from academic philosophy. In each post, I will cover the essentials of the problem, as well as provide external resources on the problem. Each post will also include a list of posts from the sequences which are recommended before participation. Each question will be solved with a consensus of less than 2 to 1 odds amongst professional philosophers,...
Living Metaphorically
by lukeprog — 2011-11-28T15:01:41.359Z

Part of the sequence: Rationality and Philosophy

In my last post, I showed that the brain does not encode concepts in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. So, any philosophical practice which assumes this — as much of 20th century conceptual analysis seems to do — is misguided.

Next, I want to show that human abstract thought is pervaded by metaphor, and that this has implications for how we think about the nature of philosophical questions and philosophical answers. As Lakoff & Johnson (1999) write:

If we are going to ask philosophical questions, we have to remember that we are human... The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical. In itself, that is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact about the capacities of the human mind. But it has major consequences for every aspect of philosophy. Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible, and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take.

To understand how fundamental metaphor is to our thinking, we must remember that human cognition is embodied:

We have inherited from the Western philosophical tradition a theory of faculty psychology, in which we have a "faculty" of reason that is separate from and independent of what we do with our bodies. In particular, reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement...

The evidence from cognitive science shows that classical faculty psychology is wrong. There is no such fully autonomous faculty of reason separate from and independent of bodily capacities such as perception and movement. The evidence supports, instead, an evolutionary view, in which reason uses and grows out of such bodily capacities.

Consider, for example, the fact that as neural beings we must categorize things:

We are neural beings. Our brains each have 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections. It is common in the brain for information to be passed from one dense ensemble of neurons to another via a relatively sparse set of connections. Whenever this happens, the pattern of activation distributed over the first set of neurons is too great to be represented in a one-to-one manner in the sparse set of connections. Therefore, the sparse set of connections necessarily groups together certain i

...
Kickstarter fundraising for largest Tesla Coils in history
by Kevin — 2011-11-28T05:48:15.225Z

"If the government is not willing to fund the building of two 10-story tall Tesla Coils, then why the hell do I even pay taxes?"

This seems like by far the best investment of $300,000 out there, if your metric is revolutionary new physics discovered per dollar. I pointed the founder at Thiel's Breakout Labs, which is probably more suited to this kind of thing than Kickstarter. But there is still a very non-negligible chance that the Kickstarter Grant will come to fruition.
[SEQ RERUN] The Litany Against Gurus
by MinibearRex — 2011-11-28T05:31:28.528Z

Today's post, The Litany Against Gurus was originally published on 18 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A piece of poetry written to describe the proper attitude to take towards a mentor, or a hero.

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 Guardians of Ayn Rand, 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.
Log-odds (or logits)
by brilee — 2011-11-28T01:11:48.673Z

(I wrote this post for my own blog, and given the warm reception, I figured it would also be suitable for the LW audience. It contains some nicely formatted equations/tables in LaTeX, hence I've left it as a dropbox download.)

Logarithmic probabilities have appeared previously on LW here, here, and sporadically in the comments. The first is a link to a Eliezer post which covers essentially the same material. I believe this is a better introduction/description/guide to logarithmic probabilities than anything else that's appeared on LW thus far.

Introduction:

Our conventional way of expressing probabilities has always frustrated me. For example, it is very easy to say nonsensical statements like, “110% chance of working”. Or, it is not obvious that the difference between 50% and 50.01% is trivial compared to the difference between 99.98% and 99.99%. It also fails to accommodate the math correctly when we want to say things like, “five times more likely”, because 50% * 5 overflows 100%.
Jacob and I have (re)discovered a mapping from probabilities to log- odds which addresses all of these issues. To boot, it accommodates Bayes’ theorem beautifully. For something so simple and fundamental, it certainly took a great deal of google searching/wikipedia surfing to discover that they are actually called “log-odds”, and that they were “discovered” in 1944, instead of the 1600s. Also, nobody seems to use log-odds, even though they are conceptually powerful. Thus, this primer serves to explain why we need log-odds, what they are, how to use them, and when to use them.

Article is here (Updated 11/30 to use base 10)
Meta-reading recommendations
by  — 2011-11-28T00:17:39.940Z

Despite a glut of reading recommendation engines, I still find that I rely on personal recommendations for 90% of the books that I read. Given that, I thought it might be useful to try to compile a list of prolific recommenders - people who provide a large number of reliable book recommendations.

I'll start off with the two obvious ones, Tyler Cowen and Cosma Shalizi. The LW/OB group of Eliezer, Robin Hanson, and Michael Vassar also provide useful recommendations (though much less frequently).

Who else can reliably recommend a good book?