trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Choose without suffering
by So8res — 2015-09-27T03:00:00.000Z
Link: https://mindingourway.com/choose-without-suffering/

Imagine Eve, who works a service industry job. Her manager tells her, at the last minute and without warning, that she has to staff an event tomorrow in a town a few hour's drive from where she lives, and she has to wake up at 5am to get there on time.

Let's further suppose that she's on shaky footing with her manager as it is, and so she is posed with the following choice: she can either wake up at 5am tomorrow and go to work, or she can lose her job.

Imagine Eve's demeanor, upon learning this fact. It's likely dour, to say the least. She's probably grumpy and annoyed and malcontent, and she's likely to vent and complain all evening. She'll likely spend a lot of cognitive effort tolerifying the situation, convincing herself either that it's not going to be that bad to wake up early, or that her manager is a terrible person.

This is a common occurrence, I think: if you give humans the choice between bad and worse, they get grumpy.

When people find that none of their options cross a certain "acceptability" threshold, they get frustrated.

This, I think, is part of why tolerification is such a common human response to unfortunate situations. In an intolerable world, none of your options seem acceptable: so you tolerify, until at least one option (perhaps indignance, perhaps cynicism, perhaps doing nothing differently) passes the acceptablility threshold. Only then are you able to act.

This behavior won't do, for someone living in a dark world. If you're going to live in a dark world, then it's very important to learn how to choose the best action available to you without any concern for how good it is in an absolute sense.

When given a choice between bad and worse, you need to be able to choose "bad", without qualm.

I think that one of the big reasons why people get annoyed when none of their options pass the "acceptable" threshold is they're often failing to see a hidden third alternative, and some part of them knows that this might be the case. In this setting, the frustration might even be useful, if it puts them in a mental state where they search more fervently for an escape hatch.

Furthermore, by acting flustered, people may well be able to draw other humans to their aid, and the additional assistance can often help make the situation better.

So frustration in the face of a choice between bad and worse may be a useful response in many situations. (At the least, it ...
Find someone to talk to thread
by hg00 — 2015-09-26T22:24:32.676Z

Many LessWrong users are depressed. On the most recent survey, 18.2% of respondents had been formally diagnosed with depression, and a further 25.5% self-diagnosed with depression. That adds up to nearly half of the LessWrong userbase.

One common treatment for depression is talk therapy. Jonah Sinick writes:

Talk therapy has been shown to reduce depression on average. However:

Professional therapists are expensive, often charging on order of $120/week if one's insurance doesn't cover them.

Anecdotally, highly intelligent people find therapy less useful than the average person does, perhaps because there's a gap in intelligence between them and most therapists that makes it difficult for the therapist to understand them.

House of Cards by Robyn Dawes argues that there's no evidence that licensed therapists are better at performing therapy than minimally trained laypeople. The evidence therein raises the possibility that one can derive the benefits of seeing a therapist from talking to a friend.

This requires that one has a friend who:

is willing to talk with you about your emotions on a regular basis

you trust to the point of feeling comfortable sharing your emotions

Some reasons to think that talking with a friend may not carry the full benefits of talking with a therapist are

Conflict of interest — Your friend may be biased for reasons having to do with your pre-existing relationship – for example, he or she might be unwilling to ask certain questions or offer certain feedback out of concern of offending you and damaging your friendship.

Risk of damaged relationship dynamics — There's a possibility of your friend feeling burdened by a sense of obligation to help you, creating feelings of resentment, and/or of you feeling guilty.

Risk of breach of confidentiality — Since you and your friend know people in common, there's a possibility that your friend will reveal things that you say to others who you know, that you might not want to be known. In contrast, a therapist generally won't know people in common with you, and is professionally obliged to keep what you say confidential.

Depending on the friend and on the nature of help that you need, these factors may be non-issues, but they're worth considering when deciding between seeing a therapist and talking with a friend.

One idea for solving the problems with talking to a fr...
[Link] 2015 modafinil user survey
by gwern — 2015-09-26T17:28:17.324Z

I am running, in collaboration with ModafinilCat, a survey of modafinil users asking about their experiences, side-effects, sourcing, efficacy, and demographics:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ZNyGHl6vnHD62spZyHIqyvNM_Ts_82GvZQVdAr2LrGs/viewform

This is something of a followup to the LW surveys which find substantial modafinil use, and Yvain's 2014 nootropics survey. I hope the results will be useful; the legal questions should help reduce uncertainty there, and the genetics questions (assuming any responses) may be interesting too.
Meetup : First meetup in Stockholm
by Awlio — 2015-09-26T16:39:17.727Z

Discussion article for the meetup : First meetup in Stockholm

WHEN:
15 October 2015 03:00:00PM (+0000)

WHERE:
Stockholms universitetsbibliotek, Universitetsvägen 14, 114 18 Stockholm, Sweden

To clarify, the time is 17:00 Swedish time.

I'm going to sit at a table for at least an hour and see how many people show up. There are meetups happening all around, so it ought to happen in Stockholm too.

When you enter the library, turn right. You'll find some tables -- mine has a big sheet of paper saying "LessWrong meet-up". Look for a guy with long hair.

The library is wondrous, and open until 21:30, so you could take the opportunity to explore after you meet us.

Discussion article for the meetup : First meetup in Stockholm
Happy Petrov Day
by Eneasz — 2015-09-26T15:41:37.106Z

It is Petrov Day again, partially thanks to Stanislaw Petrov.

"Today is September 26th, Petrov Day, celebrated to honor the deed of Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov on September 26th, 1983. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, take a minute to not destroy the world."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/jq/926_is_petrov_day/
[Link] Review of "Doing Good Better"
by fortyeridania — 2015-09-26T07:58:17.440Z

The article is here.

The book is by William MacAskill, founder of 80000 Hours and Giving What We Can. Excerpt:

Effective altruism takes up the spirit of Singer’s argument but shields us from the full blast of its conclusion; moral indictment is transformed into an empowering investment opportunity...

Either effective altruism, like utilitarianism, demands that we do the most good possible, or it asks merely that we try to make things better. The first thought is genuinely radical, requiring us to overhaul our daily lives in ways unimaginable to most...The second thought – that we try to make things better – is shared by every plausible moral system and every decent person. If effective altruism is simply in the business of getting us to be more effective when we try to help others, then it’s hard to object to it. But in that case it’s also hard to see what it’s offering in the way of fresh moral insight, still less how it could be the last social movement we’ll ever need.
Help with relevant rational decision making research ideas 
by BiasedBayes — 2015-09-25T17:46:05.285Z

Im researching rational medical decision making and trying to find right angles to approach the subject of probabilistic decision making in medicine.
My first paper will be about the probability updating after the medical tests when we know the prevalence of the patients possible disease and the tests sensitivity and specificity.
Second paper will be (at the moment) about the decision to test if we have certain treatment treshold and know the prevalence of the disease and the tests sensitivity and specifity.
So im reasearching how well the descriptive medical decision making (usually intuitive) matches the normative ideal when in the decision making situation we have all the available info to actually calculate the best action.
If you have some ideas regarding this topic I would love to hear them. Thanks a lot!
New LW Meetup: Lund
by FrankAdamek — 2015-09-25T15:40:50.083Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on September 18th. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

First meetup in Lund: 19 October 2015 06:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Oslo Lesswrong meetup, September: 27 September 2015 04:00PM
San Francisco Meetup: Fun and Games: 21 September 2015 06:15PM

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

Austin, TX - Caffe Medici - Board Games: 19 September 2015 01:30PM
Austin, TX - Petrov Day Celebration: 26 September 2015 04:00PM
Moscow LW experimental group meetup: 25 September 2015 07:20PM
Sydney Meetup - September: 23 September 2015 06:30PM
[Tel Aviv] Effective Altruism @ LessWrong Tel Aviv: 29 September 2015 07:00PM
Tel Aviv: Black Holes after Jacob Bekenstein: 24 November 2015 08:00AM
Vienna: 26 September 2015 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games: 20 September 2015 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

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 is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are 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 subscribin...
Subjective vs. normative offensiveness
by casebash — 2015-09-25T04:10:34.282Z

Terms like offensive are often used in a manner that blurs the boundaries between two different, but related concepts. Let’s suppose that Alex send Billy an email that he finds offensive. We can say that the email is subjectively offensive if it causes Billy to feel offended. On the other hand, we can say that it is normatively offensive if Alex has taken an action that deserves to be criticised morally. The former does not prove the later. For example, Alex might tell Billy that he saw a recent Mets game and that he thought their pitcher didn’t play very well. Billy might be a huge Mets fan and find this offensive. Clearly the Alex was subjectively offensive (relative to Billy), but few people would say that he was normatively offensive. This requires something extra, such as if Alex had made a similar comment before and seen that it had upset Billy we might be more willing to conclude that Alex deserved the criticism.

Billy is entitled to feel an emotional reaction and feel offended (subjectively). It would be hard to argue that he isn’t as can be incredibly difficult or impossible to suppress such a reaction. However, he is not entitled to act like Alex was normatively offensive purely based on his subjective appraisal. He needs to consider the actual reasonableness of Alex’s actions and the broader social context. Sadly, this normally results in very messy conversations. One side will be arguing, “You shouldn’t be (normatively) offended”, with the other saying that they have every right to be (subjectively) offended.

At this point, I should clarify the greatest misunderstanding based upon feedback in the comments. Normative here simply refers to some kind of moral standard; to the making of claims that people should act in a particular way. It doesn't depend on the assumption that morality is objective; just that the person operates within some kind of moral framework that leaves their moral assertions open to challenge by others. In regard to culturally relativism, normative is being used to mean "locally normative"; normative within the particular cultural context; rather than "globally normative". Even if you believe that morality is purely personal, you probably have some meta-level beliefs that can be used to challenge or justify your object level beliefs.

I think that this discussion is well understood...
What is your rationalist backstory?
by Adam Zerner — 2015-09-25T01:25:04.036Z

I'm reading Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational. The story of what got him interested in rationality and human biases goes something like this.

He was the victim of a really bad accident, and had terrible burns covering ~70% of his body. The experience was incredibly painful, and so was the treatment. For treatment, he'd have to bathe in some sort of disinfectant, and then have bandages ripped off his exposed flesh afterwards, which was extremely painful for him.

The nurses believed that ripping it off quickly would produce the least amount of pain for the patient. They thought the short and intense bursts of pain were less (in aggregate) than the less intense but longer periods of pain that a slower removal of the bandages would produce. However, Dan disagreed about what would produce the least amount of pain for patients. He thought that a slower removal would be better. Eventually, he found some scientific research that supported/proved his theory to be correct.

But he was confused. These nurses were smart people and had a ton of experience giving burn victims baths - shouldn't they have figured out by now what approaches best minimize patient pain? He knew their failure wasn't due to a lack of intelligence, and that it wasn't due to a lack of sympathy. He ultimately concluded that the failure was due to inherent human biases. He then became incredibly interested in this and went on to do a bunch of fantastic research in the area.

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of people are uninterested in rationality, and a lot of them are even put off by it. So I'm curious about how members of this incredibly small minority of the population became who they are.

Part of me thinks that extreme outputs are the result of extreme inputs. Like how Dan's extreme passion for his work has (seemingly) originated from his extreme experiences with pain. With this rule-of-thumb in mind, when I see someone who possesses some extreme character trait, I expect there to be some sort of extreme story or experience behind it.

But another part of me thinks that this doesn't really apply to rationality. I don't have much data, but from the limited experience I've had getting to know people in this community, "I've just always thought this way" seems common, and "extreme experiences that motivated rational thinking" seems rare.

Anyway, I'm interested in hearing people's "rati...
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Singing
by RobinZ — 2015-09-24T02:58:10.086Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Singing

WHEN:
27 September 2015 03:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

Crossposted from mailing list.

Edit: We have tentatively decided to go to the fallback meetup topic and will meet in the courtyard as normal.

We'll be meeting to hang out and take turns singing songs. Singing is purely optional, and you don't have to be a good singer to take a turn. There will probably be at least one smartphone available for looking up lyrics.

In case of inclement weather, we plan to talk about weather forecasts and event planning - and, more generally, about making plans given uncertainty and about communicating uncertainty to decision-makers.

Upcoming meetups:

Oct. 04: Availability Heuristic

Oct. 11: Fun and Games

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Singing
Rationality Reading Group: Part J: Death Spirals
by Gram_Stone — 2015-09-24T02:31:00.157Z

This is part of a semi-monthly reading group on Eliezer Yudkowsky's ebook, Rationality: From AI to Zombies. For more information about the group, see the announcement post.

Welcome to the Rationality reading group. This fortnight we discuss Part J: Death Spirals (pp. 409-494). This post summarizes each article of the sequence, linking to the original LessWrong post where available.

J. Death Spirals

100. The Affect Heuristic - Positive and negative emotional impressions exert a greater effect on many decisions than does rational analysis.

101. Evaluability (and Cheap Holiday Shopping) - It's difficult for humans to evaluate an option except in comparison to other options. Poor decisions result when a poor category for comparison is used. Includes an application for cheap gift-shopping.

102. Unbounded Scales, Huge Jury Awards, and Futurism - Without a metric for comparison, estimates of, e.g., what sorts of punitive damages should be awarded, or when some future advance will happen, vary widely simply due to the lack of a scale.

103. The Halo Effect - Positive qualities seem to correlate with each other, whether or not they actually do.

104. Superhero Bias - It is better to risk your life to save 200 people than to save 3. But someone who risks their life to save 3 people is revealing a more altruistic nature than someone risking their life to save 200. And yet comic books are written about heroes who save 200 innocent schoolchildren, and not police officers saving three prostitutes.

105. Mere Messiahs - John Perry, an extropian and a transhumanist, died when the north tower of the World Trade Center fell. He knew he was risking his existence to save other people, and he had hope that he might be able to avoid death, but he still helped them. This takes far more courage than someone who dies, expecting to be rewarded in an afterlife for their virtue.

106. Affective Death Spirals - Human beings can fall into a feedback loop around something that they hold dear. Every situation they consider, they use their great idea to explain. Because their great idea explained this situation, it now gains weight. Therefore, they should use it to explain more situations. This loop can continue, until they believe Belgium controls the US banking sy...
The Temptation to Bubble
by gressettd — 2015-09-23T23:34:09.220Z

"Never discuss religion or politics."

I was raised in a large family of fundamentalist Christians. Growing up in my house, where discussing politics and religion were the main course of life, the above proverb was said often -- as an expression of regret, shock, or self-flagellation. Later, the experience impressed a deep lesson about bubbling up that even intelligent and rational people fall into. And I ... I am often tempted, so tempted, to give in.

Religion and political identity were the languages of love in my house. Affirming the finer points of a friend's identical values was a natural ritual, like sharing coffee or a meal together, and so soothing we attributed the afterglow to God himself. We can use some religious nonsense to illustrate, but please keep in mind, there's a much more interesting point here than "certain religious views are wrong".

A point of controversy was an especially excellent topic of mutual comfort. How could anyone else be *so* stupid as to believe we came from monkeys and monkeys came from *nothing*! that exploded a gazillion years ago, especially given all the young earth creation evidence that they stubbornly ignored. They obviously just wanted to sin and needed an excuse. Agreeing about something like this, you both felt smarter than the hostile world, and you had someone to help defend you against that hostility. We invented byzantine scaffolding for our shared delusions to keep the conversation interested and agree with each other in ever more creative ways. We esteemed each other, and ourselves, much more.

This safety bubble from the real world would allow denial of anything too painful. Losing a loved one to cancer? God will heal them. God mysteriously decided not this time? They're in Heaven. Did your incredible stupidity lose you your job, your wife, your reputation? God would forgive you and rescue you from the consequences. You could probably find a Bible verse to justify anything you're doing. Ironically, this artificial shell of safety, which kept us from ever facing the pain and finality reality often has, made us all the more fragile inside. The bubble became necessary to psychologically survive.

In this flow of happy mirror neuron dances, minor disagreements felt like a slap on the face. The shock afterward burned harder than a hand-print across the face.

25 years and, what seems like 86 bill...
Against Expected Utility
by Houshalter — 2015-09-23T21:21:59.960Z

Expected utility is optimal as the number of bets you take approaches infinity. You will lose bets on some days, and win bets on other days. But as you take more and more bets, the day to day randomness cancels out.

Say you want to save as many lives as possible. You can plug "number of lives saved" into an expected utility maximizer. And as the amount of bets it takes increases, it will start to save more lives than any other method.

But the real world obviously doesn't have an infinite number of bets. And following this algorithm in practice will get you worse results. It is not optimal.

In fact, as Pascal's Mugging shows, this could get arbitrarily terrible. An agent following expected utility would just continuously make bets with muggers and worship various religions, until it runs out of resources. Or worse, the expected utility calculations don't even converge, and the agent doesn't make any decisions.

So how do we fix it? Well we could just go back to the original line of reasoning that led us to expected utility, and fix it for finite cases. Instead of caring what method does the best on infinite bets, we might say we want the one that does the best the most on finite cases. That would get you median utility.

For most things, median utility will approximate expected utility. But for very very small risks, it will ignore them. It only cares that it does the best in most possible worlds. It won't ever trade away utility from the majority of your possible worlds to very very unlikely ones.

A naive implementation of median utility isn't actually viable, because at different points in time, the agent might make inconsistent decisions. To fix this, it needs to decide on policies instead of individual decisions. It will pick a decision policy which it believes will lead to the highest median outcome.

This does complicate making a real implementation of this procedure. But that's what you get when you generalize results, and try to make things work on the messy real world. Instead of idealized infinite worlds. The same issue occurs in the multi-armed bandit problem. Where the optimal infinite solution is simple, but finite solutions are incredibly complicated (or simple but require brute force.)

But if you do this, you don't need the independence axiom. You can be consistent and avoid money pumping without it. By not making decisions in isolation, but considering t...