trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Elqayam & Evans (2011) argue against a certain kind of normativism about rationality
by lukeprog — 2011-09-04T05:57:08.205Z

A forthcoming edition of Behavioral and Brain Sciences will be devoted to Elqayam & Evans' (2011) critique of normativism about rationality and brief responses to it.

Abstract:

We propose a critique of normativism, defined as the idea that human thinking reflects a normative system against which it should be measured and judged. We analyze the methodological problems associated with normativism, proposing that it invites the controversial is-ought inference, much contested in the philosophical literature. This problem is triggered when there are competing normative accounts (the arbitration problem), as empirical evidence can help arbitrate between descriptive theories, but not between normative systems. Drawing on linguistics as a model, we propose that clear distinction between normative systems and competence theories is essential, arguing that equating them invites an ‘is-ought’ inference; to wit, supporting normative ‘ought’ theories with empirical ‘is’ evidence. We analyze in detail two research programs with normativist features, Oaksford and Chater’s rational analysis, and Stanovich and West’s individual differences approach, demonstrating how in each case equating norm and competence leads to an is-ought inference. Normativism triggers a host of research biases in psychology of reasoning and decision making:focusing on untrained participants and novel problems, analyzing psychological processes in terms of their normative correlates, and neglecting philosophically significant paradigms when they do not supply clear standards for normative judgment. For example, in a dual-process framework, normativism can lead to a fallacious ‘ought-is’ inference, in which normative responses are taken as diagnostic of analytic reasoning. We propose that little can be gained from normativism that cannot be achieved by descriptivist computational-level analysis, illustrating our position with Hypothetical Thinking Theory and the theory of the suppositional conditional. We conclude that descriptivism is a viable option, and that theories of higher mental processing would be better off freed from normative considerations.
[SEQ RERUN] Burdensome Details
by MinibearRex — 2011-09-04T04:39:46.564Z

Today's post, Burdensome Details was originally published on 20 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you want to avoid the conjunction fallacy, you must try to feel a stronger emotional impact from Occam's Razor. Each additional detail added to a claim must feel as though it is driving the probability of the claim down towards zero.

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 Conjunction Controversy (Or, How They Nail It Down), 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.
July 2011 review of experimental philosophy
by lukeprog — 2011-09-04T02:51:38.312Z

Experimental philosophy is the mainstream academic field that is most directly attempting to dissolve (where possible) persistent philosophical problems by revealing the cognitive algorithms that generate old philosophical debates. Those who want to catch up with some of what these researchers have discovered already may want to read this July 2011 review of the field.

Also see my post Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations?
What is the most rational view of Peak Oil and its near term consequences?
by DavidPlumpton — 2011-09-04T01:51:04.248Z

To me the following points seem hard to argue against:

Oil is harder and harder to find every year (we already took the easy stuff, nobody finds super-giant fields anymore)

The peak production year was 2005 with 73.7 million barrels produced

The amount of oil produced each year is declining

The price of oil (and therefore energy) rises

All the alternatives that were supposed to fill the gap are failing to deliver

Even oil that's harder to get (e.g. in deep water) doesn't help much as it is generally produced at a slow rate

Available energy production rate (i.e. power) drops

Since nearly everything needs power to create/mine/produce prices rise

Food for example becomes more expensive as fertilizer prices rise

The average person is mystified as the price of everything seems to rise at once

Business and whole national economies are squeezed by rising prices

As businesses fail unemployment increases

Politicians are powerless, so promise general feel-good nonsense like "energy independence". Nobody even tries to tackle the problem.

Everything continues to get worse, and at an increasing rate

Within the near future the lights start to go out.

Sure there's a possibility that a form of nuclear fusion/thorium/cold fusion/zero point energy that is safe and cheap to build and operate might be invented tomorrow, but given that such things usually take a decade or so from inception to delivery it looks like there's no practical alternative on the horizon. Thermodynamics is a harsh mistress. Work out the energy in 73 million barrels of oil, and figure out how many wind farms are needed to offset a 5% decline. And then another decline the next year. Even uranium prices are rising as demand outstrips supply for just the current set of reactors.

The more we examing the situation the worse it seems to be. Some early wells had a enormous energy return on investment, e.g. for the energy of burning one barrel of oil we could pump 100 barrels from the ground. Now we are pumping wells that produce only about 5 barrels. This is known as EROEI (energy return on energy investment). EROEI is falling everywhere as all the low hanging fruit was plucking decades before, and only the difficult stuff is left. The net result is that it is ever harder to increase production rates.

Civilization runs on the constant supply of power. If that power declines 5% every year we are back to t

...
Rationality Attractors in Personspace
by atucker — 2011-09-03T21:25:08.952Z

These two questions seem to be somewhat interesting, especially for those interested in rationality outreach.

What makes someone more likely to study rationality?

More likely to become a higher level rationalist?

A few thoughts:

Empirically, rationalists seem to be more into technical fields than average, and more interested in an explicit understanding of social things than most technical people.

People who can more clearly see deficiencies in themselves, and who try to solve problems seem more likely to become rationalists, when exposed to rationality.

People who are motivated to pursue rationality for instrumental goals, rather than for funsies, seem to become better rationalists.
Meetup : Munich Meetup, Saturday September 10th, 2PM
by David Althaus — 2011-09-03T20:03:33.034Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Munich Meetup, Saturday September 10th, 2PM

WHEN: 10 September 2011 02:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE: Munich Central Station, Coffee Fellows cafe, Bahnhofsplatz 2, First floor.

I will be there with a Lesswrong sign. If you can't find it, you can call me: 0160-93132663 .

According to a doodle-survey 5 people (including me) could attend. And of course you are welcome too!

If the cafe sucks, we could easily go elsewhere. I've merely chosen the place, because it's relatively nice, near the central station and easy to find.

Lurkers and newbies are very welcome!

P.S. : Could you please drop a short comment if you're planning to attend?
How to hack one's self to want to want to ... hack one's self.
by  — 2011-09-03T17:06:56.249Z

I was inspired by the recent post discussing self-hacking for the purpose of changing a relationship perspective to achieve a goal. Despite my feeling inspired, though, I also felt like life hacking was not something I could ever want to do even if I perceived benefits to doing it. It seems to me that the place where I would need to begin is hacking myself in order to cause myself to want to be hacked. But then I started contemplating whether this is a plausible thing to do.
In my own case, there are two concrete examples in mind. I am a graduate student working on applied math and probability theory in the field of machine vision. I was one of those bright-eyes, bushy-tailed dolts as an undergrad who just sort of floated to grad school believing that as long as I worked sufficiently hard, it was a logical conclusion that I would get a tenure-track faculty position at a desirable university. Even though I am a fellowship award winner and I am working with a well-known researcher at an Ivy League school, my experience in grad school (along with some noted articles) has forced me to re-examine a lot of my priorities. Tenure-track positions are just too difficult to achieve and achieving them is based on networking, politics, and whether the popularity of your research happens to have a peak at the same time that your productivity in that area also has a peak.
But the alternatives that I see are: join the consulting/business/startup world, become a programmer/analyst for a large software/IT/computer company, work for a government research lab. I worked for two years at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory as a radar analyst and signal processing algorithm developer prior to grad school. The main reason I left that job was because I (foolishly) thought that graduate school was where someone goes to specifically learn the higher-level knowledge and skills to do theoretical work that transcends the software development / data processing work that is so common. I'm more interested in creating tools that go into the toolbox of an engineer than with actually using those tools to create something that people want to pay for.
I have been deeply thinking about these issues for more than two years now, almost every day. I read everything that I can and I try to be as blunt and to-the-point about it as I can be. Future career prospects seem bleak to me. Everyone is getting crushed by da...
[LINK] Report on the Fourth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence 
by Kaj_Sotala — 2011-09-03T16:42:59.793Z

http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/09/01/report-on-the-fourth-conference-on-artificial-general-intelligence/

By: Ben Goertzel

Published: September 1, 2011

The Fourth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-11) was held on Google’s campus in Mountain View (Silicon Valley), California, in the first week of August 2011. This was the largest AGI conference yet, with more than 200 people attending, and it had a markedly different tone from the prior conferences in the series. A number of participants noted that there was less of an out-of-the-mainstream, wild-eyed maverick feel to the proceedings, and more of a sense of “business as usual” or “normal science” – a sense in the air that AGI is obviously an important, feasible R&D area to be working on, albeit a bit “cutting-edge” compared to the majority of (more narrowly specialized) AI R&D.

I think this difference in tone was due partly to the Google and Bay Area location, and partly to the fact that the conference was held in close spatiotemporal proximity to two larger and older AI-related conferences, AAAI-11 and IJCNN-11. IJCNN was just before AGI in San Jose, and AAAI was just after AGI in San Francisco — so a number of academic AI researchers who usually go to the larger conferences but not AGI, decided to try out AGI as well this year. Complementing this academic group, there was also a strong turnout from the Silicon Valley software industry, and the Bay Area futurist and transhumanist community.

The first day of the conference was occupied by tutorials on the LIDA and OpenCog systems, and the Church probabilistic logic programming language. The second day comprised two workshops: one on self-programming in AGI systems, and the next the traditional “Future of AGI” workshop, which was particularly lively due to the prominence of future-of-technology issues in Bay Area culture (the conference site was not so far off from the headquarters of a variety of futurist organizations like Singularity University, the Singularity Institute for AI, the Foresight Institute, etc.). Most of the talks from the Future of AGI workshop have corresponding papers or presentations on the conference’s schedule page — with themes such as

Steve Omohundro, Design Principles for a Safe

...
Gender differences in spatial reasoning appear to be nurture
by David_Gerard — 2011-09-03T11:56:05.166Z

"In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society."

It is presently a commonplace of Western culture that women are worse at spatial reasoning than men, and this is commonly attributed to intrinsic biological differences.

It turns out this may be highly questionable. A study in PNAS studied two nearby tribes in northeast India, one with a strongly patriarchal organisation, one with a strongly matriarchal organisation. Both share the same agrarian diet and lifestyle and DNA tests indicate they are closely related.

In the patriarchal society, women did noticeably worse on spatial reasoning. In the matriarchal society, women and men did about the same.

The authors carefully do not overstate their results, claiming only that they demonstrated that culture influences spatial performance "in the task that we study." However, this promisingly suggests quite a bit of room for improvement of measurable aspects of intelligence may be feasible with proper attention to culture and nurture.

What measurable aspects of intelligence do you attribute to genetic causes? Can you test it this well? How would you fix it and help people be all they can be?

News coverage: ArsTechnica.
Impact of India-Pakistan nuclear war on x-risk?
by multifoliaterose — 2011-09-03T05:14:27.111Z

Last month I was involved in a conversation thread about what the impact of a hypothetical nuclear war would be on existential risk.

There are many potential nuclear war scenarios which would have varying impacts on existential risk. It's difficult to know where to start to gain an understanding of the long-term of nuclear proliferation.

For concreteness, consider the case of an India-Pakistan nuclear war.

According to Local Nuclear War, Global Suffering by Robock and Toon,

India and Pakistan, long at odds, have more than 50 nuclear warheads apiece; if each country dropped that many bombs on cities and industrial areas, the smoke from fires would stunt agriculture worldwide for 10 years.

[...]

1 billion people worldwide with marginal food supplies today could die of starvation because of ensuing agricultural collapse

Note that this would presumably cause some degree of chaos in the developed world.

I have not yet investigated the credibility of the papers' claims. However,

Suppose that an all-out nuclear war between India and Pakistan were to occur and were to result in climate change killing 1 billion people. Then would the probability of a positive singularity increase or decrease and if so why?

This question seems very difficult to answer; maybe altogether too difficult for humans to answer. I welcome responses raising relevant considerations even in absence of a good way to compare the relevant considerations. Please read the linked conversation thread before commentating.
A prize to become artist in residence at CERN
by EvelynM — 2011-09-03T02:56:14.354Z

http://www.aec.at/collide/

Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN is the new international competition for digital artists to win a residency at CERN the world's largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva. It is the first prize to be announced as part of the new Collide@CERN artists residency programme initiated by the laboratory.

The residency is in two parts - with an initial two months at CERN, where the winning artist will have a specially dedicated science mentor from the world famous science lab to inspire him/her and his/her work. The second part will be a month with the Futurelab team and mentor at Ars Electronica Linz with whom the winner will develop and make new work inspired by the CERN residency.
Can’t buy me instant gratification
by KatjaGrace — 2011-09-03T02:31:54.000Z

You can get a lot of things by doing something to earn money, then using the money to buy the thing. One large exception to this is things in the very near future, since the process of earning money and spending it takes some time. So one big reason for being disinterested in earning money would be that you have a very short term focus.

The usual reason people give for being disinterested in money is nearly the opposite: that they are inordinately interested in big, important, deep things and thus have no need for such a petty mundane thing as money. Money is presumably useful in seeking such big goals, since it can at least buy you out of other mundane concerns. But let’s suppose these people are right, and money is less important than usual in this realm, for instance because there are other inputs to deep important goals, that money can’t buy.

Then we should expect people who are especially disinterested in money to be well represented at both the ‘very near goals’ and the ‘very far goals’ ends of the spectrum. My observations of humans suggest at least as many would be at the near end as at the far end. However almost everyone who isn’t very motivated to earn money seems to cite being at the far end as reason for disinterest. Should we believe them?
[SEQ RERUN] Conjunction Controversy (Or, How They Nail It Down)
by MinibearRex — 2011-09-03T00:39:25.717Z

Today's post, Conjunction Controversy (Or, How They Nail It Down) was originally published on 20 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When it seems like an experiment that's been cited does not provide enough support for the interpretation given, remember that Scientists are generally pretty smart. Especially if the experiment was done a long time ago, or it is described as "classic" or "famous". In that case, you should consider the possibility that there is more evidence that you haven't seen. Instead of saying "This experiment could also be interpreted in this way", ask "How did they distinguish this interpretation from ________________?"

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 Conjunction Fallacy, 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.
What are good topics for literature review prizes?
by jsalvatier — 2011-09-02T23:48:09.248Z

The last prize, for the best literature review of spaced repetition, was moderately successful, inspiring a pretty good review of the academic literature on spaced repetition. I am interested in experimenting more with prizes, but I would like to get input other people's input: what are other good topics for future prizes?

The topic should be:

Well defined.

Not too big. Something someone could understand pretty well in two weeks.

Academically researched.

Relevant to being effective.

I am also open to projects besides literature reviews but literature reviews seem the most attractive to me right now.
[Link] The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas
by XiXiDu — 2011-09-02T19:29:31.883Z

Researchers have recently argued that utilitarianism is the appropriate framework by which to evaluate moral judgment, and that individuals who endorse non-utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas (involving active vs. passive harm) are committing an error. We report a study in which participants responded to a battery of personality assessments and a set of dilemmas that pit utilitarian and non-utilitarian options against each other. Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness. These results question the widely-used methods by which lay moral judgments are evaluated, as these approaches lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors also possess a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral.

Bartels, D., & Pizarro, D. (2011). The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas Cognition, 121 (1), 154-161 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.05.010

via charbonniers.org/2011/09/01/is-and-ought/
[Link] The Typical Mind Fallacy, Illustrated
by pjeby — 2011-09-02T17:22:44.526Z

If you've ever wanted a quick way to explain the Typical Mind Fallacy, this cartoon by Winston Rowntree will do the trick nicely.

(Panel 3 seems of particular relevance to LessWrongians, and the last two panels also remind me of Hufflepuff/Slytherin themes in HP:MOR.)

Enjoy!