trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Buridan's ass and the psychological origins of objective probability
by common_law — 2013-03-30T09:43:38.902Z

[Crossposted]

The medieval philosopher Buridan reportedly constructed a thought experiment to support his view that human behavior was determined rather than “free”—hence rational agents couldn’t choose between two equally good alternatives. In the Buridan’s Ass Paradox, an ass finds itself between two equal equidistant bales of hay, noticed simultaneously; the bales’ distance and size are the only variables influencing the ass’s behavior. Under these idealized conditions, the ass must starve, its predicament indistinguishable from a physical object suspended between opposite forces, such as a planet that neither falls into the sun nor escapes into outer space. (Since the ass served Buridan as metaphor for the human agent, in what follows, I speak of “ass” and “agent” interchangeably.)

Computer scientist Leslie Lamport formalized the paradox as “Buridan’s Principle,” which states that the ass will starve if it is situated in a range of possibilities that include midpoints where two opposing forces are equal and it must choose in a sufficiently short time span. We assume, based on a principle of physical continuity, that the larger the bale of hay compared to the other, the faster will the ass be able to decide. Since this is true on the left and on the right, at the midpoint, where the bales are equal, symmetry requires an infinite decision time Conclusion: within some range of bale comparisons, the ass will require decision time greater than a given bounded time interval. (For rigorous treatment, see Buridan’s Principle (1984).)

Buridan’s Principle is counterintuitive, as Lamport discovered when he first tried to publish. Among the objections to Buridan’s Principle summarized by Lamport, the main objection provides an insight about the source of the mind-projection fallacy, which treats probability as a feature of the world. The most common objection is that when the agent can’t decide it may use a default metarule. Lamport points out this substitutes another decision subject to the same limits: the agent must decide that it can’t decide. My point differs from that of Lamport, who proves that binary decisions in the face of continuous inputs are unavoidable and that with minimal assumptions they preclude deciding in bounded time; whereas I dr...
[SEQ RERUN] Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-30T06:03:22.218Z

Today's post, Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate was originally published on 20 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/early-adopter/programmer/etc crowd, aka "the nonconformist cluster", seems to be stunningly bad at coordinating group projects. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them is that people are as reluctant to speak agreement out loud, as they are eager to voice disagreements - the exact opposite of the situation that obtains in more cohesive and powerful communities. This is not rational either! It is dangerous to be half a rationalist (in general), and this also applies to teaching only disagreement but not agreement, or only lonely defiance but not coordination. The pseudo-rationalist taboo against expressing strong feelings probably doesn't help either.

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 Rationalist Fiction, 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.
Drowning In An Information Ocean
by diegocaleiro — 2013-03-30T04:32:42.980Z

Drowning In An Information Ocean

I decided to take a look at the books hanging around the Future of Humanity Institute. It is a sobering and sad experience. I'd say there are little less than 2 thousand books.

80% of books I wouldn't mind reading,

1/2 I would read,

1/3 I should read

and 1/5 I must read!

I predict that I'll read actually 1/400, counting the ones there, and their enhanced successors. How emotionally terrible is it to live in such a technically competent society and want to understand the world! Since 2000 I've abandoned TV, videogames, celebrity gossip, musical ability, knowledge about bands, politics, theater classes, dancing classes, handball, tennis, reading fiction, reading parts of Facebook, maintaining contact with groups X and Y of friends, newspapers, magazines and comics. All in the name of keeping up with human knowledge on some areas that fascinate me. Mostly areas having to do with the nature of minds and mental states. Come to think of it, the only two things that really, really interest me are minds and evolution. My curiosity is very narrow, it should be no trouble to learn a satisfactory amount about two things, right? So if you want to know what a mind is and what it does, and to get a grasp on the outlook of evolved stuff, you need to go through areas like:

Positive Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Animal Cognition (Ethology), Cultural Evolution, Cognitive Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Primatology, Physical and Biological Anthropology.

Which I did.

Dig up a bit and you'll find that those require knowledge from Evolutionary Biology, Neuroeconomics, Basic Neuroscience, Genetics, Proof Theory, Formal Logic, Anthropic Reasoning - And from Anthropic Reasoning, you get a lot of physics requirements, mostly in cosmology and a bit in particle physics. Dig a little further and you can't get a lot of what is up there without grasping Maynard Smith and Trivers thoughts on biology, which come from economics, and by the time you notice you are surrounded by isoquants, comparing stable equilibriums across disciplines and thinking of economic metaphors for how the PreMedial Ventral Cortex settles some decision issues. Which of course requires that you understand metaphors, and you'll have to check some Hofstadter and Pinker on those issues, which...
The value of time as a student
by KatjaGrace — 2013-03-30T04:21:06.000Z

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

When I was at college, many of my associates had part time jobs, or worked during school breaks. They were often unpleasant, uninspiring, and poorly paid jobs, such as food preparation. Some were better, such as bureaucracy. But they were generally much worse than any of us would expect to be after graduating. I think this is normal.

It was occasionally suggested that I too should become employed. This seemed false to me, for the following reasons. There are other activities I want to spend a lot of time on in my life, such as thinking about things. I expect the nth hour of thinking about things to be similarly valuable regardless of when it happens. I think for a hundred extra hours this year, or a hundred extra hours in five years, I still expect to have about the same amount of understanding at the end, and for hours in ten years to be about as valuable either way.

Depending on what one is thinking about, moving hours of thinking earlier might make them more valuable. Understanding things early on probably adds value to other activities, and youth is purportedly helpful for thinking. Also a better understanding early on probably makes later observations (which automatically happen with passing time) more useful.

This goes for many things. Learning an instrument, reading about a topic, writing. Some things are even more valuable early on in life, such as making friends, gaining respect and figuring out efficient lifestyle logistics.

Across many periods of time, work is roughly like this. It is the total amount of work you do that matters. But between before and after graduating, this is not so!

If activity A is a lot more valuable in the future, and activity B is about as valuable now or in the future, all things equal I should trade them and do B now.

Yes, work before graduating might get you a better wage after graduating, but so will the same amount of work after graduating, and it will be paid more at the time. Yes, you will be a year behind say, but you will have done something else for a year that you no longer need to do in the future.

On the other hand, working seems a great option if you have pressing needs for money now, or a strong aversion to indebtedness. My guess is that the latter played a large part in others’ choices. In Australia, most youth whose families aren’t wealthy can get enough money ...
[Link] Researchers devise technique to allow X-ray crystallography of un-crystallized molecule groups
by ChristianKl — 2013-03-29T19:08:09.781Z

(Phys.org) —A team of researchers working in Japan has developed a method for allowing X-ray crystallography to work on molecular groups that have not first been crystallized. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes how they built small scaffolds that resemble pockets for the molecules to rest in, securing them in place and allowing for X-ray crystallography analysis.

If this process works reliably it's probably the biggest scientific breakthrough of the year. Nanotechonlogy will get a boost from the ability to inexpensively determine the structure of a lot of molecule that we couldn't visualize beforehand.
Robin Hanson's Cryonics Hour
by orthonormal — 2013-03-29T17:20:23.897Z

I'm writing to recommend something awesome to anyone who's recently signed up for cryonics (and to the future self of anyone who's about to do so). Robin Hanson has a longstanding offer that anyone who's newly signed up for cryonics can have an hour's discussion with him on any topic, and I took him up on that last week.

I expected to have a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion on various facets of futurism. My expectations were exceeded. Even if you've been reading Overcoming Bias for a long time, talking with Robin is an order of magnitude more stimulating/persuasive/informative than reading OB or even watching him debate someone else, and I'm now reconsidering my thinking on a number of topics as a result.

So if you've recently signed up, email Robin; and if you're intending to sign up, let this be one more incentive to quit procrastinating!

Relevant links:

The LessWrong Wiki article on cryonics is a good place to start if you have a bunch of questions about the topic.

If you want to argue about whether signing up for cryonics is a good idea, two good and relatively recent threads on that subject are under the posts on A survey of anti-cryonics writing and More Cryonics Probability Estimates.

And if you are cryocrastinating (you've decided that you should sign up for cryonics, but you haven't yet), here's a LW thread about taking the first step.
Weekly LW Meetups: Atlanta, Austin, Berlin, Durham, London, Montreal, Vancouver
by FrankAdamek — 2013-03-29T15:46:15.374Z

This summary was posted to LW main on March 22nd. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Durham HPMoR meetup, ch. 47-50: 23 March 2013 11:30AM
Vancouver: 23 March 2013 03:00PM
Berlin social: 23 March 2013 05:00PM
London Meetup, 24th March: Steelmanning: 24 March 2013 02:00PM
Montreal Meetup - Bayes' Theorem: 25 March 2013 06:30PM
Atlanta: ATLessWrong Meetup: 29 March 2013 07:00PM
Brussels Biased Boardgaming: 30 March 2013 01:00PM
Munich Meetup (updated): 01 April 2013 03:00PM
Vienna Meetup #2 - : 13 April 2013 07:06PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 23 March 2019 01:30PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

Whether or not there's currently a meetup in your area, you can sign up to be notified automatically of any...
Meetup : Padeborn Meetup April 3th
by Just_existing — 2013-03-29T13:02:32.262Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Padeborn Meetup April 3th

WHEN:
03 April 2013 06:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Gownsmen's Pub, Uni Paderborn, Warburger Straße 100, Paderborn

We are meeting once again in Paderborn.

The topics of this evening will probably include some techniques on how to invoke curiosity in yourself and in other people, and some thinking on how to introduce rationality to someone who doesn't know what you are talking about.

If you live in the area consider dropping by :)

Discussion article for the meetup : Padeborn Meetup April 3th
[SEQ RERUN] Rationalist Fiction
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-29T04:45:28.140Z

Today's post, Rationalist Fiction was originally published on 19 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

What works of fiction are out there that show characters who have acquired their skills at rationality through practice, and who we can watch in the act of employing those skills?

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 Pascal's Wager Fallacy 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.
Meetup : Vancouver Rationality Habits and Friendship
by  — 2013-03-28T19:33:15.032Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Rationality Habits and Friendship

WHEN:
06 April 2013 03:00:00AM (-0700)

WHERE:
2505 W broadway, vancouver bc

We will discuss Anna's list of rationality habits, and then we will discuss how to make more and better friends, and the importance of this.

Join us on our mailing list.

This post sounds really dry and boring but I promise we are fun and exciting!

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Rationality Habits and Friendship
Suggestion: LW Meditation Hall 
by  — 2013-03-28T18:59:24.860Z

Lets make up a LW Meditation Hall, analog to the LW Study Hall.

Judging from my own (limited) experience, meditation might profit even more from doing it together than working.

It should work more or less like the study hall, with one exception:

Sessions need to be scheduled in advance (There is probably not enough interest in meditation to keep the hall filled 24/7, and people will want to take part from the beginning instead of stumbling in in the middle).
Is The Blood Thicker Near The Tropics? Trade-Offs Of Living In The Cold
by diegocaleiro — 2013-03-28T17:14:46.884Z

A few centuries ago it was believed that the reason why people near the tropics didn't achieve the level of affluence of their northern conspecifics was that the heat made the blood grow thicker, and that slowed down their movements, and thoughts (thoughts at that time used to take place not only in the head, but also in the heart).

It's a funny theory, very catchy, as mechanistic as the time demanded and all that. No wonder it was appreciated for a while.

Many centuries have passed now, and we have a lot of better hypotheses for why there is less development in tropical areas than elsewhere. Here are a few.

More diseases that consume family resources

Lower average IQ

Centuries of exploitation by Europe and US

Fewer Institutions (There is a terrible paper by Daron Acemoglu, whom I hear otherwise is a great economist, on that)

Shorter east-west axis within a land area (Guns, Germs and Steel)

More frequent natural disasters, in particular floods, leading to property damage.

Probably all of those play a small role. I just want to say that primitive as it is as an explanation, I still think that the heat, and sunshine that comes with it, is a very strong factor, still today. Development is not my target though, my target is individual productivity and individual freedom, here thought of as "amount of things per unit time someone could be doing", not political freedom.

So far I've spent three weeks in England, at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, this month. During those 21 days, I have experienced strictly 08 (eight) minutes of sunlight. Outside it is freezing. So no wonder that all interactions I had were had inside walls. Meanwhile talking to friends back home, at the Tropic of Capricorn, they had outside parties, picnics at the park, bike riding days, shopping outside in the streets, free dancing at the streets festivals, learning to do slacklining, swimming pool etc...

In this grey lowlight world of English weather, with the added factor that by and large interaction between anglophones is mostly linguistic, it is not admirable that many come to office even on Saturdays and Sundays, and also stay late during weekdays. Basically, where else would they go?

The same distinction I saw while in California when comparing it to Boston. Both I saw in the winter-ish. In Boston you can basically choose in which venue you wi...
Noticing the 5-second mindkill
by Shmi — 2013-03-28T05:58:50.447Z

I've been reading news and a headline popped out at me:

Some Conservative backbenchers stirred up controversy in the House of Commons Tuesday when they accused their own party of preventing them from speaking out in Parliament.

(For the US audience, the Canadian (and British) House of Commons is like the House of Representatives, only with less democracy.)

My first thought: how dare the Prime Minister muzzles democratically elected MPs!

(For the US audience, the Prime Minister in a majority government has the power of the President and the majority leaders in both chambers combined, and much much more. "MP" (Member of Parliament) is the equivalent of a "Rep." Backbenchers are the reps who don't get a portfolio in the administration. Indeed, basically no separation of the legislative power from the executive. As I said, less democracy. Blame the Brits.)

Then I keep reading:

Warawa [the MP in question] did not specify the topic, but it’s widely believed that he wanted to bring up his motion calling on parliamentarians to condemn sex-selective abortion.

My next thought: oh, good on the Prime Minister to prevent that crazy lunatic from pushing his pro-life agenda!

And finally, my third thought: WTF did just happen? I changed my mind 180 degrees instantly because I disagree with the person's opinion, even though the original issue didn't go away. Mindkill in action. Had he been trying to promote, say, legalization of marijuana instead, I would have been twice as indignant about the evil PM.

Now, I do notice this sometimes (often when reading something on LW), but probably not every time it happens to me. I want to notice it more often.

So, I'm asking people to give your own (hopefully non-political) examples of noticing your instant about-face and hopefully some experience in recognizing it more reliably.
[SEQ RERUN] The Pascal's Wager Fallacy Fallacy
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-28T04:55:48.361Z

Today's post, The Pascal's Wager Fallacy Fallacy was originally published on 18 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

People hear about a gamble involving a big payoff, and dismiss it as a form of Pascal's Wager. But the size of the payoff is not the flaw in Pascal's Wager. Just because an option has a very large potential payoff does not mean that the probability of getting that payoff is small, or that there are other possibilities that will cancel with it.

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 What Do We Mean By "Rationality"?, 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.