trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Singularity Institute - mainstream media exposure in Australia
by D_Alex — 2012-07-20T02:45:00.766Z

The Age, one of the most widely read Australian newspapers, has published an article on "the Singularity". Mostly features Jaan Tallinn, but SI gets a mention and a link. Comments section makes for interesting reading.

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/sci-tech/rise-of-the-machines-20120718-229ev.html
Imperfect Voting Systems
by Scott Alexander — 2012-07-20T00:07:11.912Z

Stalin once (supposedly) said that “He who casts the votes determines nothing; he who counts the votes determines everything “ But he was being insufficiently cynical. He who chooses the voting system may determine just as much as the other two players.
The Art of Strategy gives some good examples of this principle: here's an adaptation of one of them. Three managers are debating whether to give a Distinguished Employee Award to a certain worker. If the worker gets the award, she must receive one of two prizes: a $50 gift certificate, or a $10,000 bonus.
One manager loves the employee and wants her to get the $10,000; if she can't get the $10,000, she should at least get a gift certificate. A second manager acknowledges her contribution but is mostly driven by cost-cutting; she'd be happiest giving her the gift certificate, but would rather refuse to recognize her entirely than lose $10,000. And the third manager dislikes her and doesn't want to recognize her at all - but she also doesn't want the company to gain a reputation for stinginess, so if she gets recognized she'd rather give her the $10,000 than be so pathetic as to give her the cheap certificate.
The managers arrange a meeting to determine the employee's fate. If the agenda tells them to vote for or against giving her an award, and then proceed to determine the prize afterwards if she wins, then things will not go well for the employee. Why not? Because the managers reason as follows: if she gets the award, Manager 1 and Manager 3 will vote for the $10,000 prize, and Manager 2 will vote for the certificate. Therefore, voting for her to get the award is practically the same as voting for her to get the $10,000 prize. That means Manager 1, who wants her to get the prize, will vote yes on the award, but Managers 2 and 3, who both prefer no award to the $10,000, will strategically vote not to give her the award. Result: she doesn't get recognized for her distinguished service.
But suppose the employee involved happens to be the secretary arranging the meeting where the vote will take place. She makes a seemingly trivial change to the agenda: the managers will vote for what the prize should be first, and then vote on whether to give it to her.
If the managers decide the appropriate prize is $10,000, then the motion to give the award will fail for exactly the same reasons it did above. But ...
[LINK] Using procedural memory to thwart "rubber-hose cryptanalysis"
by Shmi — 2012-07-19T23:54:08.814Z

It's an interesting idea, to fight the standard social engineering attempts by hiding the password from the user. In a sense, all the conscious mind gets is "********". The paper is called "Neuroscience Meets Cryptography: Designing Crypto Primitives Secure Against Rubber Hose Attacks". Here is a popular write-up and the paper PDF.

Abstract:

Cryptographic systems often rely on the secrecy of cryptographic keys given to users. Many schemes, however, cannot resist coercion attacks where the user is forcibly asked by an attacker to reveal the key. These attacks, known as rubber hose cryptanalysis, are often the easiest way to defeat cryptography. We present a defense against coercion attacks using the concept of implicit learning from cognitive psychology. Implicit learning refers to learning of patterns without any conscious knowledge of the learned pattern. We use a carefully crafted computer game to plant a secret password in the participant’s brain without the participant having any conscious knowledge of the trained password. While the planted secret can be used for authentication, the participant cannot be coerced into revealing it since he or she has no conscious knowledge of it. We performed a number of user studies using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to verify that participants can successfully re-authenticate over time and that they are unable to reconstruct or even recognize short fragments of the planted secret.

While this approach does nothing against man-in-the-middle attacks, it can probably be evolved into a unique digital signature some day. Cheaper than a retinal scan or a fingerprint, and does not require client-side hardware.
In Defense of Tone Arguments
by OrphanWilde — 2012-07-19T19:48:50.749Z

Suppose, for a moment, you're a strong proponent of Glim, a fantastic new philosophy of ethics that will maximize truth, happiness, and all things good, just as soon as 51% of the population accepts it as the true way; once it has achieved majority status, careful models in game theory show that Glim proponents will be significantly more prosperous and happy than non-proponents (although everybody will benefit on average, according to its models), and it will take over.

Glim has stalled, however; it's stuck at 49% belief, and a new countermovement, antiGlim, has arisen, claiming that Glim is a corrupt moral system with fatal flaws which will destroy the country if it has its way. Belief is starting to creep down, and those who accepted the ideas as plausible but weren't ready to commit are starting to turn away from the movement.

In response, a senior researcher of Glim ethics has written a scathing condemnation of antiGlim as unpatriotic, evil, and determined to keep the populace in a state of perpetual misery to support its own hegemony. He vehemently denies that there are any flaws in the moral system, and refuses to entertain antiGlim in a public debate.

In response to this, belief creeps slightly up, but acceptance goes into a freefall.

You immediately ascertain that the negativity was worse for the movement than the criticisms; you write a response, and are accused of attacking the tone and ignoring the substance of the arguments. Glim and antiGlim leadership proceed into protracted and nasty arguments, until both are highly marginalized, and ignored by the general public. Belief in Glim continues, but when the leaders of antiGlim and Glim finally arrive on a bitterly agreed upon conclusion - the arguments having centered on an actual error in the original formulations of Glim philosophy, they're unable to either get their remaining supports to cooperate, or to get any of the public to listen. Truth, happiness, and all things good never arise, and things get slightly worse, as a result of the error.

Tone arguments are not necessarily logical errors; they may be invoked by those who agree with the substance of an argument who nevertheless may feel that the argument, as posed, is counterproductive to its intended purpose.

I have stopped recommending Dawkin's work to people who are on the fence about religion. The God Delusio...
The Problem Of Apostasy
by Raw_Power — 2012-07-19T10:27:37.541Z

So I have been checking laws around the world regarding Apostasy. And I have found extremely troubling data on the approach Muslims take to dealing with apostates. In most cases, publicly stating that you do not, in fact, love Big Brother (specifically, that you do not believe in God, the Prophet, or Islam), after having professed the Profession of Faith being adult and sane (otherwise, you were never a Muslim in the first place), will get you killed.

Yes, killed. It's one of the only three things traditional Islamic tribunals hand out death penalties for, the others being murder and adultery.

However, interestingly enough, you are often given three days of detainment to "think it over" and "accept the faith".

Some other countries, though, are more forgiving: you are allowed to be a public apostate. But you are still not allowed to proselytize: that remains a crime (in Morocco it's 15 years of prison, and a flogging). Though proselytism is also a crime if you are not a Muslim. I leave to your imagination how precarious the situation of religious minorities is, in this context.

How little sense all of this makes, from a theological perspective. Forcing someone to "accept the faith" at knife point? Forbidding you from arguing against the Lord's (reputedly) absolutely self-evident and miraculously beautiful Word?

No. These are the patterns of sedition and treason laws. The crime of the Apostate is not one against the Lord (He can take care of Himself, and He certainly can take care of the Apostate) but against the State (existence of a human lord contingent on political regime).

And the lesswronger asks himself: "How is that my concern? Please, get to the point." The point is that the promotion of rationalism faces a terrible obstacle there. We're not talking "God Hates You" placards, or getting fired from your job. We're talking fire range and electric chair.

"Sure," you say, "but rationalism is not about atheism." And you'd be right. It isn't. It's just a very likely conclusion for the rationalist mind to reach, and, also, our cult leader (:P) is a raging, bitter, passionate atheist. That is enough. If word spreads and authorities find out, just peddling HPMOR might get people jailed. And that's not accounting for the hypothetical (cough) case of a young adult reading the Sequences and getting all hotheaded about it and doing something stupid...
Meetup : Madison: Rough Numbers
by fiddlemath — 2012-07-19T07:13:43.947Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Madison: Rough Numbers

WHEN:
22 July 2012 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
302 S Mills St, Apt 5, Madison, WI

Note: If it's convenient, and you have a smartphone, laptop, or tablet, bring it. We'll want to be able to all look up data efficiently, and I want some folks to run races against calculators. :)

I have a whole slew of stuff I'd like to talk about, and possibly even some things to test.

Short topics we'll cover:

Fermi problems: How to get rough numbers for things you're interested in, without actually knowing much hard data.

Fast mental math: How to compute Fermi estimates in your head, quickly.

Value of information: How to estimate when doing more work to find more information is likely to be useful.

Some tests/experiments/kind-of-games I'd like to try:

Is fast mental math actually useful if you have a glowing rectangle handy? I suspect it is, and will happily race some calculators to see if it is so.

In what situations do Fermi estimates even make sense? Do we have questions that are actually better answered with roughly-guessed numbers, rather than data from the nearest source of internet?

Discussion article for the meetup : Madison: Rough Numbers
Logging progress improving conscientiousness and overcoming procrastination at LessWrong
by ChrisHallquist — 2012-07-19T04:35:12.461Z

I've recently been thinking a lot about working on items in Luke's article How to Be Happy. Here's one in particular I've struggled with a long time:

Improve your conscientiousness. Conscientiousness involves a variety of tendencies: useful organization, strong work ethic, reliability, planning ahead, etc. Each of these individual skills can be learned. The techniques for overcoming procrastination are useful, here. Some people report that books like Getting Things Done have helped them become more organized and reliable.

I particularly want to work on avoiding procrastination. I've tried several techniques for avoiding procrastination, but I always seem to relapse away from using them. But I've heard that you're more likely to stick with a plan if you log your progress in a place other people can see. That's what I plan to do in this thread. I encourage others to use it for the same purpose.

I'm not sure how to best exploit LessWrong for this purpose. Tentatively I plan to come back weekly and post comments on my progress, though suggestions for better ways to do this are welcome.

This thread can also serve as a place for sharing information on what techniques for approving conscientiousness, not procrastinating, etc. have worked and not worked for people in the LessWrong community.

Over the next week, I plan on specifically focusing on implementing kalla724's advice on attention control, which worked when I first tried it but I've fallen away from using. I also plan on trying to make better use of productivity-related browser plugins like Delayed Gratification.

And again, advice on how to tweak this project greatly appreciated.
[SEQ RERUN] Detached Lever Fallacy
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-19T04:11:13.608Z

Today's post, Detached Lever Fallacy was originally published on 31 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

There is a lot of machinery hidden beneath the words, and rationalist's taboo is one way to make a step towards exposing 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 Humans in Funny Suits, 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.
Take Part in CFAR Rationality Surveys
by Unnamed — 2012-07-18T23:57:52.193Z

Posted By: Dan Keys, CFAR Survey Coordinator
The Center for Applied Rationality is trying to develop better methods for measuring and studying the benefits of rationality. We want to be able to test if this rationality stuff actually works.
One way that the Less Wrong community can help us with this process is by taking part in online surveys, which we can use for a variety of purposes including:

seeing what rationality techniques people actually use in their day-to-day lives

developing & testing measures of how rational people are, and seeing if potential rationality measures correlate with the other variables that you'd expect them to

comparing people who attend a minicamp with others in the LW community, so that we can learn what value-added the minicamps provide beyond what you get elsewhere

trying out some of the rationality techniques that we are trying to teach, so we can see how they work

We have a couple of surveys ready to go now which cover some of these bullet points, and will be developing other surveys over the coming months.
If you're interested in taking part in online surveys for CFAR, please go here to fill out a brief form with your contact info; then we will contact you about participating in specific surveys.

If you have previously filled out a form like this one to participate in CFAR surveys, then we already have your information so you don't need to sign up again.
Questions/Issues can be posted in the comments here, PMed to me, or emailed to us at CFARsurveys@gmail.com.
Meetup : Berkeley meetup: Argument mapping software
by Nisan — 2012-07-18T19:50:27.973Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley meetup: Argument mapping software

WHEN: 18 July 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE: Berkeley, CA

So at tonight's meetup we will be playing with John's argument mapping software! Feel free to bring your laptop — we have wifi and the software is web-based at www.entailment.org. (It only works with Firefox.)

The meetup starts at 7pm at Zendo. For directions to Zendo see the mailing list or call me at .
Challenge: change someone's mind
by Blackened — 2012-07-18T19:06:55.052Z

Pick one (or several) of the following. I used specific examples, therefore anything similar still counts.

1. You have a friendly new acquaintance who is pretty much an average person. He is a theist and doesn't believe Evolution, you have already had a polite debate about that. Convince him to believe in the truth*.

2. One of your friends is very deeply religious - he has devoted his life to already invested a lot of it in religion. Unexpectedly, he is also highly rational (as a personality) and very intelligent, he studies a technical degree (enjoys it), he has read books about critical thinking (he even knows a little about biases) and he says that he will stop believing in religion if you disprove it. Debating with him so far didn't help (also he isn't too good - he isn't aware of expected value and such ideas). For his own good, convince him to change his mind in the direction of the truth. He is wasting a huge potential and that's not only bad for him, but also for humanity. Also, he will feel more comfortable in his new, more sensible beliefs.

3. Your brother dislikes you because of his impression of you that was created several years ago and wasn't updated to reflect the changes in your personality. You easily make impressions to other people that are vastly different from his impression of you. Change his impression, so that he sees you truthfully.

[I have removed 4., because it wasn't about changing the mind of someone who isn't a rationalist, but about coming up with a good psychological mechanism - it deserves an entirely new thread; I suspect that 3 might be too different from 1 and 2, but it's too late to make a so big change to the thread]

I know at least one person for each category. And I haven't been able to change nobody's mind. Have you succeeded in a similar situation? Regardless of whether you have, what strategies do you think would be winning in the 4 situations? If some of them sounds good, I might even try them out and share the results. I'm especially curious about how to approach in #3, because if there is a way, it would come from low-level psychology, which is something I adore.

So, the aim of this thread is for the participants to try and change someone's mind and then tell the story.

(also, I'm willing to accept ideas of other templates for classical situations similar to those, in fact I think I had one or two more ideas, but ...
Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
by Paul Crowley — 2012-07-18T17:24:51.381Z

If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as a rationalist or how you found us. You can skip right to that if you like; the rest of this post consists of a few things you might find helpful. More can be found at the FAQ.

(This is the fourth incarnation of the welcome thread, the first three of which which now have too many comments. The text is by orthonormal from an original by MBlume.)

A few notes about the site mechanics

Less Wrong comments are threaded for easy following of multiple conversations. To respond to any comment, click the "Reply" link at the bottom of that comment's box. Within the comment box, links and formatting are achieved via Markdown syntax (you can click the "Help" link below the text box to bring up a primer).

You may have noticed that all the posts and comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have "karma" scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. This immediate easy feedback mechanism helps keep arguments from turning into flamewars and helps make the best posts more visible; it's part of what makes discussions on Less Wrong look different from those anywhere else on the Internet.

However, it can feel really irritating to get downvoted, especially if one doesn't know why. It happens to all of us sometimes, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation. (Sometimes it's the unwritten LW etiquette; we have different norms than other forums.) Take note when you're downvoted a lot on one topic, as it often means that several members of the community think you're missing an important point or making a mistake in reasoning— not just that they disagree with you! If you've any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.

Replies to your comments across the site, plus private messages from other users, will show up in your inbox. You can reach it via the little mail icon beneath your karma score on the upper right of most pages. When you have a new reply or message, it glows red. You can also click on any user's name to view all of their comments and posts.

It's definitely worth your time commenting on old posts

...
Meetup : Austin, TX - HPMoR Wrap Party
by Vaniver — 2012-07-18T15:15:08.313Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX - HPMoR Wrap Party

WHEN:
14 March 2015 05:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
4212 Hookbilled Kite Drive

The next meetup is March 14th, 2015 at 6:00PM at a private residence (newcomers, especially from places other than Austin, are welcome!). We'll be celebrating the end of HPMoR; there will be food of both the dinner and snack varieties, as well as a wealth of pies. (Feel free to bring food if you'd like, but we expect to have enough even if you don't.)

The topic of the March 21st meetup will be Fun and Games. (Suggest ideas for future topics!)

If you have any questions or want to get my phone number to make sure you find us, please send me a private message. I'll notice and respond to those much more quickly than I'll notice comments on this meetup announcement.

We have a Google Group here.

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX - HPMoR Wrap Party
[SEQ RERUN] Humans in Funny Suits
by MinibearRex — 2012-07-18T03:17:31.306Z

Today's post, Humans in Funny Suits was originally published on 30 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It's really hard to imagine aliens that are fundamentally different from human beings.

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 Interpersonal Morality, 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.
Eliezer apparently wrong about higgs boson
by duckduckMOO — 2012-07-17T19:44:40.068Z

So someone told me that Eliezer Yudkowsky predicted no 5 sigma evidence of the higgs boson, and that 6 sigma evidence had been found. A quick search found the post referred to, and a slightly longer but not particularly thorough search did not find anything discussing it.

So:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1dt/open_thread_november_2009/17xb (02 November 2009)

I'll go ahead and predict here that the Higgs boson will not be showing up. As best I can put the reason into words: I don't think the modern field of physics has its act sufficiently together to predict that a hitherto undetected quantum field is responsible for mass. They are welcome to prove me wrong.

(I'll also predict that the LHC will never actually run, but that prediction is (almost entirely) a joke, whereas the first prediction is not.)

Anyone challenging me to bet on the above is welcome to offer odds.

In the post below rolfandreassen sets the condition of 5 sigma evidence before 2014 and offers a bet of $25. In the post below that Eliezer accepts.

Discuss.