trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Thinking and Deciding: a chapter by chapter review
by Vaniver — 2012-05-09T23:52:14.508Z

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of Thinking and Deciding by Jonathan Baron (UPenn, twitter). It won't be a detailed summary like badger's excellent summary of Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment, in part because this is a 600-page textbook and so a full summary would be far longer that I want to write here. I'll try to provide enough details that people can seek out the chapters that they find interesting, but this is by no means a replacement for reading the chapters that you find interesting. Every chapter is discussed below, with a brief "what should I read?" section if you know what you're interested in.

We already have a thread for textbook recommendations, but this book is central enough to Less Wrong's mission that it seems like it's worth an in-depth review. I'll state my basic impression of the whole book up front: I expect most readers of LW would gain quite a bit from reading the book, especially newer members, as it seems like a more focused and balanced introduction to the subject of rationality than the Sequences.

Baron splits the book into three sections: Thinking in General, Probability and Belief, and Decisions and Plans.

I may as well quote the first page in its entirety, as I feel it gives a good description of the book:

Beginning with its first edition and through three subsequent editions, Thinking and Deciding has established itself as the required text and important reference work for students and scholars of human cognition and rationality. In this, the fourth edition, Jonathan Baron retains the comprehensive attention to the key questions addressed in previous editions- How should we think? What, if anything, keeps us from thinking that way? How can we improve our thinking and decision making? - and his expanded treatment of topics such as risk, utilitarianism, Bayes's theorem, and moral thinking. With the student in mind, the fourth edition emphasizes the development of an understanding of the fundamental concepts in judgment and decision making. This book is essential reading for students and scholars in judgment and decision making and related fields, including psychology, economics, law, medicine, and business.

Jonathan Baron is Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author and editor of several other books, most recently Against Bioethics. Currently he is editor of the journal Judgmen

...
Jason Silva on AI safety
by curiousepic — 2012-05-09T18:07:54.070Z

Just an FYI that Jason Silva, a "performance philosopher" who is quickly gaining popularity and audience, seems to have given little thought to, or not been exposed to the proper arguments for, or is unconvinced by, the existential threat of AGI. But of course, perhaps this optimism is what has allowed him to become so engagingly exuberant.

"And I think if they're truly trillions of times more intelligent than us, they're not going to be less empathetic than us---they're probably going to be more empathetic. For them it might not be that big of deal to give us some big universe to play around in, like an ant farm or something like that. We could already be living in such a world for all we know. But either way, I don't think they're going to tie us down and enslave us and send us to death camps; I don't think they're going to be fascist A.I.'s. "

Anyone have the connections to change his mind and help the X-risk meme piggyback on his voice? Perhaps inviting him to Singularity Summit?
Is friendly AI "trivial" if the AI cannot rewire human values?
by Alerus — 2012-05-09T17:48:24.657Z

I put "trivial" in quotes because there are obviously some exceptionally large technical achievements that would still need to occur to get here, but suppose we had an AI with a utilitarian utility function of maximizing subjective human well-being (meaning, well-being is not something as simple as physical sensation of "pleasure" and depends on the mental facts of each person) and let us also assume the AI can model this "well" (lets say at least as well as the best of us can deduce the values of another person for their well-being). Finally, we will also assume that the AI does not possess the ability to manually rewire the human brain to change what a human values. In other words, the ability for the AI to manipulate another person's values is limited by what we as humans are capable of today. Given all this, is there any concern we should have about making this AI; would it succeed in being a friendly AI?

One argument I can imagine for why this fails friendly AI is the AI would wire people up to virtual reality machines. However, I don't think that works very well, because a person (except Cypher from the Matrix) wouldn't appreciate being wired into a virtual reality machine and having their autonomy forcefully removed. This means the action does not succeed in maximizing their well-being.

But I am curious to hear what arguments exist for why such an AI might still fail as a friendly AI.
Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics
by bekkerd — 2012-05-09T15:17:26.675Z

Question:

What are your thoughts on cryogenic preservation and the idea of medically treating aging?

His response:

A marvelous way to just convince people to give you money. Offer to freeze them for later. I'd have more confidence if we had previously managed to pull this off with other mammals. Until then I see it as a waste of money. I'd rather enjoy the money, and then be buried, offering my body back to the flora and fauna of which I have dined my whole life.

Link
[SEQ RERUN] Do Scientists Already Know This Stuff
by MinibearRex — 2012-05-09T03:57:52.470Z

Today's post, Do Scientists Already Know This Stuff? was originally published on 17 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

No. Maybe someday it will be part of standard scientific training, but for now, it's not, and the absence is visible.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Science Isn't Strict Enough, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Thoughts from a conversation on quantum immortality
by  — 2012-05-08T21:14:47.419Z

[Today, I participated in a conversation about the idea of quantum immortality. I decided to summarise some of the thoughts that came up in this short post. Therefore, it should be viewed as a report on a discussion rather than an attempt at a proper post.]

Assume that many-worlds interpretation is correct and quantum immortality is true. Essentially, in at least one universe you survive no matter what dangerous things you try. Since there is no defined biological "expiry date" on your body, you end up in state where your body just continues avoiding terminal shutdown. Your body is failing but the space of probabilistic events (such as a given organ failing, or a given blood vessel rupturing, or two given molecules interacting, or others, however minor) which lead to terminal shutdown is sufficiently large to last you for a while, with at least one universe where you still happen to be alive.

The above process probably takes a while(?). Until the entire space of events is explored (your body is finite) and you die in all universes. But in this case we don't have quantum immortality, only "maximally delayed mortality" (MDM).

We can only observe quantum immortality with relation to ourself. Thus, in the universe where you survive, everyone else around you is likely to be dead, since the probability of two individuals surviving to this stage in the same universe is much smaller than the probability of you alone surviving. Therefore, you end up in an incapacitated state of continuous (eventually, lethal) failing of your body, completely alone in a universe where everyone else is dead.

The argument in the previous paragraph does not account for new people being born. So assuming no catastrophic event killing everyone else but you occurred, there may be other people in the universe where you are. But then you will not be in a state to appreciate that towards the end of your MDM.

So, if many-worlds is true, are we all going to end up experiencing a slow gradual fade-out of life just as we experienced a gradual fade-in?
Consequentialist Formal Systems
by Vladimir_Nesov — 2012-05-08T20:38:47.981Z

This post describes a different (less agent-centric) way of looking at UDT-like decision theories that resolves some aspects of the long-standing technical problem of spurious moral arguments. It's only a half-baked idea, so there are currently a lot of loose ends.

On spurious arguments

UDT agents are usually considered as having a disinterested inference system (a "mathematical intuition module" in UDT and first order proof search in ADT) that plays a purely epistemic role, and preference-dependent decision rules that look for statements that characterize possible actions in terms of the utility value that the agent optimizes.

The statements (supplied by the inference system) used by agent's decision rules (to pick one of the many variants) have the form [(A=A1 => U=U1) and U<=U1]. Here, A is a symbol defined to be the actual action chosen by the agent, U is a similar symbol defined to be the actual value of world's utility, and A1 and U1 are some particular possible action and possible utility value. If the agent finds that this statement is provable, it performs action A1, thereby making A1 the actual action.

The use of this statement introduces the problem of spurious arguments: if A1 is a bad action, but for some reason it's still chosen, then [(A=A1 => U=U1) and U<=U1] is true, since utility value U will in that case be in fact U1, which justifies (by the decision rule) choosing the bad action A1. In usual cases, this problem results in the difficulty of proving that an agent will behave in the expected manner (i.e. won't choose a bad action), which is resolved by adding various compilicated clauses to its decision algorithm. But even worse, it turns out that if an agent is hapless enough to take seriously a (formally correct) proof of such a statement supplied by an enemy (or if its own inference system is malicious), it can be persuaded to take any action at all, irrespective of agent's own preferences.

Deciding which theorems to make valid

Given that an inference system can overpower decision rules, causing an agent to follow a preference other than its own, perhaps decision-making should be happening inside the inference system in the first place, with agent only following its decisions. What does an inference system decide? Directly, it decides which theorems to have. The set of valid theorems follows deterministically from the axioms, b...
The ethics of breaking belief
by thelittledoctor — 2012-05-08T20:34:34.012Z

I'm not sure if this is precisely the correct forum for this, but if there is a better place, I don't know what it would be. At any rate...

I'm a student a Catholic university, and there are (as one might surmise) quite a lot of Catholics here, along with assorted other theists (yes, even some in the biology faculty). For this reason, I find myself acquiring more and more devoutly Catholic friends, and some of them I have grown quite close to. But the God issue keeps coming up for one reason or another, which is a source of tension. And yet as I grow closer to these people, it becomes clearer and clearer that each theist has a certain personal sequence of Dark Arts-ish levers in eir head, the flipping (or un-flipping) of which would snap em out of faith.

So the question is this: in what situations (if any) is it ethical to push such buttons? We often say, here, that that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, but these are people who have built their lives around faith, people for whom the Church is their social support group. If it were possible to disillusion the whole world all at once, that'd be one thing - but in this case my options are limited to changing the minds of only the specific individuals I have spent time getting to know, and the direct result would be their alienation from the entire community in which they've been raised.

And yet it is the truth.

I'm conflicted. LessWrong, what is your opinion?
A wild theist platonist appears, to ask about the path 
by Hang — 2012-05-08T11:23:04.072Z

I recognize the title could be more informative. At the same time I believe it says what is important.
I believe in a deity, I believe in mathematical entities in the same way.
The community of LessWrong (from whenceforth: LessWrong) is deeply interesting to me, appearing as a semi-organized atheist, reductionist community.
LessWrong seems very interested in promoting rationality, which I applaud. The effort does seem scattered, though, and this is the reason I post.
One has Eliezer's website with some interesting posts. The same of this community. The community links to some posts when you are coming for the first time into it, and you also have a filter for top posts. One has the blog. And recently, the center for modern rationality (in the same page as harrypoter fanfiction about rationality).
The point being there is no defined roadmap to go from AIC (average irrational chump to make an analogy to Game - which also seems to come up around quite a bit) to RA (again, rationality artist).
I write this post as to maybe generate a discussion on how the efforts could be concentrated and a new direction taken.
Should the creation of the Center for Modern Rationality envision this same concentration, this post may and should be disregard.
If it does not, then I leave it to your consideration.

Hang.
Logical fallacies poster, a LessWrong adaptation.
by Utopiah — 2012-05-08T07:08:42.210Z

Following http://lesswrong.com/lw/bwo/logical_fallacy_poster/ some people complained about

the sarcastic illustration

the lack of references

the weird categorization that should rather fit a Bayesian framework

the simplistic or even wrong definitions

and more

Yet this poster has ONE key difference with the ideal poster, it exists.
If it sparks criticisms that lead to a new, LessWrong compatible poster, then it is well worth the critics.

The obvious next step then is to make a poster that would allow to take into account such well founded suggestion and synthesize the LessWrong lessons visually.

In your opinion then what would be a good structure, e.g. a hierarchy of fallacies, and a design theme?
Hacking Quantum Immortality
by CasioTheSane — 2012-05-08T07:06:06.748Z

Quantum immortality sounds exactly like the mythical hell: living forever in perpetual agony, unable to die and in your own branch of existence separate from everyone else you ever knew.

What if we can hack quantum immortality to force continued good health, and the mutual survival of our loved ones in the same branch of the universe as us?

It seems like one would "simply" need a device which monitors your health with biosensors, and if anything goes out of range- it instantly kills you in a manner with extremely low probability of failure. All of your friends and family would wear a similar device, and they would be coupled such that if one person becomes "slightly unhealthy" you all die instantly, keeping you all alive and healthy together.

We nearly have the technology to build such a thing now. Would you install one in your own body? If not, why not?

Who wants to invest in my new biotech startup which promises to stop all disease and human suffering within the next decade? Just joking, there is a serious technical problem here that makes it considerably more difficult than it sounds: for such a device to work the probability of it's failure must be much much less than the probability of your continued healthy survival. You also never get to test the design before you use it.
[SEQ RERUN] Science Isn't Strict Enough
by MinibearRex — 2012-05-08T05:31:17.947Z

Today's post, Science Isn't Strict Enough was originally published on 16 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Science lets you believe any damn stupid idea that hasn't been refuted by experiment. Bayesianism says there is always an exactly rational degree of belief given your current evidence, and this does not shift a nanometer to the left or to the right depending on your whims. Science is a social freedom - we let people test whatever hypotheses they like, because we don't trust the village elders to decide in advance - but you shouldn't confuse that with an individual standard of rationality.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was When Science Can't Help, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Meetup : West LA Meetup - Nomic
by  — 2012-05-08T03:22:58.941Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Nomic

WHEN:
09 May 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

When: 7:00pm - 9:00pm Wednesday, May 9th.

Where: The Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters.

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Activity: This week, we will begin a game of Nomic, the most meta game known to man. This is a game in which changing the rules of the game constitutes a "move". I will pick one of the more common initial rulesets.

Don't worry if you don't have time to read any articles, or even if you've never read any Less Wrong! Bring a friend! The atmosphere is casual, and good, intelligent conversation with friendly people is guaranteed.

I will bring a whiteboard with Bayes' Theorem written on it.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup - Nomic
On what rationality-related topic should I give a school presentation?
by bramflakes — 2012-05-07T19:00:45.232Z

My school has a weekly event on Thursdays where someone can give a 15-25 minute lecture about a topic of their choice during the lunch break. The standard attendance is about 20-30, aged between 14 and 18, and some teachers drop by if the topic is related to their subject. It's heavily interlinked with the philosophy department, in that topics are typically about religion or ethics, so the audience is generally more philosophically informed than average. A good percentage are theists or deists, and there's a very high chance that the subject will be more thoroughly discussed in the philosophy club the day after.

In a previous lecture a few months ago I tried to explain some standard biases, the Map/Territory concepts, Bayes, and generally attempted to compress the core sequences into 25 minutes, which despite a lot of interest from the head of the philosophy department, didn't go as well as I'd hoped for the rest of the audience. The problem was that I tried to close too many inferential gaps in too many areas in too short a timespan, so for this I thought I should take one rationality idea and go into detail. The problem is I don't know which one to choose for maximum impact. I've decided against cryonics because I don't feel confident that I know enough about it.

So what do you think I should talk about for maximum sanity-waterline-raising impact?
Meetup : Vancouver Politics Meetup
by  — 2012-05-07T13:47:09.568Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Politics Meetup

WHEN:
12 May 2012 01:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
Benny's Bagels 2505 W Broadway Vancouver, BC

We are going to be at Benny's again. Saturday this time, because we know some of you can't do Sundays. 13:00.

The sequence we are reading this week is politics is the mind killer, so read that and come discuss. We prefer that you come out even if you havn't read anything, tho.

See you all there.

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Politics Meetup
Lesswrong Community's How-Tos and Recommendations
by EE43026F — 2012-05-07T13:41:52.658Z

The Lesswrong community is often a dependable source of recommendations, network help, and advice. When I'm looking for a book or learning material on a topic I'll often try and search here to see what residents have found useful. Similarly, social advice, anecdotes and explanations as seen from the point of view of the community have regularly been insightful or eye-opening. The prototypical examples of such articles are, on top of my head :

http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gu/the_best_textbooks_on_every_subject/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/453/procedural_knowledge_gaps/

the topics of which are neatly listed on

http://lesswrong.com/lw/a08/topics_from_procedural_knowledge_gaps/

And lately

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/c6y/why_do_people/

the latter prompted me to write this article. We don't keep track of such resources as far as I know. This probably belongs in the wiki as well.

Other potentially useful resources were:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/12d/recommended_reading_for_new_rationalists/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2kk/book_recommendations/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ua/recommended_reading_for_friendly_ai_research/
math learning
http://lesswrong.com/lw/9qq/what_math_should_i_learn/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/8js/what_mathematics_to_learn/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/a54/seeking_education/
misc learning
http://lesswrong.com/lw/5me/scholarship_how_to_do_it_efficiently/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/4yv/i_want_to_learn_programming/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3qr/i_want_to_learn_economics/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3us/i_want_to_learn_about_education/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/8e3/which_fields_of_learning_have_clarified_your/
social
http://lesswrong.com/lw/6ey/learning_how_to_explain_things/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/818/how_to_understand_people_better/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/6tb/developing_empathy/
community
http://lesswrong.com/lw/929/less_wrong_mentoring_network/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/7hi/free_research_help_editing_and_article_downloads/
Employment
http://lesswrong.com/lw/43m/optimal_employment/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2qp/virtual_employment_open_thread/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/38u/best_career_models_for_doing_research/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/4ad/optimal_employment_open_thread/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/626/job_search_advice/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/8cp/any_thoughts_on_how_to_locate_job_opportunities/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/7yl/more_shameless_ploys_for_job_advice/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/a93/existent...
Meetup : Small Berkeley Meetup
by Thausler — 2012-05-07T05:20:40.924Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Small Berkeley Meetup

WHEN:
09 May 2012 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2128 Oxford St, Berkeley, CA

We'll be meeting at the Starbucks on Oxford St and then probably going somewhere to get food. This will be a small meetup.

Discussion article for the meetup : Small Berkeley Meetup