trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Rational Repentance
by Mass_Driver — 2011-01-14T09:37:11.613Z

Related to: Branches of Rationality, Rationality Workbook

Changing your behavior to match new evidence could be harder than simply updating your beliefs and then mustering your willpower, because (a) we are in denial about how often we change our minds, (b) cognitive dissonance is tolerable in the medium-term, and (c) the additional monitoring required to verify that your actions as well as your beliefs have changed makes it easier for you to pretend that your actions are suitable to your reality. It might help to (1) specify a quitting point in advance, (2) demonstrate your new opinion with symbolic action, or (3) activate your emotions by reading non-rational propaganda. Additional solutions are eagerly solicited.

Disclaimer:

This post contains examples drawn from politics and current events. I do not hope to change anyone's mind about any specific political belief, I know that Politics is the Mind-killer, I have tried to use non-inflammatory language, and I have a good faith belief that this post contains actual content on rationalism sufficient to justify its potentially controversial examples. Equally powerful but less controversial examples will be cheerfully substituted if anyone can bring them to my attention.

Review:

As has been amply discussed in the sequences, a key tool for overcoming the human tendency to irrationally defend prior beliefs simply because they are comfortable is to ask what, if anything, would cause you to abandon those beliefs. For example, in the “invisible dragon in the garage” parable, it quickly becomes clear to neutral observers that there is no potential evidence that could convince an invisible-dragon-fundamentalist that the dragon is fictional. If you test for breathing noises, it turns out that the dragon is inaudible. If you test for ecological impact, it turns out that the dragon lives off of invisible hamsters, etc. Thus we say that the belief in the dragon is unfalsifiable; there is no way to falsify your hypothesis that there is a dragon in your garage, and so your belief in the dragon does not pay rent in anticipated experiences.

There is a second human bias that causes you to cache an unrealistically high summary statistic for how often you change your mind: you think you change your mind, in general, pretty often, but unless you are an expert, highly-practiced rationalist, odds are that you do not. As...
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 7
by Unnamed — 2011-01-14T06:49:46.793Z

Update: Discussion has moved on to a new thread.

The load more comments links are getting annoying (at least if you're not logged in), so it's time for a new Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread. We're also approaching the traditional 500-comment mark, but I think that hidden comments provide more appropriate joints to carve these threads at. So as of chapter 67, this is the place to share your thoughts about Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic.
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six. The fanfiction.net author page is the central author-controlled HPMOR clearinghouse with links to the RSS feed, pdf version, TV Tropes pages, fan art, and more, and AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author's Notes.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it's fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that "Eliezer said X is true" unless you use rot13.
Treatment Tips for Used up Costume outfit Jewelry 
by jewelryshop2011 — 2011-01-14T01:43:57.834Z

When you have old, worn out, found better days outfit jewelry just already there gathering dust really don't throw it out. You can enliven those dirty, obsolete and broken bits by using a few simple steps:Worn out gold or silver plating:Simply because typical costume diamond jewelry plating is very thin it could eventually rub off from wear or grow to be damaged from the by using harsh chemicals, products, or perfumes. Should this happen there are several options throughout gold and silver re-plating solutions that is found online. Some are fairly simple and can possibly be performed without the use of heat up or electricity whilst others are a little more complicated. I found one web-site in particular that offers a decent variety of plating options in addition to general plating instructions with regard to precious metals including jewelry, silver, platinum, plus rhodium.

Click the contents as well as search box and plating gateway. Keep your eyes open: I recommend buying only cyanide zero cost plating solutions as cyanide is usually poisonous. For metallic lovers there is one particular product that I have individually used that has labored well for me and it is called Silver Brite. This kind of easy to use cream polishes, cleans and re-plates in one move. It is very easy to use as well as fairly inexpensive. Simply just rub the product on with an applicator cloth or sponge or a Q-tip for little items and rub off with the buffing cloth that's included with the system. The result is a sparkling, clean silver accomplish.Tarnished or dirty:Cleaning costume diamond jewelry is simple but pick your cleaner smartly.

Only use a rings cleaner that precisely states that it is protected for costume jewellery and read the ingredients to make sure that it does not contain alcoholic beverages, acids, or ammonia as these can strip this gold or silver plate. Work with a children's soft bristle tooth brush for cleaning around fancy dress jewelry stones. I don't recommend submerging rhinestone jewelry since the stones may become loosened and fall out.The light tarnish can be easily buffed away using a soft jewel

...
Link: The Uncertain Future - "The Future According to You"
by XiXiDu — 2011-01-13T17:44:38.067Z

Visualizing "The Future According to You"

The Uncertain Future is a future technology and world-modeling project by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Its goal is to allow those interested in future technology to form their own rigorous, mathematically consistent model of how the development of advanced technologies will affect the evolution of civilization over the next hundred years. To facilitate this, we have gathered data on what experts think is going to happen, in such fields as semiconductor development, biotechnology, global security, Artificial Intelligence and neuroscience. We invite you, the user, to read about the opinions of these experts, and then come to your own conclusion about the likely destiny of mankind.

Link: theuncertainfuture.com
Fields related to Friendliness philosophy
by Will_Newsome — 2011-01-13T12:25:25.611Z

I just realized that my 'Interests' list on The Facebook made an okay ad hoc list of fields potentially related to Friendliness-like philosophy. They sorta kinda flow into each other by relatedness and are not particularly prioritized. This is my own incomplete list, though it was largely inspired by many conversations with Singularity Institute folk. Plus signs mean I'm moderately more certain that the existing field (or some rationalist re-interpretation of it) has useful insights.

Friendliness philosophy:

+Epistemology (formal, Bayesian, reflective, group)

Axiology

+Singularity (seed AI, universal AI drives, neuromorphic/emulation/de novo/kludge timelines, etc)

+Cosmology (Tegmark-like stuff, shake vigorously with decision theory, don't get attached to ontologies/intuitions)

Physics (Quantum MWI, etc)

Metaphysics

+Ontology of agency (Yudkowsky (kind of), Parfit, Buddha; limited good condensed stuff seemingly)

+Ontology (probably grounded in algorithmic information theory / theoretical computer science ideas)

Ontologyology (abstract Turing equivalence, et cetera)

+Metaphilosophy (teaching ourselves to teach an AI to do philosophy)

+Cognitive science (computational cognitive science especially)

Neuroscience (affective neuroscience)

Machine learning (reinforcement learners, Monte Carlo)

+Computer science (super theoretical)

+Algorithmic probability theory (algorithmic information theory, universal induction, etc)

+Decision theory (updateless-like)

Optimal control theory (stochastic, distributed; interestingly harder than it looks)

+Bayesian probability theory (for building intuitions, mostly, but generally useful)

Rationality

Dynamical systems (attractors, stability)

+Complex systems (multilevel selection, hierarchical stuff, convergent patterns / self-similarity)

Cybernetics (field kind of disintegrated AFAIK, complex systems took over)

Microeconomics (AGI negotiation stuff, human preference negotiation at different levels of organization)

+Meta-ethics (Bostrom)

Morality (Parfit)

Moral psychology

Evolutionary game theory

+Evolutionary psychology (where human preferences come from (although again, universal/convergent patterns))

+Evolutionary biology (how preferences evolve, convergent features, etc)

Evolutionary developmental biology

Dual inheritance theory (where preferences come from, different ontology and level of organization, see also memetics)

C

...
[LINK] What should a reasonable person believe about the Singularity?
by Kaj_Sotala — 2011-01-13T09:32:24.651Z

http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/what-should-a-reasonable-person-believe-about-the-singularity/

Michael Nielsen, a pioneer in the field of quantum computation (from his website: Together with Ike Chuang of MIT, he wrote the standard text on quantum computation. This is the most highly cited physics publication of the last 25 years, and one of the ten most highly cited physics books of all time (Source: Google Scholar, December 2007). He is the author of more than fifty scientific papers, including invited contributions to Nature and Scientific American) has a pretty good essay about the probability of the Singularity. He starts off from Vinge's definition of the Singularity, and says that it's essentially the proposition that the three following assumptions are true:

A: We will build computers of at least human intelligence at some time in the future, let’s say within 100 years.
B: Those computers will be able to rapidly and repeatedly increase their own intelligence, quickly resulting in computers that are far more intelligent than human beings.
C: This will cause an enormous transformation of the world, so much so that it will become utterly unrecognizable, a phase Vinge terms the “post-human era”. This event is the Singularity.

Then he goes on to define the probability of the Singularity within the next 100 years as the probability p(C|B)p(B|A)p(A), and gives what he thinks are reasonable ranges for the values p(A), p(B) and p(C)

I’m not going to argue for specific values for these probabilities. Instead, I’ll argue for ranges of probabilities that I believe a person might reasonably assert for each probability on the right-hand side. I’ll consider both a hypothetical skeptic, who is pessimistic about the possibility of the Singularity, and also a hypothetical enthusiast for the Singularity. In both cases I’ll assume the person is reasonable, i.e., a person who is willing to acknowledge limits to our present-day understanding of the human brain and computer intelligence, and who is therefore not overconfident in their own predictions. By combining these ranges, we’ll get a range of probabilities that a reasonable person might assert for the probability of the Singularity..

In the end, he finds that the Singularity should be considered a serious probability:

If we put all those ranges together

...
Simpson's Paradox
by bentarm — 2011-01-12T23:01:11.727Z

This is my first attempt at an elementary statistics post, which I hope is suitable for Less Wrong. I am going to present a discussion of a statistical phenomenon known as Simpson's Paradox. This isn't a paradox, and it wasn't actually discovered by Simpson, but that's the name everybody uses for it, so it's the name I'm going to stick with. Along the way, we'll get some very basic practice at calculating conditional probabilities.

A worked example

The example I've chosen is an exercise from a university statistics course that I have taught on for the past few years. It is by far the most interesting exercise in the entire course, and it goes as follows:

You are a doctor in charge of a large hospital, and you have to decide which treatment should be used for a particular disease. You have the following data from last month: there were 390 patients with the disease. Treatment A was given to 160 patients of whom 100 were men and 60 were women; 20 of the men and 40 of the women recovered. Treatment B was given to 230 patients of whom 210 were men and 20 were women; 50 of the men and 15 of the women recovered. Which treatment would you recommend we use for people with the disease in future?

The simplest way to represent these sort of data is to draw a table, we can then pick the relevant numbers out of the table to calculate the required conditional probabilities.

Overall

A
B

lived
60
65

died
100
165

The probability that a randomly chosen person survived if they were given treatment A is 60/160 = 0.375

The probability that a randomly chosen person survived if they were given treatment B is 65/230 = 0.283

So a randomly chosen person given treatment A was more likely to surive than a randomly chosen person given treatment B. Looks like we'd better give people treatment A.

However, since were given a breakdown of the data by gender, let's look and see if treatment A is better for both genders, or if it gets all of its advantage from one or the other.

Women

A
B

lived
40
15

died
20
5

The probability that a randomly chosen woman survived given that they were given treatment A is 40/60 = 0.67

The probability that a randomly chosen woman survived given that they were given treatment B is 15/20 = 0.75

So it looks like treatment B is better for women. Guess that means treatment A must be much better for men, in order to be be...
Scott Sumner on Utility vs Happiness [Link]
by Nic_Smith — 2011-01-12T20:14:50.158Z

A distinction that some people grok right away and some others may not realize exists:

Imagine a country called “Lanmindia,” where much of the population has seen its legs blown off in horrible accidents. Does that sound like a pretty miserable place? Happiness research suggests not. The claim is that there is a sort of natural “set-point” for happiness, and that after winning a lottery one is happy for a short time, and then you revert right back to your natural happiness level. I find that plausible. They also claim that if someone loses a limb, then they are unhappy for a short period and then revert back to normal. I find that implausible, but if the evidence says it is the case then I guess I need to accept that.

My claim is that although Lanmindia is just as happy as America, it has much lower utility. Let’s define ’utility’ as ”that which people maximize.” People very much don’t want to have their legs blown off, and hence emigrate from Lanmindia in droves. People behave as if they care about utility, not happiness.

-Scott Sumner, "Nonsense on stilts: Part 1. What if utility and happiness are unrelated?" TheMoneyIllusion

This is also somewhat a reply to Hanson's "Lift Up Your Eyes" on Overcoming Bias. Some people on LessWrong are careful to make the distinction between ordinal utility, cardinal utility, and fuzzies, and others aren't quite so much. The above sentence on accepting evidence and the post script that he is not serious about one part of the post might also make interesting conversation -- part two is advice to move next door to a child molester for cheaper housing if you don't have a kid and part three is about The Fed taking advantage of banks.
NYC Rationalist Diplomacy Post-Game Discussion
by Zvi — 2011-01-12T19:40:05.015Z

In addition to the two games currently being played on Less Wrong directly, the NYC group formed a third game; we filled five of the seven slots, with two being taken from an open call on LW when it was clear we would not reach seven players otherwise. While there were some technical problems for a few players, I feel the game was quite interesting. The game can be found here: http://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=42765. Commentary was posted to the discussion group LW-Diplomacy@googlegroups.com which you can access here: http://groups.google.com/group/lw-diplomacy/browse_thread/thread/e8141331abf8a114, which all are free to join and review. These were neutral point of view overviews of the situation, to help bring everyone up to speed, and were done without private knowledge. While some figured out who I was right away, we didn't reveal it explicitly until much later. In terms of the software, a lack of good notifications makes it problematic for games that aren't either very long deadlines or very short, but it is a strong system otherwise.

Also available there are all my communications and my journal, which I updated as the game progressed. I will give an overview here of what happened, as I understand it, and am happy to discuss anything and everything related to the game or Diplomacy in general.

Early on, Italy and Russia quickly realized I was Turkey from my messages, and given my experience in the game and in games in general decided to try and take me out, agreeing on a triple with Austria, while in the west England and Germany formed an alliance against France. In the fall, both Austria and England had technical issues that cost them a center, which served to help keep France viable in the west and position Austria's units in awkward fashion. The first key movement in the game was that Austria decided that he felt that taking me out for who I was wasn't sporting, and so he backstabbed Italy but without making a deal with Turkey because he'd read (correctly) that Austria/Turkey is not a good deal for Austria in general. However, by lying to all and refusing to make a deal with Russia or with Turkey until too late he put us all in a position where it was easier to take him out. France jumped on Italy while he was weak and took advantage of England's struggles and Germany's fleets to realign the west. With Austria out of the way, Russia jumped on Germ...
Link: why training a.i. isn’t like training your pets
by XiXiDu — 2011-01-12T18:23:12.823Z

As the SIAI is gaining publicity more people are reviewing its work. I am not sure how popular this blog is but judged by its about page he writes for some high-profile blogs. His latest post takes on Omohundro's "Basic AI Drives":

When we last looked at a paper from the Singularity Institute, it was an interesting work asking if we actually know what we’re really measuring when trying to evaluate intelligence by Dr. Shane Legg. While I found a few points that seemed a little odd to me, the broader point Dr. Legg was perusing was very much valid and there were some equations to consider. However, this paper isn’t exactly representative of most of the things you’ll find coming from the Institute’s fellows. Generally, what you’ll see are spanning philosophical treatises filled with metaphors, trying to make sense out of a technology that either doesn’t really exist and treated as a black box with inputs and outputs, or imagined by the author as a combination of whatever a popular science site reported about new research ideas in computer science. The end result of this process tends to be a lot like this warning about the need to develop a friendly or benevolent artificial intelligence system based on a rather fast and loose set of concepts about what an AI might decide to do and what will drive its decisions.

Link: worldofweirdthings.com/2011/01/12/why-training-a-i-isnt-like-training-your-pets/

I posted a few comments but do not think to be the right person to continue that discussion. So if you believe it is important what other people think about the SIAI and want to improve its public relations, there is your chance. I'm myself interested in the answers to his objections.
Anki deck for biases and fallacies
by phob — 2011-01-12T15:34:43.053Z

Followup to: Spaced Repetition Database for A Human's Guide to Words

There's a great list of cognitive biases and fallacies on Wikipedia. For those who wish to aid their learning with some Anki cards, I've shared a deck. Just search "biases" in Anki.

For those who use a different program, here are the cards in a tab-separated file.

I'll soon update it to also contain the list of memory biases.
Freaky unfairness
by benelliott — 2011-01-12T10:08:16.966Z

In Freaky Fairness the author discusses the problem of multi-player game theory problems where all players have access to each-other's source code. He gives an algorithm called Freaky Fairness, and makes the claim that 'all players run Freaky Fairness' is both a Strong Nash Equilibrium and a Pareto Optimum. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this claim is false.

For reference, the algorithm of Freaky Fairness works as follows:

Calculate the security values in mixed strategies for all subsets of players.

Divide all other players into two groups: those whose source code is an exact copy of Freaky Fairness (friends), and everyone else (enemies).

If there are no enemies: build a Shapley value from the computed security values of coalitions; play my part in the outcome that yields the highest total sum in the game; give up some of the result to others so that the resulting allocation agrees with the Shapley value.

If there are enemies: play my part in the outcome that brings the total payoff of the coalition of all enemies down to their security value.

Now consider the following simple game for three players:

Each player chooses one player to nominate.

They can nominate themselves but they don't have to.

If a player gets nominated by at least two players (possibly including themselves) then they win the game and receive $300

If every player gets nominated exactly once then nobody gets anything.

Conventional competitive game theory notes that each player has a dominant strategy of nominating themselves, and so nobody gets anything. Since the game potentially offers an $300 prize there is room for improvement here. Lets see how Freaky Fairness does:

The empty coalition and all coalitions with only one player have a security value of 0.

All coalitions with at least two players have a security value of $300 (this is independent of whether you use the alpha method, the beta method or mixed strategies to calculate security values).

The Shapley values work out at $100 to each player (this is trivial by symmetry but can be worked out the long way if you feel like it).

If all players run Freaky Fairness then they will choose one of their number, nominate them and then that player will then share out the money evenly.

If any one player deviates then the other two will split the money between themselves to ensure that this one pla...
Link: NY Times covers Bayesian statistics
by Mass_Driver — 2011-01-12T08:45:37.236Z

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/science/11esp.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage

It's disguised as an article about ESP to fool their editors; scroll down two paragraphs and it goes on for quite a while about what Bayesian statistics are and why Bayesian analysis is important.