trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Branches of rationality 
by AnnaSalamon — 2011-01-12T03:24:35.656Z

Related to: Go forth and create the art!, A sense that more is possible.

If you talk to any skilled practitioner of an art, they have a sense of the depths beyond their present skill level. This sense is important. To create an art, or to learn one, one must have a sense of the goal.

By contrast, when I chat with many at Less Wrong meet-ups, I often hear a sense that mastering the sequences will take one most of the way to "rationality", and that the main thing to do, after reading the sequences, is to go and share the info with others. I would therefore like to sketch the larger thing that I hope our rationality can become. I have found this picture useful for improving my own rationality; I hope you may find it useful too.

To avoid semantic disputes, I tried to generate my picture of "rationality" by asking not "What should 'rationality' be?" but "What is the total set of simple, domain-general hacks that can help humans understand the most important things, and achieve our goals?" or "What simple tricks can help turn humans -- haphazard evolutionary amalgams that we are -- into coherent agents?"

The branches

The larger "rationality" I have in mind would include some arts that are well-taught on Less Wrong, others that that don't exist yet at all, and others have been developed by outside communities from which we could profitably steal.

Specifically, a more complete art of rationality might teach the following arts:

1. Having beliefs: the art of having one's near-mode anticipations and far-mode symbols work together, with the intent of predicting the outside world. (The Sequences, especially Mysterious answers to mysterious questions, currently help tremendously with these skills.)

2. Making your beliefs less buggy -- about distant or abstract subjects. This art aims to let humans talk about abstract domains in which the data doesn’t hit you upside the head -- such as religion, politics, the course of the future, or the efficacy of cryonics -- without the conversation turning immediately into nonsense. (The Sequences, and other discussions of common biases and of the mathematics of evidence, are helpful here as well.)

3. Making your beliefs less buggy -- about yourself. Absent training, our models of ourselves are about as nonsense-prone as our models of distant or a...
VIDEO: The Problem With Anecdotes
by JenniferRM — 2011-01-12T02:37:33.860Z

Inspired by some of the comments in Back To The Basics I thought it might be interesting to see whether and how video embedding works in the discussion area. The experiment is intended to function technically to see if this is possible, but also socially to see if the reaction is good and the comments are high quality.

When trying to set up this video I clicked the "HTML" button among the text tools (to the right of "Insert/edit image" and to the left of "Insert horizontal ruler". In the text box that popped up, I pasted the html that I had already found on youtube by pressing the "Embed" button for a video that seemed thematically appropriate.

Assuming that this technically succeeds, we'll all have an some anecdotal evidence about whether videos are a positive contribution to LW.

One thing that might be useful to mention is that QualiaSoup has produced about 28 videos of which I picked one that seemed particularly relevant to this forum and that I watched before posting. I didn't really learn anything from this but I also didn't notice anything glaringly wrong with it. If this experiment is good enough to repeat we might want to think about the standards we'd expect video posts to live up to. Not sure what those should be, but it seemed like a good idea to mention that conversation around this might be useful.

Without further ado, "The Problem With Anecdotes"...
NPR show All Things Considered on the Singularity and SIAI
by arundelo — 2011-01-11T22:58:24.725Z

The NPR show All Things Considered did a short story on the Singularity, including interviews with Eliezer Yudkowsky and others involved with SIAI:
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/11/132840775/The-Singularity-Humanitys-Last-Invention
Convincing ET of our rationality
by TheRev — 2011-01-11T17:32:13.598Z

Allow me to propose a thought experiment. Suppose you, and you alone, were to make first contact with an alien species. Since your survival and the survival of the entire human race may depend on the extraterrestrials recognizing you as a member of a rational species, how would you convey your knowledge of mathematics, logic, and the scientific method to them using only your personal knowledge and whatever tools you might reasonably have on your person on an average day?

When I thought of this question, the two methods that immediately came to mind were the Pythagorean Theorem and prime number sequences. For instance, I could draw a rough right triangle and label one side with three dots, the other with four, and the hypotenuse with five. However, I realized that these are fairly primitive maths. After all, the ancient Greeks knew of them, and yet had no concept of the scientific method. Would these likely be sufficient, and if not what would be? Could you make a rough sketch of the first few atoms on the periodic table or other such universal phenomena so that it would be generally recognizable? Could you convey a proof of rationality in a manner that even aliens who cannot hear human vocalizations, or see in a completely different part of the EM spectrum? Is it even in principle possible to express rationality without a common linguistic grounding?

In other words, what is the most rational thought you could convey without the benefit of common language, culture, psychology, or biology, and how would you do it?

Bonus point: Could you convey Bayes' theorem to said ET?
Population ethics and personal identity
by KatjaGrace — 2011-01-11T17:21:11.000Z

Photo: Misocrazy

It seems most people think creating a life is a morally neutral thing to do while destroying one is terrible. This is apparently because prior to being alive and contingent on not being born, you can’t want to be alive, and nobody exists to accrue benefits or costs. For those who agree with these explanations, here’s a thought experiment.

The surprise cake thought experiment

You are sleeping dreamlessly. Your friends are eating a most delicious cake. They consider waking you and giving you a slice, before you all go back to sleep. They know you really like waking up in the night to eat delicious cakes with them and will have no trouble getting back to sleep. They are about to wake you when they realize that if they don’t give you the cake you you will be unconscious and thus unable to want to join them, or be helped or harmed. So they finish it themselves. When you awake the next day and are told how they almost wasted their cake on you, are you pleased they did not?

If not, one explanation is that you are a temporally extended creature who was awake and had preferences in the past, and that these things mean you currently have preferences. You still can’t accrue benefits or costs unless you get a bit more conscious, but it usually seems the concern is just whether there is an identity to whom the benefits and costs will apply. As an added benefit, this position would allow you to approve of resuscitating people who have collapsed.

To agree with this requires a notion of personal identity other than ‘collection of person-moments which I choose to define as me’, unless you would find the discretionary boundaries of such collections morally relevant enough to make murder into nothing at all. This kind of personal identity seems needed to make unconscious people who previously existed significantly different from those who have never existed.

It seems very unlikely to me that people have such identities. Nor do I see how it should matter if they did, but that’s another story. Perhaps those of you who think I should better defend my views on population ethics could tell me why I should change my mind on personal identity. These may or may not help.
Alternate Sleep Schedules
by  — 2011-01-11T11:47:51.511Z

My friend and I are starting the Uberman sleep schedule (six 20-minute naps spread evenly throughout each day) tonight. Have other lesswrongians experimented with alternate sleep schedules? Are any of you qualified medical experts who can give input or advice? Success stories and failure stories would both be appreciated, and I'll keep you guys posted on our progress.
Are committed truthseekers lonelier?
by spencerth — 2011-01-11T09:42:11.277Z

People of a truthseeking bent - rationalists, unbiased scientists, inquisitive non-ideologues - are these types of people likely to be lonelier on average? Those who hold a particular set of positions, tastes, perspectives, worldviews, or preferences to be part of a group, rather than the other way around (being considered part of some group because they hold a particular set of positions) seem like they are at a significant advantage when it comes to the ability to make and keep friends, or at least find tolerant acquaintances compared to the typical truthseeker.

The truthseeker, by virtue of their ability to find, to a particular group they are currently part of or interacting with, uncomfortable truths, seems to put them in the unenviable position of, once they've found a particular uncomfortable truth, having to either keep quiet and have less-than-completely honest or more limited interactions, or speaking their mind and getting ostracized. Along with this, they're far less likely to engage in "false flattery", are more likely to focus on details and nuance (and hence be perceived negatively, due to an aversion to pedantry on certain subjects by some), far more likely to voice disagreement, and far more likely to wind up being a person to defend something considered objectionable by the group (they'd defend the proverbial idiot who says the sun will rise tomorrow - since it will, regardless of the fact that an idiot says it.)

The truthseeker may also confuse their interlocutors, due to what may be perceived as "holding contradictory views" ("how can you think THAT if you also think THIS? You don't know what you're talking about"); they may be accused of being a "plant" from the "other side" ("if you think that particular thing, you must secretly be an X, so all that other stuff you said that I agree with must be a lie"); they may be thought of as a troll or prankster ("you're just saying that thing I consider objectionable to get a negative reaction out of me, but I know you really agree with me on that the way you [honestly] agree with me on all that other stuff"), or that you're playing devil's advocate for its own sake. These things all happen, but due to the (current) inability to know for sure another's motives, it may be easy to confuse the truthseeker with the idiot, the confused/self-contradic...
Back to the Basics of Rationality
by lukeprog — 2011-01-11T07:05:28.177Z

My deconversion from Christianity had a large positive impact on my life. I suspect it had a small positive impact on the world, too. (For example, I no longer condemn gays or waste time and money on a relationship with an imaginary friend.) And my deconversion did not happen because I came to understand the Bayesian concept of evidence or Kolmogorov complexity or Solomonoff induction. I deconverted because I encountered some very basic arguments for non-belief, for example those in Dan Barker's Losing Faith in Faith.

Less Wrong has at least two goals. One goal is to raise the sanity waterline. If most people understood just the basics Occam's razor, what constitutes evidence and why, general trends of science, reductionism, and cognitive biases, the world would be greatly improved. Yudkowsky's upcoming books are aimed at this first goal of raising the sanity waterline. So are most of the sequences. So are learning-friendly posts like References & Resources for LessWrong.

A second goal is to attract some of the best human brains on the planet and make progress on issues related to the Friendly AI problem, the problem with the greatest leverage in the universe. I have suggested that Less Wrong would make faster progress toward this goal if it worked more directly with the community of scholars already tackling the exact same problems. I don't personally work toward this goal because I'm not mathematically sophisticated enough to do so, but I'm glad others are!

Still, I think the first goal could be more explicitly pursued. There are many people like myself and jwhendy who can be massively impacted for the better not by coming to a realization about algorithmic learning theory, but by coming to understand the basics of rationality like probability and the proper role of belief and reductionism.

Reasons for Less Wrong to devote more energy to the basics

Such efforts to spread the basics will have a short-term impact on more people than will efforts toward Friendly AI, and these impacted people will in turn impact others, hopefully for the better.

Some LWers may feel they have little to contribute because they aren't masters of Solomonoff induction or algorithmic learning theory. But they will be able to contribute to raising the sanity waterline by spreading the basics of rationality.

Providing more basic

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Aguirre, Tegmark, Layzer "Cosmological interpretation of quantum mechanics"
by cousin_it — 2011-01-11T06:29:49.349Z

We haven't discussed it here yet, have we? Article from August 2010. ArXiv link. The upshot:

We study the quantum measurement problem in the context of an infinite, statistically uniform space, as could be generated by eternal inlfation. It has recently been argued that when identical copies of a quantum measurement system exist, the standard projection operators and Born rule method for calculating probabilities must be supplemented by estimates of relative frequencies of observers. We argue that an infinite space actually renders the Born rule redundant, by physically realizing all outcomes of a quantum measurement in different regions, with relative frequencies given by the square of the wave function amplitudes. [...] Finally, the analysis suggests a “cosmological interpretation” of quantum theory in which the wave function describes the actual spatial collection of identical quantum systems, and quantum uncertainty is attributable to the observer’s inability to self-locate in this collection.

The notion that I am this huge equivalence class of almost-identical human beings (just similar enough to be running the same mind-computation at this moment), scattered over a spatially infinite universe, sounds very UDT-ish. Unfortunately I don't know enough physics to judge the paper properly. Please halp.
Does Evidential Decision Theory really fail Solomon's Problem?
by AlexMennen — 2011-01-11T04:53:36.930Z

Solomon's Problem and varients thereof are often cited as criticism of Evidential decision theory.

For background, here's Solomon's Problem: King Solomon wants to sleep with another man's wife. However, he knows that uncharismatic leaders frequently sleep with other men's wives, and charismatic leaders almost never do. Furthermore, uncharismatic leaders are frequently overthrown, and charismatic leaders rarely are. On the other hand, sleeping with other men's wives does not cause leaders to be overthrown. Instead, high charisma decreases the chance that a leader will sleep with another man's wife and the chance that the leader will be overthrown separately. Not getting overthrown is more important to King Solomon than getting the chance to sleep with the other guy's wife.

Causal decision theory holds that King Solomon can go ahead and sleep with the other man's wife because it will not directly cause him to be overthrown. Timeless decision theory holds that he can sleep with the woman because it will not cause his overthrow in any timeless sense either. Conventional wisdom holds that Evidential decision theory would have him refrain from her, because updating on the fact that he slept with her would suggest a higher probability that he will get overthrown.

The problem with that interpretation is that it assumes that King Solomon only updates his probability distributions based on information about him that is accessible to others. He cannot change whether or not he would sleep with another man's wife given no other disincentives by refraining from doing so in response to other disincentives. The fact that he is faced with the dilemma already indicates that he would. Updating on this information, he knows that he is probably uncharismatic, and thus likely to get overthrown. Updating further on his decision after taking into account the factors guiding his decision will not change the correct probability distribution.

This more complete view of Evidential decision theory is isomorphic to Timeless decision theory (edit: shown to be false in comments). I'm slightly perplexed as to why I have not seen it elsewhere. Is it flawed? Has it been mentioned elsewhere and I haven't noticed? If so, why isn't it so widely known?
Non-trivial probability distributions for priors and Occam's razor
by JoshuaZ — 2011-01-11T03:59:28.947Z

Assume we have a countable set of hypotheses described in some formal way with some prior distribution such that 1) our prior for each hypothesis is non-zero 2) our formal description system has only a finite number of hypotheses of any fixed length. Then, I claim that that under just this set of weak constraints, our hypotheses are under a condition that informally acts a lot like Occam's razor. In particular, let h(n) be the the probability mass assigned to "a hypothesis with description at least exactly n is correct." (ETA: fixed from earlier statement) Then, as n goes to infinity, h(n) goes to zero. So, when one looks in the large-scale complicated hypotheses must have low probability. This suggests that one doesn't need any appeal to computability or anything similar to accept some form of Occam's razor. One only needs that one has a countable hypothesis space, no hypothesis has probability zero or one, and that has a non-stupid way of writing down hypotheses.

A few questions: 1) Am I correct in seeing this as Occam-like or is this just an indication that I'm using too weak a notion of Occam's razor?

2) Is this point novel? I'm not as familiar with the Bayesian literature as other people here so I'm hoping that someone can point out if this point has been made before.

ETA: This was apparently a point made by Unknowns in an earlier thread which I totally forgot but probably read at the time. Thanks also for the other pointers.
Spreadsheet-based tool for tracking time
by jwhendy — 2011-01-10T23:55:28.976Z

I'm not sure what interest others will have in this, but I developed a spreadsheet-based time-tracking tool a bit back for a friend. He wanted to see where he was spending his time -- work, sleep, time with his wife, recreation, kids, etc. I used it myself for a while, too, and found it informative. I think the primary benefits of doing something like this are:

Examining what you think you value compared to what you show, in practice, that you actually value in order to identify areas of improvement concerning time usage.

Improve efficiency. Target an area, implement an reduction method, and see how your efforts track with time spent on that area.

Self-policing. I found that just by tracking my time, I was able to reduce time spent in the "wasted time" category (stupid browsing, non-beneficial wiki-hopping, etc.), especially while at work being paid to do something else.

The spreadsheet is available HERE, and consists of three tabs, one for time input and two for statistics.

DailyInput: this tab is where data is input each day. I have default formulas set to make time entry as fast as possible. After entering a date, start and top time each day, you should only have to enter stop times for the rest of the day (trying and seeing for yourself is easier than explaining it. To override (e.g. if you have a gap or are on the next day), just manually enter a date/time in the cell, overwriting the formula.

The number of hours gets calculated and will work for multiple-day-spanning activities (like sleep).

You assign a category and can input a memo for each chunk of time. The categories are a drop down list created from a set of cells you define (in column H). I have an example list in the download above. Changing the cells containing categories automatically changes the drop-down list (I have it set to read up to 20 cells). You can manually fiddle with this via the Data -> Validation dialog box. Sleep and work should remain the top two entries if you like the non-sleep/work calculations discussed below.

Jan-Jun/Jul-Dec: the other two tabs (I just broke it up into 6 months to cut down on the number of rows per sheet) do some basic calculations on the daily input. You'll see that the total hours spent on a category appear as the data gets input, and a conditional setting highlights the current week's row in blue. At t

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The Unpresumptuous Philosopher
by KatjaGrace — 2011-01-10T16:40:18.000Z

Nick Bostrom showed that either position in Extreme Sleeping Beauty seems absurd, then gave a third option. I argued that his third option seems worse than either of the original pair. If I am right there that the case for Bayesian conditioning without updating on evidence fails, we have a choice of disregarding Bayesian conditioning in at least some situations, or distrusting the aversion to extreme updates as in Extreme Sleeping Beauty. The latter seems the necessary choice, given the huge disparity in evidence supporting Bayesian conditioning and that supporting these particular intuitions about large updates and strong beliefs.

Notice that both the Halfer and Thirder positions on Extreme Sleeping Beauty have very similar problems. They are seemingly opposed by the same intuitions against extreme certainty in situations where we don’t feel certain, and extreme updates in situations where we hardly feel we have any evidence. Either before or after discovering you are in the first waking, you must be very sure of how the coin came up. And between ignorance of the day and knowledge, you must change your mind drastically. If we must choose one of these positions then, it is not clear which is preferable on these grounds alone.

Now notice that the Thirder position in Extreme Sleeping Beauty is virtually identical to SIA and consequently the Presumptuous Philosopher’s position (as Nick explains, p64). From Anthropic Bias:

The Presumptuous Philosopher

39It is the year 2100 and physicists have narrowed down the search for a theory of everything to only two remaining plausible candidate theories, T1 and T2 (using considerations from super-duper symmetry). According to T1 the world is very, very big but finite, and there are a total of a trillion, trillion observers in the cosmos. According to T2, the world is very, very, very big but finite, and there are a trillion, trillion, trillion observers. The super-duper symmetry considerations are indifferent between these two theories. Physicists are preparing a simple experiment that will falsify one of the theories. Enter the presumptuous philosopher: “Hey guys, it is completely unnecessary for you to do the experiment, because I can already show to you that T2 is about a trillion times more likely to be true than T1 (whereupon the philosopher […] appeals to SIA)!”

The Presumptuous Ph...