trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Fixed-Length Selective Iterative Prisoner's Dilemma Mechanics
by Andreas_Giger — 2011-09-13T03:24:59.358Z

Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.

I recently stumbled upon the selective IPD tournament results, and while I was very interested in the general concept I was also very disappointed by the strategies that were submitted, especially considering this is Less Wrong we are talking about.

This post is designed to help people who are interested in IPD problems to come up with possibly successful strategies; hopefully the same effect another couple of tournaments would have, just in a shorter period of time. All of the following is written with the tournament rules in mind, with scores depicted as deviations of matches with full mutual cooperation since the actual number of turns per match is arbitrary anyway. Also, the hypothetical objective is not to have the highest population after a certain number of generations, but to achieve lasting superiority eventually while treating near-clones that behave exactly the same in the late game as one single strategy. The results of tournaments with a very limited number of generations depend way too much on the pool of submitted strategies to be of general interest, in my opinion.

This post starts out with practical observations and some universal rules and gets increasingly theoretical. Here is a short glossary of terms I presume known:

Feeding on a strategy: Scoring higher against that strategy in a match than against itself.
Outperforming a strategy: Outscoring that strategy over the course of matches against all other strategies in the pool according to populations, including each other and themselves (i.e. improving the population ratio).
Dominance: More than 50% of the total population.
Dormant strategy: A strategy that will achieve dominance at some point but hasn't done so yet.
Extinction: Asymptotical approach to 0% percent of the total population, or actual extinction in case of integer truncation.
TFT-nD: A TFT strategy that defects from the nth last turn on, so TFT-0D is vanilla TFT.

Disclaimer: There is only very basic mathematics and logical reasoning in this post, so if anything seems confusing, it must be me using the wrong words (I'm not a native speaker). Please point out any of these cases so that I can correct them.

Survival And Dominance

Let us assume a scenario with only two strategies, one of them dominating which we call X, the other one A.

Sur...
The Cognitive Science of Rationality
by lukeprog — 2011-09-12T20:48:22.898Z

(The post is written for beginners. Send the link to your friends! Regular Less Wrong readers may want to jump to the Stanovich material.)

The last 40 years of cognitive science have taught us a great deal about how our brains produce errors in thinking and decision making, and about how we can overcome those errors. These methods can help us form more accurate beliefs and make better decisions.

Long before the first Concorde supersonic jet was completed, the British and French governments developing it realized it would lose money. But they continued to develop the jet when they should have cut their losses, because they felt they had "invested too much to quit"1 (sunk cost fallacy2).

John tested positive for an extremely rare but fatal disease, using a test that is accurate 80% of the time. John didn't have health insurance, and the only available treatment — which his doctor recommended — was very expensive. John agreed to the treatment, his retirement fund was drained to nothing, and during the treatment it was discovered that John did not have the rare disease after all. Later, a statistician explained to John that because the disease is so rare, the chance that he had had the disease even given the positive test was less than one in a million. But neither John's brain nor his doctor's brain had computed this correctly (base rate neglect).

Mary gave money to a charity to save lives in the developing world. Unfortunately, she gave to a charity that saves lives at a cost of $100,000 per life instead of one that saves lives at 1/10th that cost, because the less efficient charity used a vivid picture of a starving child on its advertising, and our brains respond more to single, identifiable victims than to large numbers of victims (identifiability effect3 and scope insensitivity4).

During the last four decades, cognitive scientists have discovered a long list of common thinking errors like these. These errors lead us to false beliefs and poor decisions.

How are these errors produced, and how can we overcome them? Vague advice like "be skeptical" and "think critically" may not help much. Luckily, cognitive scientists know a great deal about the mathematics of correct thinking, how thinking errors are produced, and how we can overcome these errors in order to live more fulfilling lives.

Rationality

First, what ...
My Greatest Achievement
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2011-09-12T19:26:38.833Z

[warning: this is another gooey self-disclosure in the spirit of Alicorn and lukeprog’s recent posts, except more so.]

According to my submissions summary, my first top-level post dates back to February 18th, 2011. (I don’t know exactly when I started commenting, but I don’t feel like clicking through dozens of pages of old comments to find out.) By then, it had already been a month since I embarked on the most deliberate and probably the most difficult act of self-modification that I’ve ever attempted, and definitely the one I’m proudest of. At this point, I think I can say confidently that I’ve fixed one of the most irrational facets of my behaviour. A few people here know quite a bit about this, namely molybdenumblue.

[Aside: some people might find this article very personal. I’ve never had a strong privacy instinct, and since in this case it’s all my personal information*, and I talk openly about most of it with my friends and family, I have no qualms about publishing it. If it makes you uncomfortable, please feel free to stop reading.]

My New Year’s resolution for 2011, which I clearly remember making in my parents’ kitchen, was to experiment more with relationships. I had been in 2 relationships by my 19th birthday: one at age 14 with a much older recent immigrant to Canada who went to my high school, and one at age 17 with a boy who I worshipped when I was 12. Neither of them led anywhere interesting, in either an emotional or a physical sense. After breaking up with my second boyfriend, I was about ready to give up and start calling myself asexual. But since I had very little data to go on, an experiment seemed like a good idea.

I chose my experimental subject carefully: Billy, a boy I met through competitive lifeguarding, who was my age and seemed to share some of my values; he was in good shape, anyway; and whom I found moderately attractive. (I’ve been attracted to girls in the past, but that seemed like a more complicated experiment to set up.) I found him interesting without being too intimidating.

I had had some success in the past with getting boys&

...
Signup to wiki broken ?
by kilobug — 2011-09-12T18:52:18.995Z

Hi,

(Sorry if the discussion if not the best place to post that, but didn't find any better place).

It seems the signup to the http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/ is broken :

Account creation from this IP address (10.254.182.117) has been blocked by Gwern.

10.254 ? Seems that the blocking was made to an internal IP (load-balancer ? proxy-cache ?) so blocking everyone... can anyone fix it ?

Thanks !
9/11 as mindkiller
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-09-12T17:44:44.361Z

Noah Millman wrote:

In retrospect, what suffered the most lasting damage from the terrorist attacks of ten years ago was my belief in my own rationality. I believed that I was thinking things through seriously, and coming to difficult but true conclusions about what had happened, what would happen, what must happen. Here is part of what I wrote, to friends and family, several days later:

Our President has made it clear: we are at war. I do not anticipate that this will be a short or an easy war. Our enemy has operations in dozens of countries, including this one. He is supported, out of enthusiasm or fear, by many governments among our purported friends as well as among our enemies. He has shown his cunning, his ruthlessness, and most of all his patience, in his successful plot to kill thousands of innocents and bring down the symbols of our civilization. And in striking at him, as we must, we will bring down others who will in turn seek their own vengeance upon us.

There is not a single factual assertion in that paragraph that I had any reason to believe I could substantiate. I did not know anything about the enemy. I had no idea whether or not there were “operations” in dozens of countries – I don’t even know what I meant by “operations.” I know what I was referring to with the business about being “supported” by friends and enemies, but “support” is a deliberately fuzzy word; I wouldn’t have used it if I was trying to make a concrete assertion with clear implications. The purpose of that assertion, like everything else, was to build up my first assertion. We were at war. And it wouldn’t be short or easy. Because that conclusion, though grim, was one that imparted meaning to the murder of 3,000 people. I thought I was being serious – examining the facts, calculating the likely negative consequences of necessary action, preparing myself for the unfortunate necessities of life. But I wasn’t doing anything of the kind. I was engaged in a search for meaning in which reason was purely instrumental.

Link (which includes additional good retrospectives) thanks to Ampersand.

This article may have more political content than is suitable for LW-- if you'd rather discuss it elsewhere, I've linked it at my blog. I've posted about it here because it's an excellent example of updating and...
Meetup : Northern Virginia: Nonviolent Communication
by atucker — 2011-09-12T17:17:09.717Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Northern Virginia: Nonviolent Communication

WHEN:
15 September 2011 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Ballston Commons Mall

NVC is still the most popular meetup topic, and there were attendance issues last week for reasons that seem uncorrelated with the topic. So we're going to try again, and fix those issues.

Discussion article for the meetup : Northern Virginia: Nonviolent Communication
Meetup : University of Maryland
by atucker — 2011-09-12T16:42:14.267Z

Discussion article for the meetup : University of Maryland

WHEN:
16 September 2011 06:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
University of Maryland, University of Maryland - College Park, STAMP

There are a few LessWrong readers at UMD. Let's meet up! We're meeting in Terrapin Room B, in the Student Involvement Suite, kindly reserved by btrettel. You can find the Student Involvement Suite on this map: http://www.stamp.umd.edu/visitor_information/stamp_map.html We have the room from 6 - 8 PM. This meeting will probably have an outsize impact on future meetup topics, please come with opinions.

Discussion article for the meetup : University of Maryland
[Link] Dilbert author tries to try
by MileyCyrus — 2011-09-12T16:24:06.972Z

Scott Adams, author of Dilbert, believes that trying to try is more effective than trying:

...my system is that I attempt to exercise five times a week around lunchtime. And I always allow myself the option of driving to the gym then turning around and going home. What I've discovered is that the routine of preparing to exercise usually inspires me to go through with it even if I didn't start out in the mood.[...]
If I had a goal instead of a system, I would have failed [when I didn't exercise]. And I would have felt like a loser. That can't be good for motivation. That failure might be enough to prevent me from going to the gym the next time I don't feel 100%, just to avoid the risk of another failure.

Regular Less Wrong readers will remember Eliezer Yudkowsky's warning about trying to try:

But when we deal with humans, being satisfied with having a plan is not at all like being satisfied with success. The part where the plan has to maximize your probability of succeeding, gets lost along the way. It's far easier to convince ourselves that we are "maximizing our probability of succeeding", than it is to convince ourselves that we will succeed.

Almost any effort will serve to convince us that we have "tried our hardest", if trying our hardest is all we are trying to do.

Adams says the danger of trying is that you will fail in trying, which will bruise your self-esteem and cripple your motivation to try again. Yudkowsky says the danger of trying to try is that you will succeed in trying to try, leaving you too easily satisfied and unmotivated to actually do the thing you were trying to try to do.

Have any readers had success in trying to try?
What does it take?
by Hyena — 2011-09-12T13:59:47.350Z

You unexpectedly find yourself sitting in a windowless room across from a gray-haired gentleman. You didn't wake up there; you were walking down the street and cut to camera two, a white windowless room with a table and two chairs. After a moment, the gentleman speaks:

"You are dead, killed instantly by a small meteorite. Incidentally," he smirks, "you have lost Pascal's Wager. You may 'cross-over' once you can accept that you are dead. I am here to help in that endeavor and can present any evidence you desire."

You, being a stone-cold rationalist, will only reach this conclusion on the basis of solid evidence. He, being extremely ethical, will neither present false evidence nor attempt to undermine your rationality. What can he do to convince you that you have died?

I suspect there is nothing he could say or do to convince you of this. Rather, for any sufficiently "final" definition of physical death, there's no way he can demonstrate that you have somehow come out the other side. That's my wager: there is no sound way to convince someone, even while in the afterlife, that there is such a thing; thus, we should never believe in an afterlife knowing that we could never accept it even if actually there.

Am I wrong? Has this been proposed before? Is there any thing which, while actually true, could never be demonstrated in this manner?

I think that, if correct, this may point to a special class of untruths. Sort of... Bayesian contradictions, things which could never be sufficiently demonstrated.

Naturally, lukeprog's earlier post has me thinking on religious lines.
Ask LW: What are some well-designed institutions?
by Will_Newsome — 2011-09-12T05:48:53.992Z

I've been reading "Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution" and it's awesome. It's inspired me to ask LW:

Can you give me an example of a good institution? Why is it a good institution? What caused it to become a good institution?

It can be an institution at any level of organization. If you'd like to talk about why your brain is a good institution I'd like to hear about that. Or the country of Burma. Or the free market. Or the Catholic memeplex. Whatever you wish.
Informal job survey
by  — 2011-09-12T05:16:47.152Z

I've recently been thinking about future job prospects and ways that I might alter my preferences to increase the likelihood that I'll be happy with my future career. I have read some of the LessWrong resources about this issue, but they don't seem to address my particular concerns. I think there is a high relative importance for selecting a career with a high capacity for making me happy. It will consume at least 8 prime daylight hours of my work days and in many cases also some of the weekend. In all likelihood I will also be forced to sit in front of a computer for extended periods of time. The tasks I am assigned may have nothing to do with the things that I happen to find intellectually interesting or of ethical importance. And the work will likely zap me of most of the energy that I could use to pursue hobbies or other more "intrinsically worthwhile endeavors" (intrinsic to my personal preference ordering). Given that I believe these factors will largely determine whether I feel happy in many future situations and also whether I feel generically happy about the content of my life as a whole, I think it is worthwhile to seek advice from other rationalists in how to choose an appropriate career goal and take steps to pursue it.
What I have found on LessWrong, however, is that ambiguous and open-ended pleas for advice generally steer off course, even if the tangential issues are very interesting and insightful. Rather than query everyone for open advice about preference hacking, vague goal achievement, and wisdom for properly assigning value to some of the factors I have listed above, I propose a simpler informal job survey.
If you are interested, please briefly list the job you have or the job of someone you know very well (well enough that you feel you know relevant details about the job, details that may be hard to gather in less than 1 hour of internet searching). You don't have to reveal the location or name of the employer or anything like that, just the type of job. Optionally, please also include a sentence stating whether you (or your friend, etc.) seem to enjoy the job and why. For example, my entry would be like this:
I am a graduate student studying applied mathematics. I enjoy the access to educational resources and the flexible schedule that my current job offers, but I think my personal displeasure with computer programming and my perception t...
Meetup : BALTIMORE: Anyone wanna meet up?
by Owen_Richardson — 2011-09-12T02:57:36.246Z

Discussion article for the meetup : BALTIMORE: Anyone wanna meet up?

WHEN: 17 September 2011 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: "One World Cafe", 100 West University Parkway, Baltimore, MD

If you're interested but have problems with the location (first cafe google maps said was near my homestay) or time (pretty much randomly selected 'reasonable' seeming hour), please just tell me!

I'm from Canada, by the way, interning as an elementary teacher at a Direct Instruction school here in Baltimore while studying Theory of Instruction. The first topic I'm likely to discuss is educational science, of course, but I'm open to anything. =]

Oh, and please do leave a comment if you're actually in Baltimore!

Discussion article for the meetup : BALTIMORE: Anyone wanna meet up?
[SEQ RERUN] What Evidence Filtered Evidence?
by MinibearRex — 2011-09-12T02:54:06.845Z

Today's post, What Evidence Filtered Evidence? was originally published on 29 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Someone tells you only the evidence that they want you to hear. Are you helpless? Forced to update your beliefs until you reach their position? No, you also have to take into account what they could have told you but didn't.

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 The Bottom Line, 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.
Heaven+Earth+Joe Davis Documentary
by EvelynM — 2011-09-11T23:08:17.214Z

"The things that are the most sensible turn out to be most absurd and the things that are the most absurd turn out to make most sense." - Joe Davis

I haven't seen this, but I'd like to:

http://joedavisthemovie.com/

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2011/09/heaven-earth-joe-davis.php

Joe Davis is an artist working with scientific themes.
[Help]: Social cost of cryonics? 
by  — 2011-09-11T19:26:20.290Z

Over the past few months I've been doing a lot of reading about cryonics, and though I agree with the arguments of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson on the issue, I still feel uncomfortable about actually signing up. Upon reflection, my true rejection is my fear of the social cost of cryonics, i.e. being perceived as weird and completely incomprehensible by everyone around me. I've read the "Hostile Wife Phenomenon" article on Depressed Metabolism, the New York Times Magazine article on Robin Hanson's personal situation (as well as Robin's reply), and scores of comments on LessWrong, and it looks a lot of cryonicists do indeed experience the feeling that Eliezer describes in Lonely Dissent.

My concerns about the social cost of cryonics can be broken down into two categories:

Loss of existing relationships with family, friends, etc. I value the relationships I currently have with my family and friends, and signing up for cryonics would jeopardize many of these relationships. Most of my friends and family members are not interested in rationality and would be completely baffled if I decided to sign up. Nonetheless, I do not want to lose these relationships, as they are currently an important part of my life; I would consider my life to be significantly worse than it is now if I had to sever a lot of these emotional ties.

Increased difficulty of forming relationships in the future. I'm not particularly good at forming new relationships, and I'm very worried that signing up for cryonics will create an insurmountable social stigma that will make it nearly impossible for me to do so.

Overall, though, I have very little information about what the social cost of cryonics really is beyond a few scattered anecdotes and secondhand descriptions of cryonicists' lives. Ultimately, I don't really know how many of my fears would actually be realized if I signed up. This makes it difficult to for me to make a decision, as I am very risk-averse and I feel reluctant to choose something that could potentially make the next six or seven decades of my life miserable. As a result, I have decided to engage in some data collection.

To do so, I would like to hear about your experiences. If you are currently signed up for cryonics, I would very much appreciate it if you took a minute or two to describe the effects that signing up has had on your relationships and your social life i...
First German Meeting
by  — 2011-09-11T17:13:14.945Z

Yesterday, we held the first German LessWrong meeting in Munich. Attending were six people, mostly from south Germany. The main focus was to get to know each other and see where we stand on various issues, but we also discussed nootropics, mainly nicotine and melatonine, methods of self improvement, existential risks, intelligence explosion, maximizing one's own utility and forming goals. We also touched upon the simulation argument and metaethics.

Highlights were:

Muflax' report on the benefits of Nicotine.

We found that even if there is no intelligence explosion, even a moderately above-human intelligent AI could pose somewhat of a threat.

We did not find any core-morality that we agreed would be shared by all human cultures.

If you can read german, please help me finish my wikibook Grundlagen des Rationalen Denkens by commenting on it.
LessWrong and Rationality ebooks via Amazon
by anonym — 2011-09-11T16:08:25.063Z

After just spending some time browsing free nonficton kindle ebooks on Amazon, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea for SIAI/LW to publish for free download through Amazon some introductory LW essays and other useful introductory works like Twelve Virtues of Rationality and The Simple Truth.

People who search for 'rationality' on Google will see Eliezer's Twelve Virtues of Rationality and LW. It would nice if searching for rationality on Amazon also led people to similar resources that could be read on the Kindle with just one click. It would considerably expand the audience of potential readers (and LW contributors and SIAI donors).