trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Reflections on Pre-Rationality
by Wei Dai — 2009-11-09T21:42:22.087Z

This continues my previous post on Robin Hanson's pre-rationality, by offering some additional comments on the idea.

The reason I re-read Robin's paper recently was to see if it answers a question that's related to another of my recent posts: why do we human beings have the priors that we do? Part of that question is why are our priors pretty close to each other, even if they're not exactly equal. (Technically we don't have priors because we're not Bayesians, but we can be approximated as Bayesians, and those Bayesians have priors.) If we were created by a rational creator, then we would have pre-rational priors. (Which, since we don't actually have pre-rational priors, seems to be a good argument against us having been created by a rational creator. I wonder what Aumann would say about this?) But we have other grounds for believing that we were instead created by evolution, which is not a rational process, in which case the concept doesn't help to answer the question, as far as I can see. (Robin never claimed that it would, of course.)

The next question I want to consider is a normative one: is pre-rationality rational? Pre-rationality says that we should reason as if we were pre-agents who learned about our prior assignments as information, instead of just taking those priors as given. But then, shouldn't we also act as if we were pre-agents who learned about our utility function assignments as information, instead of taking them as given? In that case, we're led to the conclusion that we should all have common utility functions, or at least that pre-rational agents should have values that are much less idiosyncratic than ours. This seems to be a reductio ad absurdum of pre-rationality, unless there is an argument why we should apply the concept of pre-rationality only to our priors, and not to our utility functions. Or is anyone tempted to bite this bullet and claim that we should apply pre-rationality to our utility functions as well? (Note that if we were created by a rational creator, then we would have common utility functions.)

The last question I want to address is one that I already raised in my previous post. Assuming that we do want to be pre-rational, how do we move from our current non-pre-rational state to a pre-rational one? This is somewhat similar to the question of how do we move from our current non-rational (according to ordinary rationalit...
Unpromising promise?
by KatjaGrace — 2009-11-09T19:36:17.000Z

Marriage usually involves sharing and exchanging a huge bunch of things. Love, sex, childcare, money, cooperation in finding a mutually agreeable place for the knives to live, etc. For all of these but one, you can verify whether I’m upholding my side of the deal. And for all but one, I can meaningfully promise to keep my side of the deal more than a day into the future. Yet the odd one out, love, is the one that we find most suited to making eternal promises about. Are these things related?
Practical rationality in surveys
by taw — 2009-11-08T14:27:41.688Z

"Statistically significant results" mean that there's a 5% chance that results are wrong in addition to chance that the wrong thing was measures, chance that sample was biased, chance that measurement instruments were biased, chance that mistakes were made during analysis, chance that publication bias skewed results, chance that results were entirely made up and so on.

"Not statistically significant results" mean all those, except chance of randomly mistaken results even if everything was ran correct is not 5%, but something else, unknown, and dependent of strength of the effect measured (if the effect is weak, you can have study where chance of false negative is over 99%).

So results being statistically significant or not, is really not that useful.

For example, here's a survey of civic knowledge. Plus or minus 3% measurement error? Not this time, they just completely made up the results.

Take home exercise - what do you estimate Bayesian chance of published results being wrong to be?
Protect the seemingly useless
by KatjaGrace — 2009-11-08T12:18:25.000Z

Advice I could have done with as a teenager, from G.K. Chesterton:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

Thanks to Mike Blume via me via Robert Wiblin via Jane Galt.
The Danger of Stories
by Matt_Simpson — 2009-11-08T02:53:29.184Z

Tyler Cowen argues in a TED talk (~15 min) that stories pervade our mental lives. He thinks they are a major source of cognitive biases and, on the margin, we should be more suspicious of them - especially simple stories. Here's an interesting quote about the meta-level:

What story do you take away from Tyler Cowen? ...Another possibility is you might tell a story of rebirth. You might say, "I used to think too much in terms of stories, but then I heard Tyler Cowen, and now I think less in terms of stories". ...You could also tell a story of deep tragedy. "This guy Tyler Cowen came and he told us not to think in terms of stories, but all he could do was tell us stories about how other people think too much in terms of stories."
Externalizing between conformers
by KatjaGrace — 2009-11-07T12:54:03.000Z

or Why I could conceivably support banning smoking, part 1

Suppose that people are rational and their goals are consistent, and they are free to choose whatever activities they like, as long as they don’t harm others. Suppose we don’t care about equality or whether lifestyles are nihisistic, or anything else Wikipedia claims might be wrong with libertarianism. Should we expect people to approximately end up with the best sets of behaviour? If they smoke, should we infer that they like smoking more than they dislike having lung cancer far in the future? If they watch intellectual documentaries rather than porn should we assume that they have wisely established that they like looking smart more than raunchy fantasy? Many think so, and support libertarianism for this reason.

This makes sense if humans are independently choosing activities. But the all time favorite activity of nearly everyone is doing what other people are doing. This makes such an argument more complicated.

Imagine everyone is doing A. Everyone likes doing B more than doing A, but not as much as they like conformity. There would be a huge gain to a coordinated shift to B, but nobody moves there alone. In some such situations those involved arrange coordination, but often it is impossible. If there are many equilibria like this, and no means to move to better ones, intervention by someone with the power to force a coordinated move could be a great thing.

A good example of this I saw was during first year at college. Everyone used to go to Southpac to drink. I was baffled, as it was probably not just the worst night club around, but actually the least pleasant place I had ever been, possibly but not definitely excluding ankle deep in poo and mud with rotten meat juice running up my arms and dogs clawing at me. When I asked, everyone said they hated it, but it was overall the best place to go, because that’s where everyone else went. It seemed that there were too many people for any student to easily coordinate everyone going somewhere else, so the original equilibrium remained until Southpac was closed down for using (cheap, poisonous) methylated spirits in the drinks. The student council got sponsorship somewhere else, and everyone else went there instead.

Roger

Southpac
Elsewhere

Everyone else
Southpac
2
1

Elsewhere
0
3

Payoffs for Roger in choosing a nightclub

In the above t...
Determinism is not blame-free
by KatjaGrace — 2009-11-06T23:28:52.000Z

If a person seems to have done something wrong, we check that they weren’t forced by circumstance. If we find they had no choice, we don’t punish them.

As we learn about the detail of ourselves, we see more and more circumstances forcing our decisions. The social context, your beliefs, your genes, your personality disorders, some randomness you didn’t control. In the end the circumstance of being yourself threatens to doom you to all of your actions. Many feel this is a threat indeed, for then we must abandon responsibility as a concept.

The extremes of this are treated as philosophical issue, but at the margin it is quite practical. This week for instance a murderer had his sentence cut because his genes promoted aggression. A common sentiment among those commenting is that in these cases we should distinguish between punishment, prevention and rehabilitation. He does not deserve to be punished as he had no choice, but that we don’t want him around, so he should be politely detained and helped.

Trying to draw a line between what could and couldn’t have been any other way under the circumstances is of course misguided. There is not even a gradient of degree of choice on which to draw a line for practical purposes. Everything was determined. But there is another important gradient. The key factor is how different reality would have needed to be for the person to make a different ‘choice’.

At one end of this gradient, all a killer needed was for one neuron to fire differently and she would have chickened out. At the other end, things would have had to be different for years for the death to be avoided. For instance the killer is a careful driver who runs over a child darting onto the road. He could have prevented it by never driving, which would have required their whole life to be different.

At some point, the cost of being good is equal to the cost of potentially getting punished in a certain way. Sins that are cheaper to avoid than this we should punish in that way (if prevention is worth the effort to us), those that it would take more to alter we should not.

This gradient seems to approximately coincide with when we call things a matter of choice. We also seem to roughly draw a line on it where our usual punishments, such as social ostracism, fail to change behavior. If a behavior can’t be brought down by stigma and bad treatment, it’s probably out of your cont...
Hamster in Tutu Shuts Down Large Hadron Collider
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-11-06T16:29:30.210Z

The Large Hadron Collider was shut down yesterday by a hamster in a tutu, weary scientists announced.

The Large Hadron Collider is the successor to the earlier Superconducting Super Collider, which was shut down by the US House of Representatives in 1993 after 14 miles of tunnel had been constructed at a cost of $2 billion. Since its inception, the Large Hadron Collider has been plagued by construction delays, dead technicians, broken magnet supports, electrical faults, helium containment failures, vacuum leaks, birds with baguettes, terrorists, ninjas, pirates, supervillains, hurricanes, asteroids, cosmic energy storms, and a runaway train. On one occasion it was discovered that the entire 17-mile circular tunnel had been built upside-down due to a sign error in the calculations, and the whole facility had to be carefully flipped by a giant spatula.

One year ago, hopes were raised for the first time in decades when it was discovered that all the incidents up until that point had been the work of a sinister globe-spanning conspiracy of religious fanatics who, inspired by the term "God Particle", had decided that no one could ever be allowed to look upon the hypothetical Higgs boson. This discovery was widely considered to have undermined the theory that Nature abhors a sufficiently powerful particle collider. Though some found it suspicious that the Higgs boson would even have a religious cult devoted to preventing its observation, the affair did have a patina of surface plausibility - after all, a giant plot to prevent physicists from observing the Higgs boson makes around as much sense as anything else religious people do.

After the conspiracy was shut down by heroic international detectives in an operation so hugely dramatic that it would be pointless to summarize it here, the world began to wonder whether the LHC might really, really work this time around. Scientists everywhere held their breaths as the bodies were cleared out, the tunnels reconditioned, and the broken magnets replaced, all without incident. The price of large hadrons held steady on the commodities market, permitting the LHC's reservoirs to be fully stocked. Proton beams were successfully formed and circulated through the giant tunnel.

Moments before the first collision was scheduled to probe the theretofore-unachieved energy of 3.5 TeV, a hamster in...
All hail the Lisbon Treaty! Or is that "hate"? Or just "huh"?
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2009-11-06T10:42:35.407Z

The Lisbon treaty was finally ratified last Tuesday, in a most wonderfully disdainful signing cermony.

I take it that everyone on the list is emotionally overwhelmed by this, one of the most important political events in recent history. The world's largest economy has taken a firm step towards statehood; the ramifications of this will be felt across the world. People will die who would have lived; people will live who would have died: the body count is much affected. The potential implications for AI alone (think political singleton, research funding priorities) are huge. Depending on your opinion of the consequences, you are probably dumped into a dark ditch of despair or swimming in a limitless ocean of triumphant glee.

If neither is the case... why not?
Bay area LW meet-up
by AnnaSalamon — 2009-11-06T07:49:11.816Z

The November LW/OB meet-up will be this Saturday (two days from today), at the SIAI house in Santa Clara. Apologies for the late notice. We'll have fun, food, and attempts at rationality, as well as good general conversation. Details at the bay area OB/LW meet-up page.
News: Improbable Coincidence Slows LHC Repairs
by Zack_M_Davis — 2009-11-06T07:24:31.000Z

Related to: How Many LHC Failures is Too Many?

My first reaction to this was that it had to be a joke, but I thought Less Wrong readers would like to know that The Times of London is reporting that repairs on the Large Hadron Collider have been delayed by overheating caused by a piece of bread, possibly dropped by a bird:

The rehabilitation of the beleaguered Large Hadron Collider was on hold tonight after the failure of one of its powerful cooling units caused by an errant chunk of baguette.

The £4 billion particle-collider faced more than a year of delays after a helium leak stymied the project in its first few days of operation. It is gradually being switched back on over the coming months but suffered a new setback on Tuesday morning.

Scientists at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva noticed that the system’s carefully monitored temperatures were creeping up.

Further investigation into the failure of a cryogenic cooling plant revealed an unusual impediment. A piece of crusty bread had paralysed a high voltage installation that should have been powering the cooling unit. [...]

A spokeswoman for CERN confirmed that baguette was responsible for the latest hiatus, but she conceded that mystery surrounded the way it got into the vital power installation, which is protected by high security fences.

“Nobody knows how it got there,” she told The Times. “The best guess is that it was dropped by a bird, either that or it was thrown out of a passing aeroplane.”

“Obviously this was slightly surprising. Within the team there was some amusement once they had relaxed after initial concerns.”

I'm rather confident that this is just a meaningless coincidence, but in light of the anthropic speculations last year about the LHC's technical difficulties, I thought this was worth sharing.

Hat tip MBlume
Light Arts
by Alicorn — 2009-11-06T03:54:49.881Z

tl;dr: It is worthwhile to convince people that they already, by their own lights, have reasons to believe true things, as this is faster, easier, nicer, and more effective than helping them create from scratch reasons to believe those things.

This is not part of the problem-solving sequence. I do plan to finish that, but the last post is eluding me.

Related: Whatever it is I was thinking of here (let me know if you can dig up what it was).

Today, while waiting for a bus, I heard the two girls sitting on the bench next to mine talking about organ donation. One said that she was thinking of ceasing to be an organ donor, because she'd heard that doctors don't try as hard to save donors in hopes of using their organs to save other lives.

My bus was approaching. I didn't know the girl and could hardly follow up later with an arsenal of ironclad counterarguments. There was no time, and probably no receptivity, to engage in a lengthy discussion of why this medical behavior wouldn't happen. No chance to fire up my computer, try to get on the nearest wireless, and pull up empirical stats that say it doesn't happen.

So I chuckled and interjected, at a convenient gap in her ramble, "That's why you carry a blood donor card, too, so they think if you stay alive they'll keep getting blood from you!"

Some far-off potential tragic crisis averted? Maybe. She looked thoughtful, nodded, said that she did have a blood donor card, and that my suggestion made sense. I boarded my bus and it carried me away. I hope she's never hit by a cement truck. I hope that if she is hit by a cement truck, a stupid rumor she heard once doesn't turn it into as complete a waste as it would have to be without the wonders of organ transplant.

And even maintaining those twin hopes and feeling I'd done something to improve their conjoined chance of realization, I began to feel like perhaps I'd done wrong. I could conjure up a defense - hey, I laughed first, and I'd used the exact same words before as a mere joke (with people better-informed than this who I'd expected to get it on their own). It's not strictly my fault that she didn't take it as a joke too. And hey, I would have gone ahead and had the whole knock-down drag-out argument with her if there had only been time, if I could only have had her ear for long enough to spit o...
Money pumping: the axiomatic approach
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2009-11-05T11:23:10.873Z

This post gets somewhat technical and mathematical, but the point can be summarised as:

You are vulnerable to money pumps only to the extent to which you deviate from the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms of expected utility.

In other words, using alternate decision theories is bad for your wealth.

But what is a money pump? Intuitively it is a series of trades that I propose to you, that end up bringing you back to where you started. All the trades must be indifferent or advantageous to you, so that you will accept them. And if even one of those trades is advantageous, then this is a money pump: I can charge you a tiny amount for that trade, making free money out of you. You are now strictly poorer than if you had not accepted the tradesat all.

A strict money pump happens when every deal is advantageous to you, not simply indifferent. In most situations, there is no difference between a money pump and a strict money pump: I can offer you a tiny trinket at each indifferent deal to make it advantageous, and get these back later. There are odd preference systems out there, though, so the distinction is needed.

The condition "bringing you back to where you started" needs to be examined some more. Thus define:

A strong money pump is a money pump which returns us both to exactly the same situations as when we started: in possession of the same assets and lotteries, with none of them having come due in the meantime.

A weak money pump is a money pump that returns us to the same situation that would have happened if we had never traded at all. Lotteries may have come due in the course of the trades.

What is the difference? Quite simply with a strong money pump, since we return to exactly the same setup, I can then money pump you again, and again, charging you a penny at each round, and draining you of cash until you run out completely or your preferences change. Remember that I charge you that penny only for a deal that is strictly to your advantage, so even with that charge, you are coming out ahead on every deal. It's just at the end of the loop that you're losing out.

For a weak money pump, since we don't return exactly to the same setup, I cannot just money pump you again instantly. I can get cash from you only once for each setup. It might never happen again; or it may happen regularly. But it's not as reusable as a strong money pump.

Now if your preferences are inconsis...
Rolf Nelson's "The Rational Entrepreneur"
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-11-04T21:31:00.512Z

New blog up by longtime OB/LWer Rolf Nelson, "The Rational Entrepreneur" at rolfnelson.com. On "the overlap between entrepreneurship and the modern tools of rationality". Rolf will post daily through November, and after that it will depend on how much traction the blog gets.

First posts: Pay more attention to the statistics! (which say to do what you know, not what you love) and Having co-founders is valuable but not crucial (according to a study).