trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Cognitive Biases due to a Narcissistic Parent, Illustrated by HPMOR Quotations
by Algernoq — 2014-05-24T19:25:50.338Z

A pattern of cognitive biases not yet discussed here are the biases due to having a narcissistic parent who seeks validation through the child’s academic achievements.

HPMOR clearly shows these biases: Harry's mother is narcissistic, impressed by education, and not particularly smart, and Harry does not realize how this affects his thinking.

Here is my evidence:

The Sorting Hat says Harry is driven by "the fear of losing your fantasy of greatness, of disappointing the people who believe in you" (Ch. 77). Psychology texts say that this fear is what children of a narcissistic parent usually feel. The child feels perpetually ignored because the narcissistic parent seeks validation from the child's accomplishments but refuses to actually listen to the child, spurring the child to ever greater heights of intellectual achievement.

The text supports this view: “Always Harry had been encouraged to study whatever caught his attention, bought all the books that caught his fancy...given anything reasonable that he wanted, except, maybe, the slightest shred of respect” and “Petunia wrung her hands. She seemed to be on the verge of tears. "My love, I know I can't win arguments with you, but please, you have to trust me on this … I want my husband to, to listen to his wife who loves him, and trust her just this once - " (Ch. 1) describes a narcissistic, anxiously needy mother, an avoidant father, and a son whose parents provide for his physical needs but neglect his need for respect (ego). “If you conceived of yourself as a Good Parent, you would do it. But take a ten-year-old seriously? Hardly.” (Ch. 1)

Harry goes Dark when the connection to his family is threatened. For example: "The black rage began to drain away, as it dawned on him that...his family wasn't in danger [of legal separation]" (ch. 5) indicates that Harry went Dark even though no one’s life was threatened. The cost of Harry’s Dark Side is becoming an adult at a young age: Harry says, “Every time I call on it... it uses up my childhood.” (Ch. 91). This is consistent with spending nearly all free time studying (instead of wasting time with friends) to impress Harry’s mother.

Typically, children of narcissistic parents inherit either narcissistic or people-pleasing traits. I predicted that if my theory is correct then Harry would ...
Meetup : Washington DC Games meetup
by rocurley — 2014-05-24T03:08:34.784Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Games meetup

WHEN:
25 May 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We'll be meeting to hang out and play games.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Games meetup
Will Darkcoin Have Thiel's Last Mover Advantage
by diegocaleiro — 2014-05-23T21:39:41.483Z

Thiel plays with the concept of last mover advantage when talking about what is valuable about Google and Facebook. His claim is that being the first social network (who knows what that was) is not, contra intuition, what matters, instead, if you are the last search engine or the last social network you win.

Bitcoin is the first real cryptocurrency. But will it be among the last ones?

Darkcoin, as Louie, Kevin and others told us a few days ago it would, has exploded. (Thanks for the money guys!)

I don't understand much about the properties that differentiate cryptocurrencies, but a few of Darkcoin's features seem very desirable.

It has early incentive to increase because it is good for illegal markets and international transactions. This incentive is robust and absolute, non-traceability is binary, you can't be less traceable than untraceable.

This is equivalent to Facebook starting off within the highest status social humans in the planet, young, healthy, wealthy and brilliant Harvard college students (compare to Orkut, which failed in great part because it spread worldwide too soon, allowing a lower social class (Brazilians, Persians) to overtake it, disincentivizing the elites to remain there).

It has convention status. Its market cap has surpassed all altcoins besides Litecoin.

This advantage was originally Orkut's (which is Bitcoin in the analogy). It is what MSN stole from ICQ, and facebook from MSN, and Whatsapp from all platforms.

Effective altruists in particular should consider buying Darkcoin because the EA part of you should be less loss averse than the non-EA part of you, and Darkcoin is obviously a gamble to the extend the reasons I'm laying out here are false or insufficient.

Finally Darkcoin has a complex bootstrap reward system for owners of many Darkcoin, who can own masternodes, and that is how Dropbox won, by creating a university level (copying Facebook's serendipitous "strategy") contest which would dramatically increase data storage of winning universities. Mine won and I have 30 Giga for free forever, for instance.

There are other features that caused Facebook to win, or MSN to win. Are there features we want from a cryptocurrency that have yet not been captured by Darkcoin? Or are we witnessing a real last mover advantage in real time?
Life insurance for Cryonics, how many years?
by roland — 2014-05-23T17:15:00.242Z

Hello,

one question that I don't see answered is what is the duration of your life insurance? Should I buy life insurance for 20,30 years or unlimited?

I could pay more for a longer life insurance or pay less for an insurance that will cover 20 years and invest the difference and then some so that by the end of 20 years I will *hopefully* have enough money to pay for cryonics out of my own pocket.

Has anyone done an analysis on that?
Can noise have power?
by lukeprog — 2014-05-23T04:54:32.829Z

One of the most interesting debates on Less Wrong that seems like it should be definitively resolvable is the one between Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Aaronson, and others on The Weighted Majority Algorithm. I'll reprint the debate here in case anyone wants to comment further on it.

In that post, Eliezer argues that "noise hath no power" (read the post for details). Scott disagreed. He replied:

...Randomness provably never helps in average-case complexity (i.e., where you fix the probability distribution over inputs) -- since given any ensemble of strategies, by convexity there must be at least one deterministic strategy in the ensemble that does at least as well as the average.

On the other hand, if you care about the worst-case running time, then there are settings (such as query complexity) where randomness provably does help. For example, suppose you're given n bits, you're promised that either n/3 or 2n/3 of the bits are 1's, and your task is to decide which. Any deterministic strategy to solve this problem clearly requires looking at 2n/3 + 1 of the bits. On the other hand, a randomized sampling strategy only has to look at O(1) bits to succeed with high probability.

Whether randomness ever helps in worst-case polynomial-time computation is the P versus BPP question, which is in the same league as P versus NP. It's conjectured that P=BPP (i.e., randomness never saves more than a polynomial). This is known to be true if really good pseudorandom generators exist, and such PRG's can be constructed if certain problems that seem to require exponentially large circuits, really do require them (see this paper by Impagliazzo and Wigderson). But we don't seem close to proving P=BPP unconditionally.

Eliezer replied:

Scott, I don't dispute what you say. I just suggest that the confusing term "in the worst case" be replaced by the more accurate phrase "supposing that the environment is an adversarial superintelligence who can perfectly read all of your mind except bits designated 'random'".

Scott replied:

I often tell people that theoretical computer science is basically mathematicized paranoia, and that this is the reason why Israelis so dominate the field. You're absolutely right: we do typically assume the environment is an adversarial superintelligence. But that's not because we literally think it is one, it's because we don't presume to know which distribu

...
[LINK] Normalcy bias
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-05-22T10:42:09.631Z

A useful bias to quote in discussions that spring up around the subjects we deal with on Less Wrong: Normalcy Bias. It's rather specific, but useful:

The normalcy bias, or normality bias, refers to a mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This may results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations.

The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred then it never will occur. It can result in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.
Organisations working on multiple Global Catastrophic risks
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-05-22T10:37:49.289Z

It is not uncommon to find organisations working, directly or indirectly, on a single Global Catastrophic Risk (GCR). For instance, the World Health Organization does much work to prevent pandemics, as part of its remit.

It is rarer for organisations to focus on multiple GCRs - for a start, this involves them having the concept akin to GCR, which is not often the case. In a report I'm preparing with Dennis Pamlin of the Global Challenges Foundation, here is a list of organisations focusing on multiple GCRs (note that it is not necessarily an endorsement of their quality). Let me know if there are any organisations missing, and I'll add them:

Brookings

http://www.brookings.edu/research#topics/

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

http://thebulletin.org/

CSER

http://cser.org/emerging-risks-from-technology/

Center for International Security and Cooperation

http://cisac.stanford.edu/

Club of Rome

http://www.clubofrome.org/

Council on Foreign Relations

http://www.cfr.org/issue/

Federation of American Scientists

http://www.fas.org/programs

Future of Humanity Institute

http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/research/research-areas/

Global Catastrophic Risk Institute

http://gcrinstitute.org/research/

Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses

http://www.idsa.in/topics

International Risk Governance Council

http://www.irgc.org/issues/

Lifeboat Foundation

http://lifeboat.com/ex/programs

Nuclear Threat Initiative

http://www.nti.org/

Saving Humanity from Homo Sapiens

http://shfhs.org/whatarexrisks.html

Skoll Global Threats Fund

http://www.skollglobalthreats.org/

Stimson Center

http://www.stimson.org/programs/

Risk Response Network

http://forumblog.org/communities/risk-response-network/

World Economic Forum

http://www.weforum.org/reports/global-risks-2014-report

Tower Watson

http://www.towerswatson.com/en/Insights/IC-Types/Survey-Research-Results/2013/10/Extreme-risks-2013

What kind of GCRs are being worked on? This can be seen in the following graph; AI is not as badly situated as I would initially have expected:
Meetup : Sydney Meetup - June
by taryneast — 2014-05-22T08:42:40.263Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Meetup - June

WHEN:
25 June 2014 07:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Sydney City RSL, 565 George St, Sydney, Australia 2000

6:30 PM for early discussion 7PM general dinner-discussion after dinner we'll have our rationality exercise and a more specific discussion-topic.

I'll book another table under the name "less wrong". Last meetup we were in the restaurant on level 2. Every time so far they've set up the table about 5m to the left, after you exit the lift, so there's a good chance we'll be there this time too.

The theme for this month is Goals.

Finding out what your goals should be

Breaking them into sub-goals and planning your avenues of attack

Finding ways of sticking to your planned tasks

It's a big topic, and we probably won't get through all of it in one night - but I'm sure it'll be really interesting.

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Meetup - June
[LINK] Scott Aaronson on Integrated Information Theory
by DanielFilan — 2014-05-22T08:40:40.065Z

Scott Aaronson, complexity theory researcher, disputes Tononi's theory of consciousness, that a physical system is conscious if and only if it has a high value of "integrated information". Quote:

So, this is the post that I promised to Max [Tegmark] and all the others, about why I don’t believe IIT. And yes, it will contain that quantitative calculation [of the integrated information of a system that he claims is not conscious].

...

But let me end on a positive note. In my opinion, the fact that Integrated Information Theory is wrong—demonstrably wrong, for reasons that go to its core—puts it in something like the top 2% of all mathematical theories of consciousness ever proposed. Almost all competing theories of consciousness, it seems to me, have been so vague, fluffy, and malleable that they can only aspire to wrongness.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799
Australian Mega-Meetup 2014 Retrospective
by Ruby — 2014-05-22T01:59:02.912Z

Overview

The first-ever Australia-wide mega-meetup took place on the second weekend of May 2014. LW clans from Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra met in a pristine country location in NSW for a weekend of rationality, outdoors, and fine company.

The event was a hit. This post is a general retrospective, another post aimed at future organisers will provide a thorough write-up of the planning, execution and suggested improvements.

If it's great to hang out with a few friends who share your interests, values, and thought processes - then it's sheer awesome to spend a whole weekend with two dozen kindred minds. The favourite pastime at the mega-meetup was conversation. Every spare moment was spent exchanging ideas and views. We brought up a large pile of boardgames and not a single game was played - too busy talking. I consider this evidence that we need to bring more rationalists together more often.

Background

The Australian meetups had not had any prior contact to this event. Sydney1 and Canberra are new meetups for 2014. It was hoped that the mega-meetup would persuade the new meetups that the global LW community was worth being a part of. Melbourne has been invigorated since CFAR visited and was keen to share the spirit.

There is a twelve-hour drive or one-hour flight from Melbourne to Sydney. Canberra is a three hours drive from Sydney towards Melbourne. To justify travelling the distance, we made the mega-meetup a weekend retreat from Friday evening to Sunday evening.

A word of inspiration: it was six weeks from when we first started talking to the date of the camp. Only four weeks from idea to sold out with 25 attendees. LW organisers are chock-a-block with extra-agenty goodness and are a delight to work with. If you run a LW meetup and have neighbouring groups, get in touch. An enthusiastic team can make grand things happen pretty fast.

Activities

The structure of weekend was built around practical rationality sessions. Melbourne LW has accustomed its members to running sessions and we pulled on our knowledge. Most of the sessions were CFAR modules: alumni valued the revision and those who were new got stuck into the powerful techniques. The schedule for the mega-meetup can be seen here.

The campsite offered a range of outdoor activities. People voted on sailing and a high ropes course. The activities allowed att...
Meetup : London social meetup - possibly in a park
by philh — 2014-05-21T13:54:16.372Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London social meetup - possibly in a park

WHEN:
25 May 2014 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Shakespeare's Head, Holborn, WC2B 6BG

Your regularly scheduled meetup. Join us from 2pm to talk about the sorts of things that your other friends will look funny at you for talking about.

If the weather is nice, we'll head to Lincoln's Inn Fields, probably somewhere in the northwest quadrant. If not, we'll be in the usual Shakespeare's Head. If the weather is variable, we might move from one to the other - give me a call or text if you're not sure. My number is 07792009646.

Update: Calling it in favor of the pub.

About London LessWrong:

We run this meetup almost every week; these days we tend to get in the region of 5-15 people in attendance. By default, meetups are just unstructured social discussion about whatever strikes our fancy: books we're reading, recent posts on LW/related blogs, logic puzzles, toilet usage statistics....

Sometimes we play The Resistance or other games. We usually finish around 7pm, give or take an hour, but people arrive and leave whenever suits them.

Related discussion happens on both our google group and our facebook group.

Discussion article for the meetup : London social meetup - possibly in a park
More and Less than Solomonoff Induction
by Manfred — 2014-05-21T04:55:39.054Z

I've been thinking about how to put induction with limited resources on a firmer foundation. This may just be retracing the steps of others, but that's okay with me. Mostly I just want to talk about these thoughts.

After a few points of introduction.

What's Solomonoff induction?

Suppose we're given some starting data, and asked to predict the future. Solomonoff induction predicts the future by combining the predictions of all programs that (1) output the starting data up until now, and (2) aren't the continuation of another such program. The predictions are combined according to a weighting that decreases exponentially as the length of the program increases.

Why is it a good idea?

The simplest answer is that we have a frequentist guarantee that if the "true program" generating our input has some length N (that is, if the observable universe is a big but finite-sized computer), then our predictions will only be wrong a limited number of times, and after that we'll predict the correctly every time.

A more bayesian answer would start with the information that our observations can be generated by some finite-sized program, and then derive that something like Solomonoff induction has to represent our true prior over generating programs - as the length gets bigger, our probability is required to go to zero at infinity, and an exponential is the maximum-entropy such curve. This is not a complete answer, but it at least makes the missing pieces more apparent.

Why won't it work with limited resources

The trouble with using Solomonoff induction in real life is that to pick out which programs output our data so far, we need to run every program - and if the program doesn't ever halt, we need to use a halting oracle to stop it or else we'll take infinite time.

Limited resources require us to only pick from a class of programs that is guaranteed to not run over the limit.

If we have limited time and no halting oracle, we can't check every program. Instead, we are only allowed to check programs drawn from a class of programs that we can check the output of in limited time. The simplest example would be to just check programs but not report the result if we go over some time limit, in which case the class we're picking from is "programs that don't go over the time limit."

This is an application of a general principle - when we impose resource constraints on a real agent, we want...
[LINK] Prisoner's Dilemma? Not So Much
by torekp — 2014-05-20T23:38:19.450Z

Hannes Rusch argues that the Prisoner's Dilemma is best understood as merely one game of very many:

only 2 of the 726 combinatorially possible strategically unique ordinal 2x2 games have the detrimental characteristics of a PD and that the frequency of PD-type games in a space of games with random payoffs does not exceed about 3.5%. Although this does not compellingly imply that the relevance of PDs is overestimated, in the absence of convergent empirical information about the ancestral human social niche, this finding can be interpreted in favour of a rather neglected answer to the question of how the founding groups of human cooperation themselves came to cooperate: Behavioural and/or psychological mechanisms which evolved for other, possibly more frequent, social interaction situations might have been applied to PD-type dilemmas only later.

http://www2.units.it/etica/2013_2/RUSCH.pdf
Meetup : Zurich/Zürich meetup (come out of the woodwork)
by roland — 2014-05-20T13:08:17.842Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Zurich/Zürich meetup (come out of the woodwork)

WHEN:
21 May 2014 07:30:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Zürich Switzerland

There will be a meetup taking place this wednesday the 21st of may at 19:30; at the Kronenhalle-Bar(Bellevue in Zürich)
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Kronenhalle/
I will print a paper written "LW Meetup" and place it on our table, so you guys can find it.
Come on folks, I know there are some LWers in Zürich, lets come out of the woodwork. :)
Two attendants confirmed.
How to get there: Take public transport to the Bellevue station, then walk.

Discussion article for the meetup : Zurich/Zürich meetup (come out of the woodwork)
Meetup : Utrecht- Brainstorm and ethics discussion at the Film Café
by SoerenMind — 2014-05-19T20:49:07.529Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Utrecht- Brainstorm and ethics discussion at the Film Café

WHEN:
31 May 2014 02:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Slachtstraat 5, 3512 BC Utrecht

Brainstorm

We would like to make our meetups more useful for the attendants. Therefore the meetup will start with a brainstorm to collect ideas and decide on how to proceed in future. We will talk about both the discussion meetups themselves and potential projects to work on. If you have any suggestions or ideas, this will be a great opportunity to have your say.

Ethics discussion

Should your driverless car kill you to save two other people? When is it ethical to hand out our decisions over to machines?
We will discuss the following article: http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/can-we-design-systems-to-automate-ethics/
To get most out of the discussion, you are recommended to read the article in advance. It's a nice stepping stone to topics like moral psychology and AI as well.
Very relevant to this topic as well to rational ethics in general: this presentation by Harvard philosopher Joshua Greene on learning to use our moral brains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-vleKVkMec . When is our moral intuition correct, and when not? This one is an optional addition.
Looking forward to meeting you again! New people will be warmly welcomed!

Practical

Mind that the time has changed to 2pm!

We will meet at Film Café Oscar, which is just around the corner from De Winkel van Sinkel. I will be holding a sign that says 'LW' on it. If you have trouble finding us you can reach me at 0684140766 or me Imma at 0610524989.

We have this Google Doc where anyone can make suggestions, also for the coming meetups.

Discussion article for the meetup : Utrecht- Brainstorm and ethics discussion at the Film Café
Open Thread, May 19 - 25, 2014
by somnicule — 2014-05-19T04:49:59.430Z

Previous Open Thread

You know the drill - If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one.

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.