trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[LINK] How Long Does Habit Formation Take?
by Antisuji — 2014-01-04T01:33:40.658Z

Related: Common failure modes in habit formation

I ran across this bit of pop-sci (a review of Jeremy Dean's Making Habits, Breaking Habits), which claims that habits typically take around 66 days to form, not the 21 days that self-help articles tend to cite. The somewhat surprising thing to me, on reflection, was how readily I'd taken the 21-day statistic as fact. From the article:

When he became interested in how long it takes for us to form or change a habit, psychologist Jeremy Dean found himself bombarded with the same magic answer from popular psychology websites and advice columns: 21 days. And yet, strangely — or perhaps predictably, for the internet — this one-size-fits-all number was being applied to everything from starting a running regimen to keeping a diary, but wasn’t backed by any concrete data.

The original article is here. Abstract:

To investigate the process of habit formation in everyday life, 96 volunteers chose an eating, drinking or activity behaviour to carry out daily in the same context (for example ‘after breakfast’) for 12 weeks. They completed the self-report habit index (SRHI) each day and recorded whether they carried out the behaviour. The majority (82) of participants provided sufficient data for analysis, and increases in automaticity (calculated with a sub-set of SRHI items) were examined over the study period. Nonlinear regressions fitted an asymptotic curve to each individual's automaticity scores over the 84 days. The model fitted for 62 individuals, of whom 39 showed a good fit. Performing the behaviour more consistently was associated with better model fit. The time it took participants to reach 95% of their asymptote of automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days; indicating considerable variation in how long it takes people to reach their limit of automaticity and highlighting that it can take a very long time. Missing one opportunity to perform the behaviour did not materially affect the habit formation process. With repetition of a behaviour in a consistent context, automaticity increases following an asymptotic curve which can be modelled at the individual level. [My emphasis.]

My comments:

There is an observed “automaticity plateau.” Can individuals influence the height of the plateau through interventions such as rewards? Would this change the exponential rate constant?

...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-01-03T22:19:48.390Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on December 27th. The following week's summary is here.

Other irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Montreal - How to Actually Change your Mind: 07 January 2014 07:00PM

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

Austin, TX: 28 December 2019 01:30PM
Berlin: 01 January 2019 01:30PM
Brussels monthly meetup: [topic TBD]: 11 January 2014 01:00PM
Melbourne Practical Rationality: 03 January 2014 06:30PM
Vienna: 18 January 2014 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Brussels, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portland, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver.

Whether or not there's currently a meetup in your area, you can sign up to be notified automatically of any future meetups. And if you're not interested in notifications you can still enter your ...
[link] How do good ideas spread?
by Kaj_Sotala — 2014-01-03T20:19:55.135Z

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/07/29/130729fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all

Seems related to many topics discussed on LW, such as the low adoption of cryonics and the difficulty of getting researchers convinced of AI risk.

Four weeks later, on November 18th, Bigelow published his report on the discovery of “insensibility produced by inhalation” in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. Morton would not divulge the composition of the gas, which he called Letheon, because he had applied for a patent. But Bigelow reported that he smelled ether in it (ether was used as an ingredient in certain medical preparations), and that seems to have been enough. The idea spread like a contagion, travelling through letters, meetings, and periodicals. By mid-December, surgeons were administering ether to patients in Paris and London. By February, anesthesia had been used in almost all the capitals of Europe, and by June in most regions of the world. [...] Within seven years, virtually every hospital in America and Britain had adopted the new discovery. [...]
Sepsis—infection—was the other great scourge of surgery. It was the single biggest killer of surgical patients, claiming as many as half of those who underwent major operations, such as a repair of an open fracture or the amputation of a limb. [...]
During the next few years, he perfected ways to use carbolic acid for cleansing hands and wounds and destroying any germs that might enter the operating field. The result was strikingly lower rates of sepsis and death. You would have thought that, when he published his observations in a groundbreaking series of reports in The Lancet, in 1867, his antiseptic method would have spread as rapidly as anesthesia.
Far from it. The surgeon J. M. T. Finney recalled that, when he was a trainee at Massachusetts General Hospital two decades later, hand washing was still perfunctory. Surgeons soaked their instruments in carbolic acid, but they continued to operate in black frock coats stiffened with the blood and viscera of previous operations—the badge of a busy practice. Instead of using fresh gauze as sponges, they reused sea sponges without sterilizing them. It was a generation before Lister’s recommendations became routine and the next steps were taken toward the modern standard of asepsis—that is, entirely excluding germs from the sur

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Meetup : I moved to Portland! I want to meet you!
by daenerys — 2014-01-03T19:53:18.675Z

Discussion article for the meetup : I moved to Portland! I want to meet you!

WHEN:
11 January 2014 11:50:35AM (-0800)

WHERE:
Portland, OR

The title is pretty self explanatory, I think. We're organizing a meetup on the Portland email list. Let us know if you want to come!

The location isn't set in stone yet, but will most likely be a coffee shop. Hopefully in NE. Possibly Case Study Coffee.

Hope to meet you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : I moved to Portland! I want to meet you!
Measuring lethality in reduced expected heartbeats
by chaosmage — 2014-01-03T14:14:40.145Z

Some of us here are already familiar with Micromorts - a unit that stands for a 1 in a million chance of dying. The wikipedia page lists a number of sample values. One obvious example is that smoking 1.4 cigarettes is one micromort. This is a good tool for comparing the relative dangerousness of activites - for example, if you fly in a jet in the US, your micromorts per mile from increased background radiation are twice the micromorts per mile from terrorism. And you can compare activities to baseline average risks of death, given as about 39 per day (averaged over all age groups and sexes).

However, people suck at imagining small probabilities. So a different unit, which we used in a group exercise at the Secular Solstice in Leipzig, is the number of expected future heartbeats. While Micromorts are a step away from empirical reality, expected heartbeats are another step in the same direction. But the concept got good feedback, it makes people think about life in a new way, so I thought I'd just share it here.

The average human heart gets to beat about 2.5 billion times - about 100000 times per day. So a micromort is around 2500 expected heartbeats. So you can translate, say, smoking a cigarette into a cost of about 1800 expected heartbeats (or about 80 seconds of life expectancy). And maybe that'll help people optimize their behavior in ways that Micromorts, due to their microprobability nature, aren't very good at doing especially for those who aren't very habitual Bayesians.
[Link] Changelings, Infanticide and Nortwest European Guilt Culture
by  — 2014-01-03T09:24:26.686Z

Related: The Psychological Diversity of Mankind, An African Folktale, many of the more interesting infanticide & abortion debates on this site

A fascinating post that however might need some background reading, most relevant material is linked in the article itself. I encourage reading up on the material.

Link to article.

Stories about changelings replacing babies and the recommended course of action being basically to expose the child is not a human universal, they are found only in European cultures. These rely more heavily on guilt and less on shame to regulate behavior than most other human societies. This may not be a coincidence. The stories look like they work as a ready made rationalization to reduce guilt from infanticide. Common problems often acquire common solutions like this.

Guilt and Shame Cultures

On his blog Evo and Proud, anthropologist Peter Frost recently wrote a highly interesting two-part article entitled The origins of Northwestern European guilt culture. In guilt cultures, social control is regulated more by guilt than by shame, as is the case in shame cultures that exist in most parts of the world. A crucial difference between these types of cultures is that while shame cultures require other people to shame the wrongdoer, guilt cultures do not. Instead, he or she will shame themselves by feeling guilty. This, according to Frost, is also linked to a stronger sense of empathy with others, not just with relatives but people in general.

The advantages of guilt over shame are many. People can go about their business without being supervised by others, and they can cooperate with people they’re not related to as long as both parties have the same view on right and wrong. And with this personal freedom come individualism, innovation and other forms of creativity as well as ideas of universal human rights etc. You could argue, as Frost appears to, that the increased sense of guilt in Northwestern Europe (NWE) is a major factor behind Western Civilization. While this sounds fairly plausible (in my ears at least), a fundamental question is whether there really is more guilt in the NWE sphere than elsewhere.

How to Measure Guilt

The idea of NWE countries as guilt cultures may seem obvious to some and dubious to others. The Protestant tradition is surely one indication of this, but some anthropologists argue that other cultures have o

...
Handshakes, Hi, and What's New: What's Going On With Small Talk?
by Benquo — 2014-01-02T22:08:08.933Z

This is an attempt to explicitly model what's going on in some small talk conversations. My hope is that at least one of these things will happen:

There is a substantial flaw or missing element to my model that someone will point out.

Many readers, who are bad at small talk because they don't see the point, will get better at it as a result of acquiring understanding.

Handshakes

I had some recent conversational failures online, that went roughly like this:

“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“How are you?”
The end.

At first I got upset at the implicit rudeness of my conversation partner walking away and ignoring the question. But then I decided to get curious instead and posted a sample exchange (names omitted) on Facebook with a request for feedback. Unsurprisingly I learned more this way.

Some kind friends helped me troubleshoot the exchange, and in the process of figuring out how online conversation differs from in-person conversation, I realized what these things do in live conversation. They act as a kind of implicit communication protocol by which two parties negotiate how much interaction they’re willing to have.

Consider this live conversation:

“Hi.”
“Hi.”
The end.

No mystery here. Two people acknowledged one another’s physical presence, and then the interaction ended. This is bare-bones maintenance of your status as persons who can relate to one another socially. There is no intimacy, but at least there is acknowledgement of someone else’s existence. A day with “Hi” alone is less lonely than a day without it.

“Hi.”
“Hi, how’s it going?”
“Can’t complain. And you?”
“Life.”

This exchange establishes the parties as mutually sympathetic – the kind of people who would ask about each other’s emotional state – but still doesn’t get to real intimacy. It is basically just a drawn-out version of the example with just “Hi”. The exact character of the third and fourth line don’t matter much, as there is no real content. For this reason, it isn’t particularly rude to leave the question totally unanswered if you’re already rounding a corner – but if you’re in each other’s company for a longer period of time, you’re supposed to give at least a pro forma...
Rational Resolutions: Special CFAR Mini-workshop SATURDAY
by LoganStrohl — 2014-01-02T20:32:26.931Z

This Saturday, Michael Valentine and I are taking the most fun and potent habit-formation material from CFAR's previous four-day workshops, and focusing that material towards making rational New Year's resolutions - and then actually keeping them.

If you're in the Bay Area and interested in resolutions, or in seeing CFAR's habit-formation material distilled, this workshop is for you.

We'll meet at the CFAR office in Berkeley from 11AM to 5PM PST on Saturday, Jan. 4th. You can register here - as of this posting, there are still several spots left!

Normally an event like this would cost about $400, but we want to make this workshop more accessible. So, this time the event costs $195. And we’re confident enough in the value of this material that we offer a no-hassle full money-back guarantee: If, after attending this workshop, you decide you didn’t get your money’s worth, ask to have it returned and it’s yours. (We do recommend you try the techniques out for a week or two first. Some of them are likely to surprise you!)
Meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup
by rocurley — 2014-01-02T18:00:49.403Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup

WHEN:
05 January 2014 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We'll be meeting to hang out and play games.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup
TED Prize Nomination
by Eneasz — 2014-01-02T16:47:48.235Z

I started the process of a TED Prize Nomination:

Nominate an individual — or yourself — to envision and execute a high-impact project that can spur global change. Our TED Prize winner will have an ambitious wish — and the vision, pragmatism and leadership to turn it into reality. Every self-nomination will include a proposal for a world-changing and achievable wish.

Fairly obvious who I'm nominating.

But then came across a few things that made me suspect I'm not the best person to do this. Such as:

* We weigh each single nomination as heavily as multiple nominations and we strongly discourage multiple nominations.

* The heart of the TED Prize is the wish. Though it's small in size, it is the most important element of your nomination. It's worth investing your time refining. At its most basic, a wish = who + what + how = a better world. In other words, who are you going to engage on what issue and in what way for what kind of improvement?

* Imagine your nominee is on the stage at the TED Conference announcing their wish and inviting the wider community--everyone from corporate and nonprofit leaders to TED fellows doing grassroots work in developing countries--to get involved. In a few sentences, what is your nominee's ask?

I have absolutely no idea what Eliezer would write as his wish, and I don't think I'm even remotely qualified to take a stab at it. Would someone who knows Eliezer better, or perhaps Eliezer himself, be willing to take this on?

To reduce the amount of time needed to complete the application, here are two outside-source articles about Eliezer that I googled up while I was doing this (they ask for links to such articles in Step 3)
http://www.cnbc.com/id/48538963

http://betabeat.com/2012/07/singularity-institute-less-wrong-peter-thiel-eliezer-yudkowsky-ray-kurzweil-harry-potter-methods-of-rationality/?show=all
Group Rationality Diary, January 1-15
by therufs — 2014-01-02T15:18:59.762Z

Happy new year to those who observe the Gregorian calendar! This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for January 1-15.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Immediate past diary: December 16-31

Rationality diaries archive
Two Dark Side Statistics Papers
by Scott Alexander — 2014-01-02T05:51:30.000Z

I.

First we have False Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility In Data Collection And Analysis Allows Presenting Anything As Significant (h/t Jonas Vollmer).

The message is hardly unique: there are lots of tricks unscrupulous or desperate scientists can use to artificially nudge results to the 5% significance level. The clarity of the presentation is unique. They start by discussing four particular tricks:

1. Measure multiple dependent variables, then report the ones that are significant. For example, if you’re measuring whether treatment for a certain psychiatric disorder improves life outcomes, you can collect five different measures of life outcomes – let’s say educational attainment, income, self-reported happiness, whether or not ever arrested, whether or not in romantic relationship – and have a 25%-ish probability one of them will come out at significance by chance. Then you can publish a paper called “Psychiatric Treatment Found To Increase Educational Attainment” without ever mentioning the four negative tests.

2. Artificially choose when to end your experiment. Suppose you want to prove that yelling at a coin makes it more likely to come up tails. You yell at a coin and flip it. It comes up heads. You try again. It comes up tails. You try again. It comes up heads. You try again. It comes up tails. You try again. It comes up tails again. You try again. It comes up tails again. You note that it came up tails four out of six times – a 66% success rate compared to expected 50% – and declare victory. Of course, this result wouldn’t be significant, and it seems as if this should be a general rule – that almost by the definition of significance, you shouldn’t be able to obtain it just be stopping the experiment at the right point. But the authors of the study perform several simulations to prove that this trick is more successful than you’d think:

3. Control for “confounders” (in practice, most often gender). I sometimes call this the “Elderly Hispanic Woman Effect” after drug trials that find that their drug doesn’t have significant effects in the general population, but it does significantly help elderly Hispanic women. The trick is you split the population into twenty subgroups (young white men, young white women, elderly white men, elderly white wome...
Tulpa References/Discussion
by Vulture — 2014-01-02T01:34:11.518Z

There have been a number of discussions here on LessWrong about "tulpas", but it's been scattered about with no central thread for the discussion. So I thought I would put this up here, along with a centralized list of reliable information sources, just so we all stay on the same page.

Tulpas are deliberately created "imaginary friends" which in many ways resemble separate, autonomous minds. Often, the creation of a tulpa is coupled with deliberately induced visual, auditory, and/or tactile hallucinations of the being.

Previous discussions here on LessWrong: 1 2 3

Questions that have been raised:

1. How do tulpas work?

2. Are tulpas safe, from a mental health perspective?

3. Are tulpas conscious? (may be a hard question)

4. More generally, is making a tulpa a good idea? What are they useful for?

Pertinent Links and Publications

(I will try to keep this updated if/when further sources are found)

In this article1, the psychological anthropologist Tanya M. Luhrmann connects tulpas to the "voice of God" experienced by devout evangelicals - a phenomenon more thoroughly discussed in her book When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. Luhrmann has also succeeded2 in inducing tulpa-like visions of Leland Stanford, jr. in experimental subjects.

This paper3 investigates the phenomenon of authors who experience their characters as "real", which may be tulpas by yet another name.

There is an active subreddit of people who have or are developing tulpas, with an FAQ, links to creation guides, etc.

tulpa.info is a valuable resource, particularly the forum. There appears to be a whole "research" section for amateur experiments and surveys.

This particular experiment suggests that the idea of using tulpas to solve problems faster is a no-go.

Also, one person helpfully hooked themselves up to an EEG and then performed various mental activities related to their tulpa.

Another possibly related phenomenon is the way that actors immerse themselves in their characters. See especially the section on "Masks" in Keith Johnstone's book Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (related quotations and video)4.

This blogger has some interesting ideas about the neurological basis of tulpas, based on Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a book whose scientific validity is not clear to me.

It is not hard to fi

...