trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Personal decisions the leading cause of death
by Morendil — 2010-09-28T06:52:16.265Z

I've had this paper (pdf) in my "for LW" pile for a while, I didn't want to dump it in the open thread to have it promptly drowned out but neither could I think of much more to say to make it worth a top-level post on the main LW.

This paper analyzes the relationships between personal decisions and premature deaths in the United States. The analysis indicates that over one million of the 2.4 million deaths in 2000 can be attributed to personal decisions and could have been avoided if readily available alternative choices were made.

Conclusion: the impact that thinking better could have on people's lives is way underestimated.

Discuss. :)
Anti-akrasia remote monitoring experiment
by cousin_it — 2010-09-27T23:34:50.608Z

So we (Richard Hollerith and me) tried out my anti-akrasia idea. Actually we've been doing it for more than a week now. Turns out it works just like I thought it would: when you know an actual person is checking your screen at random intervals, and they will IM you whenever you start procrastinating online, and they expect the same from you... you become ashamed of procrastinating online. You get several "clean" hours every day, where you either do work or stay away from the computer - no willpower required. Magic.

Proofpic time! Once we both left our VNC windows open for a while, which resulted in this:

The idea isn't new. I first got it this winter, Alicorn and AdeleneDawner are apparently doing similar things unilaterally, and even Eliezer has been using a watcher while writing his book. I don't know anyone who tried the Orwellian mutual screen capture thing before, but I won't be surprised if a lot of people are already quietly practicing it.

Being watched for the first time didn't make me feel as vulnerable as you'd think, because, realistically, what can the other person glean from my monitor while I work? Random screenfuls of source code? Headings of emails? We don't realize how normal the little details of our lives would look to strangers. In the words of McSweeney's, "chances are, people will understand. Most people are pretty understanding." The experiment did feel weird at first, but it was the expected kind of weird - the feeling you should get when you're genuinely trying something new for the first time, rather than just rehashing. It feels normal now. In fact, I'm already ever-so-slightly worried about becoming dependent on remote monitoring for getting work done. You decide whether that's a good sign.

Passing the microphone to Richard now:

I had to set a timer (for between 5 and 11 minutes depending on circumstances) to remind me to check Vladimir's screen (resetting the timer manually after every check). If I did not, I either spent too much time looking at his screen or let him go too long without monitoring.
I tend to think that if I continue to monitor people in this way, I will eventually come to use software (particularly software running on the monitored computer) to reduce the demands on my time and attention, but my more immediate concern is whether the technique will rem

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Don't judge a skill by its specialists
by Academian — 2010-09-26T20:56:43.485Z

tl;dr: The marginal benefits of learning a skill shouldn't be judged heavily on the performance of people who have had it for a long time. People are unfortunately susceptible to these poor judgments via the representativeness heuristic.

Warn and beware of the following kludgy argument, which I hear often and have to dispel or refine:

"Naively, learning «skill type» should help my performance in «domain». But people with «skill type» aren't significantly better at «domain», so learning it is unlikely to help me."

In the presence or absence of obvious mediating factors, skills otherwise judged as "inapplicable" might instead present low hanging fruit for improvement. But people too often toss them away using biased heuristics to continue being lazy and mentally stagnant. Here are some parallel examples to give the general idea (these are just illustrative, and might be wrong):

Weak argument: "Gamers are awkward, so learning games won't help my social skills."
Mediating factor: Lack of practice with face-to-face interaction.
Ideal: Socialite acquires moves-ahead thinking and learns about signalling to help get a great charity off the ground.

Weak argument: "Physicists aren't good at sports, so physics won't help me improve my game."
Mediating factor: Lack of exercise.
Ideal: Athlete or coach learns basic physics and tweaks training to gain a leading edge.

Weak argument: "Mathematicians aren't romantically successful, so math won't help me with dating."
Mediating factor: Aversion to unstructured environments.
Ideal: Serial dater learns basic probability to combat cognitive biases in selecting partners.

Weak argument: "Psychologists are often depressed, so learning psychology won't help me fix my problems."
Mediating factor: Time spent with unhappy people.
Ideal: College student learns basic neuropsychology and restructures study/social routine to accommodate better unconscious brain functions.

Aside from easily identifiable particular flaws [as SarahC points out, the difference between an athelete and a physicist isn't just physical activity], there are a few generic reasons why these arguments are weak:

Having a skill and learning a skill are very different things. This is especially true when the learning is coupled with efforts to avoid compartmentalizing it. People who have the skill already might have deve

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Vote Qualifications, Not Issues
by jimrandomh — 2010-09-26T20:26:32.153Z

In the United States and other countries, we elect our leaders. Each individual voter chooses some criteria by which to decide who they vote for, and the aggregate result of all those criteria determines who gets to lead. The public narrative overwhelmingly supports one strategy for deciding between politicians: look up their positions on important and contentious issues, and vote for the one you agree with. Unfortunately, this strategy is wrong, and the result is inferior leadership, polarization into camps and never-ending arguments. Instead, voters should be encouraged to vote based on the qualifications that matter: their intelligence, their rationality, their integrity, and their ability to judge character.

If an issue really is contentious, then a voter without specific inside knowledge should not expect their opinion to be more accurate than chance. If everyone votes based on a few contentious issues, then politicians have a powerful incentive to lie about their stance on those issues. But the real problem is, most of the important things that a politician does have nothing to do with the controversies at all. Whether a budget is good or bad depends on how well its author can distinguish between efficient and inefficient spending, over many small projects and expenditures that will never be reviewed by the voters, and not on the total amount taxed or spent. Whether a regulation is good or bad depends on how well its author can predict the effects and engineer the small details for optimal effect, and not on whether it is more or less strict overall. Whether foreign policies succeed or fail depends on how well the diplomats negotiate, and not on any strategy that could be determined years earlier before the election.

Voters know a lot less about governance than the politicians who study it full time, and sometimes, that leads them to incorrect conclusions. This can force politicians to choose between making the right decision, based on inside knowledge or on complexities that voters wouldn't understand, and making the wrong decision to please voters. It is not possible to know how much should be taxed or spent without studying the current budget in detail. It is not possible to know how banks should be regulated without spending years studying economics. In theory, experts can spread the correct answers to these questions in the media. But neither the me...
What Makes My Attempt Special?
by Andy_McKenzie — 2010-09-26T06:55:38.929Z

A crucial question towards the beginning of any research project is, why should my group succeed in elucidating an answer to a question where others may have tried and failed?

Here's how I'm going about dividing the possible worlds, but I'm interested to see if anyone has any other strategies. First, the whole question is conditional on nobody having already answered the particular question you're interested in. So, you first need an exhaustive lit review, that should scale in intensity based on how much effort you expect to actually expend on the project. Still nothing? These are the remaining possibilities:

1) Nobody else has ever thought of your question, even though all of the pieces of knowledge needed to formulate it have been known for years. If the field has many people involved, the probability of this is vanishingly small and you should systematically disabuse yourself of your fantasies if you think like this often. Still... if true, the prognosis: a good sign.

2) Nobody else has ever thought of your question, because it wouldn't have been ask-able without pieces of knowledge that were discovered just recently. This is common in fast-paced fields and it's why they can be especially exciting. The prognosis: a good sign, but work quickly!

3) Others have thought of your question, but didn't think it was interesting enough to devote serious attention to. We should take this seriously, as how informed others choose to allocate their attention is one of our better approximations to real prediction markets. So, the prognosis: bad sign. Figure out whether you can not only answer your question but validate its usefulness / importance, too.

4) Others have thought of your question, thought it was interesting, but have never tried to answer it because of resource or tech restraints, which you do not face. Prognosis: probably the best-case scenario.

5) Others have thought of your question and run the relevant tests, but failed to get any consistent / reliable results. It'd be nice if there were no publication bias but of course there is--people are much more likely to publish statistically significant, positive results. Due to this bias, it is sometimes hard to tell precisely how many dead skeletons and dismembered brains line your path, and because of this uncertainty you must assign this possibility a non-zero probability. The prognosis: a bad sign, but do yo...
A Player of Games
by Larks — 2010-09-23T22:52:38.849Z

Earlier today I had an idea for a meta-game a group of people could play. It’d be ideal if you lived in an intentional community, or were at university with a games society, or somewhere with regular Less Wrong Meetups.

Each time you would find a new game. Each of you would then study the rules for half an hour and strategise, and then you’d play it, once. Afterwards, compare thoughts on strategies and meta-strategies. If you haven’t played Imperialism, try that. If you’ve never tried out Martin Gardner’s games, try them. If you’ve never played Phutball, give it a go.

It should help teach us to understand new situations quickly, look for workable exploits, accurately model other people, and compute Nash equilibrium. Obviously, be careful not to end up just spending your life playing games; the aim isn't to become good at playing games, it's to become good at learning to play games - hopefully including the great game of life.

However, it’s important that no-one in the group know the rules before hand, which makes finding the new games a little harder. On the plus side, it doesn’t matter that the games are well-balanced: if the world is mad, we should be looking for exploits in real life.

It could be really helpful if people who knew of good games to play gave suggestions. A name, possibly some formal specifications (number of players, average time of a game), and some way of accessing the rules. If you only have the rules in a text-file, rot13 them please, and likewise for any discussion of strategy.
Politics as Charity
by CarlShulman — 2010-09-23T05:33:57.645Z

Related to: Shut up and multiply, Politics is the mind-killer, Pascal's Mugging, The two party swindle, The American system and misleading labels, Policy Tug-of-War

Jane is a connoisseur of imported cheeses and Homo Economicus in good standing, using a causal decision theory that two-boxes on Newcomb's problem. Unfortunately for her, the politically well-organized dairy farmers in her country have managed to get an initiative for increased dairy tariffs on the ballot, which will cost her $20,000. Should she take an hour to vote against the initiative on election day?

She estimates that she has a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of casting the deciding vote, for an expected value of $0.02 from improved policy. However, while Jane may be willing to give her two cents on the subject, the opportunity cost of her time far exceeds the policy benefit, and so it seems she has no reason to vote.

Jane's dilemma is just the standard Paradox of Voting in political science and public choice theory. Voters may still engage in expressive voting to affiliate with certain groups or to signal traits insofar as politics is not about policy, but the instrumental rationality of voting to bring about selfishly preferred policy outcomes starts to look dubious. Thus many of those who say that we rationally ought to vote in hopes of affecting policy focus on altruistic preferences: faced with a tiny probability of casting a decisive vote, but large impacts on enormous numbers of people in the event that we are decisive, we should shut up and multiply, voting if the expected value of benefit to others sufficiently exceeds the cost to ourselves.

Meanwhile, at the Experimental Philosophy blog, Eric Schwitzgebel reports that philosophers overwhelmingly rate voting as very morally good (on a scale of 1 to 9), with voting placing right around donating 10% of one's income to charity. He offers the following explanation:

Now is it just crazy to say that voting is as morally good as giving 10% of one's income to charity? That was my first reaction. Giving that much to charity seems uncommon to me and highly admirable, while voting... yeah, it's good to do, of course, but not that good. One thought, however -- adapted from Derek Parfit -- gives me pause about that easy assessment. In the U.S. 2008 Presidential electio

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(Virtual) Employment Open Thread
by Will_Newsome — 2010-09-23T04:25:58.007Z

tl;dr: Some people on LW have a hard time finding worthwhile employment. Share advice and help them out!

Working sucks. I'd rather not work. But alas, a lot of the time, we have to choose between working and starvation. At the very least I'd like to minimize work. I'd like to work somewhere cheap and comfortable... you know, like on the beach in Thailand, like LW (ab)user Louie did. Then I could spend my spare time on things like self-improvement and ahem 'studying nootropics' all day. I'd like to travel, if possible, and not be chained to an iffy job. It'd be cool to have flexible hours. I've read The 4-Hour Work Week but it seemed kinda difficult and scary and... I just don't wanna do it. I can't code, and I'd rather not learn how to. At least, I'd rather not have my job depend on it. I never graduated from college. Hell, I never got my high school diploma, even. A team of medical experts has confirmed that my sleep cycle is of the Chaotic Evil variety. (For those who read HP:MoR, imagine Harry Potter Syndrome, except on crack. I bet a lot of people have similar sleep cycles.) I'm 18, and therefore automatically low status for employment purposes: I'm obviously much too young to make a good teacher, or store manager, or police officer. I can imagine having health problems, or severe social anxiety, or a nearly useless liberal arts degree, or just a general setback limiting my employment opportunities. And if it turned out that I wanted to work 14 hour days all of a sudden because I really needed the money, well then it'd be cool to have that option as well. Alas, none of this is possible, so I might as well just give up and keep on being stressed and feeling useless... or should I?

I bet a whole bunch of Less Wrongers aren't aware of chances for alternative employment. I myself hear myths of people who work via the internet, or blog for a living, or code an hour a day and still make enough to survive comfortably. Sites like elance and vworker (which looks kinda intimidating) exist, and I bet we could find others. Are there such people on Less Wrong that could tell us their secret? Do others know about how to snag one of these gigs? What sorts of skills are easiest to specialize in that could get returns in virtual work? Are virtual markets hard to break into? Can I just blog for an hour or two a day and afford to live a life of simplistic...
Rationality Case Study - Ad-36
by Perplexed — 2010-09-22T18:32:18.906Z

Edit: Title change - may cause RSS resend.

There is a widespread belief here that we pretty much have epistemic rationality nailed. Instrumental rationality, ... well, nobody is perfect. We are still working on that. But epistemic rationality? That is a breeze. Simply a matter of avoiding some well known biases, doing Bayesian updating, and maintaining a certain kind of mutual respect in discussions. Maybe throw in a bit of Pearl, if you need to address causality in addition to correlation. We know how to handle evidence. And what is epistemic rationality, after all, besides the optimal evaluation of evidence?

A recent posting made the suggestion that we ought, as a community, to make our expertise available to society, by tackling important and controversial questions and (presumably) then sharing our consensus with the world. But will we reach a consensus? A simple test case might be useful. The purpose of this posting is to propose a test. I am providing some links to an ongoing scientific controversy which (judging by press coverage) is of considerable interest to the general public. Given the attention given to health issues here, I suspect that it will also be of interest to the LW population in general. So here goes.

There has been some suggestion that a particular strain of the common cold virus - Ad-36 - might be a major contributor to human obesity. Become infected by the virus, and you are at increased risk of becoming fat. However, a certain amount of skepticism has been expressed - the evidence may not be as good as it is made out to be.

I'm completely new to this controversy - just found out about it today. I think that it would be an interesting test case to have LW as a group look into this question (quite a lot of information is available online, and what is not can be found in university libraries to which I assume many of us have access). So, what do you all think? Does Adenovirus strain #36 cause human obesity? If so, how much? If not, where exactly have the doctors and scientists who believe otherwise gone wrong in their thinking?
Error detection bias in research
by neq1 — 2010-09-22T03:00:33.555Z

I have had the following situation happen several times during my research career: I write code to analyze data; there is some expectation about what the results will be; after running the program, the results are not what was expected; I go back and carefully check the code to make sure there are no errors; sometimes I find an error

No matter how careful you are when it comes to writing computer code, I think you are more likely to find a mistake if you think there is one. Unexpected results lead one to suspect a coding error more than expected results do.

In general, researchers usually do have general expectations about what they will find (e.g., the drug will not increase risk of the disease; the toxin will not decrease risk of cancer).

Consider the following graphic:

Here, the green region is consistent with what our expectations are. For example, if we expect a relative risk (RR) of about 1.5, we might not be too surprised if the estimated RR is between (e.g.) 0.9 and 2.0. Anything above 2.0 or below 0.9 might make us highly suspicious of an error -- that's the red region. Estimates in the red region are likely to trigger serious coding error investigation. Obviously, if there is no coding error then the paper will get submitted with the surprising results.

Error scenarios

Let's assume that there is a coding error that causes the estimated effect to differ from the true effect (assume sample size large enough to ignore sampling variability).

Consider the following scenario:

Type A. Here, the estimated value is biased, but it's within the expected range. In this scenario, error checking is probably more casual and less likely to be successful.

Next, consider this scenario:

Type B. In this case, the estimated value is in the red zone. This triggers aggressive error checking of the type that has a higher success rate.

Finally:

Type C. In this case it's the true value that differs from our expectations. However, the estimated value is about what we would expect. This triggers casual error checking of the less-likely-to-be-successful variety.

If this line of reasoning holds, we should expect journal articles to contain errors at a higher rate when the results are consistent with the authors' prior expectations. This could be viewed as a type of confirmation bias.

How common are programming errors in research?

The...
Less Wrong Should Confront Wrongness Wherever it Appears
by jimrandomh — 2010-09-21T01:40:37.861Z

In a recent discussion about a controversial topic which I will not name here, Vladimir_M noticed something extremely important.

Because the necessary information is difficult to obtain in a clear and convincing form, and it's drowned in a vast sea of nonsense that's produced on this subject by just about every source of information in the modern society.

I have separated it from its original context, because this issue applies to many important topics. There are many topics where the information that most people receive is confused, wrong, or biased, and where nonsense drowns out truth and clarity. Wherever this occurs, it is very bad and very important to notice.
There are many reasons why it happens, many of which have been explicitly studied and discussed as topics here. The norms and design of the site are engineered to promote clarity and correctness. Strategies for reasoning correctly are frequently recurring topics, and newcomers are encouraged to read a large back-catalog of articles about how to avoid common errors in thinking (the sequences). A high standard of discourse is enforced through voting, which also provides rapid feedback to help everyone improve their writing. Since Well-Kept Gardens Die by Pacifism, when the occasional nutjob stops by, they're downvoted into invisibility and driven away - and while you wouldn't notice from the comment archives, this has happened lots of times.

Less Wrong has the highest accuracy and signal to noise ratio of any blog I've seen, other than those that limit themselves to narrow specialties. In fact, I doubt anyone here knows a better one. The difference is very large. While we are certainly not perfect, errors on Less Wrong are rarer and much more likely to be spotted and corrected than on any similar site, so a community consensus here is a very strong signal of clarity and correctness.

As a result, Less Wrong is well positioned to find and correct errors in the public discourse. Less Wrong should confront wrongness wherever it appears. Wherever large amounts of utility depend on clear and accurate information, it's not already prevalent, and we have the ability to produce or properly filter that information, then we ought to do so and lots of utility depends on it. Even if it's incompatible with status signaling, or off topic, or otherwise incompatible with non-vital social norms.

So I propose the ...