trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
One-on-one charity
by KatjaGrace — 2011-08-23T00:46:22.000Z

People care less about large groups of people than individuals, per capita and often in total. People also care more when they are one of very few people who could act, not part of a large group. In many large scale problems, both of these effects combine. For instance climate change is being caused by a vast number of people and will affect a vast number of people. Many poor people could do with help from any of many rich people. Each rich person sees themselves as one of a huge number who could help that mass ‘the poor’.

One strategy a charity could use when both of these problems are present at once is to pair its potential donors and donees one-to-one. They could for instance promise the family of 109 Seventeenth St. that a particular destitute girl is their own personal poor person, and they will not be bothered again (by that organisation) about any other poor people, and that this person will not receive help from anyone else (via that organisation). This would remove both of the aforementioned problems.

If they did this, I think potential donors would feel more concerned about their poor person than they previously felt about the whole bunch of them. I also think they would feel emotionally blackmailed and angry. I expect the latter effects would dominate their reactions. If you agree with my expectations, an interesting question is why it would be considered unfriendly behaviour on the part of the charity. If you don’t, an interesting question is why charities don’t do something like this.
Kill the mind-killer
by PhilGoetz — 2011-08-22T18:46:07.719Z

The budget stalemate in the US Congress was caused entirely by blocks of voters and representatives that coalesced around strong sets of opinions that few people would have come up with on their own, and by political party leaders forcing representatives in their parties to toe the party line. Politics isn't the mind killer. Political parties are the mind-killer.

Parties are also notorious for obliterating information in elections, as well as for encouraging voters to vote sans information. If you went to your polling place and saw a list of candidates, none of whom you'd heard of before, you might rightly refrain from voting and polluting the signal with your noise. Knowing party affiliations makes people think they have enough information to vote.

For discussion:

What other disadvantages are provided by the existence of political parties?

Do political parties provide us with any advantages at all?

If so, do the benefits outweigh the disadvantages?

How might we go about disenfranchising political parties?

We want the freedom to form groups that promote political concerns. But it would be possible to keep these groups at a greater distance from elected representatives. Candidates for office could be forbidden from endorsing a particular party. The Congress could be forbidden from basing any procedural rules on party affiliation. Political parties could be forbidden from making large donations to election campaigns, or sponsoring advertising. That's not so different from what we do today with religious groups, which are not much different from political parties.

Political parties are currently officially part of Congress' operation, even though they're not in the constitution. There are all sorts of Congressional rules specifying how the parties interact, who gets to choose committee members, who runs the House and Senate floors, etc. A party leader can punish a representative who doesn't toe the line with many incentives and disincentives.

Make that illegal. Make persecuting a representative for party-based reasons have the same legal standing as persecuting a representative for religious reasons.

I will ignore comments saying "you're an intellectual dreamer", for the usual reasons.
Do we want more publicity, and if so how?
by Wei Dai — 2011-08-22T17:43:34.685Z

Recently reporters from two major national magazines contacted me in preparation for doing stories on Bitcoin. This reminded me that Wired magazine did a cover story on the Cypherpunks in its second issue. I think the LessWrong community is already larger and more active than Cypherpunks were back then, and potentially more influential, but there hasn't been much publicity on us. I'm tempted to suggest doing a story on LessWrong to one of the reporters. Is this a good idea, or bad?

More generally, do we want more publicity, and if so what's the best way to go about getting it?

ETA: Would it be bad etiquette to reveal the names of these magazines at this point, or even to say as much as I've said?
Meetup : Monthly Berkeley meetup
by Nisan — 2011-08-22T17:36:58.725Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Monthly Berkeley meetup

WHEN:
27 August 2011 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2128 Oxford Street, Berkeley

It's time for the monthly Berkeley meetup! We'll be meeting up at the Oxford Street Starbucks at 7pm, and then head over to the Free Speech Cafe on campus. Newcomers are very welcome. Feel free to bring your friends!

If you're trying to find us, call me at 734-904-6123.

Discussion article for the meetup : Monthly Berkeley meetup
[SEQ RERUN] The Crackpot Offer
by MinibearRex — 2011-08-22T15:42:36.906Z

Today's post, The Crackpot Offer was originally published on 08 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you make a mistake, don't excuse it or pat yourself on the back for thinking originally; acknowledge you made a mistake and move on. If you become invested in your own mistakes, you'll stay stuck on bad ideas.

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 Anchoring and Adjustment, 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.
REQ: Latin translation for HPMOR
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2011-08-22T10:20:06.889Z

If anyone can do non-wrong Latin, I could use a translation of the following for HPMOR. The original is supposed to be circa 1200.

No rescuer hath the rescuer.
No Lord hath the champion,
no mother and no father,
only nothingness above.
A Sketch of an Anti-Realist Metaethics
by Jack — 2011-08-22T05:32:10.596Z

Below is a sketch of a moral anti-realist position based on the map-territory distinction, Hume and studies of psychopaths. Hopefully it is productive.

The Map is Not the Territory Reviewed

Consider the founding metaphor of Less Wrong: the map-territory distinction. Beliefs are to reality as maps are to territory. As the wiki says:

Since our predictions don't always come true, we need different words to describe the thingy that generates our predictions and the thingy that generates our experimental results. The first thingy is called "belief", the second thingy "reality".

Of course the map is not the territory.

Here is Albert Einstein making much the same analogy:

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison. But he certainly believes that, as his knowledge increases, his picture of reality will become simpler and simpler and will explain a wider and wider range of his sensuous impressions. He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind. He may call this ideal limit the objective truth.

The above notions about beliefs involve pictorial analogs, but we can also imagine other ways the same information could be contained. If the ideal map is turned into a series of sentences we can define a 'fact' as any sentence in the ideal map (IM). The moral realist position can then be stated as follows:

Moral Realism: ∃x(x ⊂ IM) & (x = M)

In English: there is some set of sentences x such that all the sentences are part of the ideal map and x provides a complete account of morality.

Moral anti-realism simply negates the above. ¬(∃x(x ⊂ IM) & (x = M)).

Now it might seem that, as long as our concept of morality doesn'...
The basic questions of rationality
by  — 2011-08-22T02:23:49.667Z

I've been on Less Wrong since its inception, around March 2009. I've read a lot and contributed a lot, and so now I'm more familiar with our jargon, I know of a few more scientific studies, and I might know a couple of useful tricks. Despite all my reading, however, I feel like I'm a far cry from learning rationality. I'm still a wannabe, not an amateur. Less Wrong has tons of information, but I feel like I haven't yet learned the answers to the basic questions of rationality.

I, personally, am a fan of the top-down approach to learning things. Whereas Less Wrong contains tons of useful facts that could, potentially, be put together to answer life's important questions, I really would find it easier if we started with the important questions, and then broke those down into smaller pieces that can be answered more easily.

And so, that's precisely what I'm going to do. Here are, as far as I can tell, the basic questions of rationality—the questions we're actually trying to answer here—along with what answers I've found:

Q: Given a question, how should we go about answering it? A: By gathering evidence effectively, and correctly applying reason and intuition.

Q: How can we effectively gather relevant evidence? A: I don't know. (Controlled experiments? Asking people?)

Q: How can we correctly apply reason? A: If you have infinite computational resources available, use probability theory.

Q: We don't have infinite computational resources available, so what now? A: I don't know. (Apply Bayes' rule anyway? Just try to emulate what a hypercomputer would do?)

Q: How can we successfully apply intuition? A: By repairing our biases, and developing habits that point us in the right direction under specific circumstances.

Q: How can we find our biases? A: I don't know. (Read Less Wrong? What about our personal quirks? How can we notice those?)

Q: Once we find a bias, how can we fix it? A: I don't know. (Apply a correction, test, repeat? Figure out how the bias feels?)

Q: How can we find out what habits would be useful to develop? A: I don't know. (Examine our past successes and rationalize them?)

Q: Once we decide on a habit, how can we develop it? A: I don't know. (Sheer practice?)

We could answer some of these questions ourselves, though simple practice and straightforward methods. The method "apply a correction, test, rep

...
A Valuable Asset in Your Intellectual Portfolio is Not the Same as a Good Guide
by David_J_Balan — 2011-08-21T21:29:31.173Z

Haven't posted in quite a while.

Suppose you have a big, complicated question that you're not sure of the answer to, and you want to seek an adviser to guide you. One kind of adviser is someone whose opinion, by your lights, constitutes strong evidence regarding the answer; on the basis of that opinion alone you are prepared to substantially update your beliefs. Of course you may profit from further discussion beyond just hearing the adviser's opinion on the big question: since the question is complicated, hearing his or her reasoning or evidence on different elements of the big question may be valuable, but the point is that there are some advisers for whom just knowing their ultimate judgment moves the needle a lot for you. Such people might be termed "good guides."
But there may be other potential advisers whose ultimate opinion on the big question you don't credit much at all, but who you think might still have valuable insight into some important element of the question. A good example for me is "Chicago School" Industrial Organization Economics. It's members had some insights that are absolutely true and important ("one monopoly profit" and related ideas), and that the people who I would have regarded as my "good guides" had I been around at the time did not have before them. No analyst who does not understand those insights can be a good analyst, and no analysis that ignores them can be correct. But simply knowing what an orthodox Chicago School economist thinks about some big question would move me very little. They are a valuable part of my "intellectual portfolio" (to use a phrase favored by Brad DeLong) and I would be a fool to dismiss them. But they are only providers of valuable input, not good guides.
I think the distinction between these two types of advisers is often missed. If you believe my example (if not, substitute one of your own, the point of this post is not to debate IO), there are a bunch of expert economists (Chicago School types) who should have fancy prestigious professorships, and whose arguments should be given careful consideration; and there are another bunch of expert economists who should have fancy prestigious professorships, whose arguments should be given careful consideration, and whose advice should be heeded. Leave aside the practical difficulty of knowing which is which if you are, say, a reporter or a policy-make...
What ‘believing’ usually is
by KatjaGrace — 2011-08-21T20:56:06.000Z

Experimental Philosophy discusses the following experiment. Participants were told a story of Tim, whose wife is cheating on him. He gets a lot of evidence of this, but tells himself it isn’t so.

Participants given this case were then randomly assigned to receive one of the two following questions:

Does Tim know that Diane is cheating on him?

Does Tim believe that Diane is cheating on him?

Amazingly enough, participants were substantially more inclined to say yes to the question about knowledge than to the question about belief.

This idea that knowledge absolutely requires belief is sometimes held up as one of the last bulwarks of the idea that concepts can be understood in terms of necessary conditions, but now we seem to be getting at least some tentative evidence against it. I’d love to hear what people think.

I’m not surprised – often people say explicitly things like ‘I know X, but I really can’t believe it yet’. This seems uninteresting from the perspective of epistemology. ‘Believe’ in common usage just doesn’t mean the same as what it means in philosophy. Minds are big and complicated, and ‘believing’ is about what you sincerely endorse as the truth, not what seems likely given the information you have. Your ‘beliefs’ are probably related to your information, but also to your emotions and wishes and simplifying assumptions among other things. ‘Knowing’ on the other hand seems to be commonly understood as about your information state. Though not always – for instance ‘I should have known’ usually means ‘in my extreme uncertainty, I should have suspected enough to be wary’. At any rate, in common use knowing and believing are not directly related.

This is further evidence you should be wary of what people ‘believe’.
synapse renormalization - another reason to sleep more than minimum-REM
by Jonathan_Graehl — 2011-08-21T19:44:37.093Z

(not yet studied in mammals)

The ratio of the strength of a synapse between neurons and the total potential (from all incoming synapses) needed to activate a neuron may be all that figures; the absolute values may not be important (this is the basis for computer neural networks, though temporal effects, firing rates, and who knows what else also matter in real brains).

So you can renormalize (multiply by some constant 1) and see almost no difference except for perhaps greater susceptibility to noise. But at least the amount of physical material needed is smaller, and the energy needed is smaller. It's more efficient.

In flies and other simple animals studied so far, this definitely happens during sleep. Maybe it happens in humans also. (remains to be studied).

In any case, be careful committing to some REM-sleep only 3hr/day-with-naps sleep schedule, just because you may feel fine at first, when the exact utility of non-REM sleep isn't completely known.

Via.
Please do not downvote every comment or post someone has ever made as a retaliation tactic.
by Will_Newsome — 2011-08-21T12:35:48.430Z

People who go back and downvote every post or comment a Less Wrong user has ever made, please, stop doing that. It's a clever way to pull information cascades in your direction but it is clearly an abuse of the content filtering system. It's also highly dishonorable. If you truly must use such tactics then downvoting a few of your enemy's top level posts is much less evil; your enemy loses the karma and takes the hint without your severely biasing the public perception of Less Wrong's discourse.

(I just lost over 200 karma in a few minutes and that'll probably continue for awhile. This happens to me every few weeks. Edit: I mean it's been happening every few weeks for a few months for a total of only three or four. Between 400 and 700 karma lost total I think? I don't mean to overstate the problem.)
For fiction: How could alien minds differ from human minds?
by Solvent — 2011-08-21T10:37:50.151Z

One of the most important points raised by the sequences is that not all minds are like humans. In quite a few places, people have discussed minds with slight changes from human minds, which seem altogether different. However, a lot of this discussion has been related to AI, as opposed to minds created by evolution. I'm trying to think of ways that minds which evolved, and are effective enough to start a civilization, could differ from humans'.

Three Worlds Collide would seem like an excellent starting point, but isn't actually very useful. As far as I recall, the Babyeaters might have learned their baby eating habits as a result of societal pressure. The main difference in their society seemed to be the assumption that people who disagreed with you were simply mistaken: this contrasts to humans' tendency to form rival groups, and assume everyone in the rival groups is evil. The Super-Happies had self modified, and so don't provide an example of an evolved mind.

So here are my ideas so far.

A species could have the same neural pathways for wanting and liking. This would lead to far less akrasia.

A species could have a different set of standards for boredom. This seems to be one of the most precarious values in the human mind.

What other ways can you think of?
[SEQ RERUN] Anchoring and Adjustment
by MinibearRex — 2011-08-21T02:56:13.957Z

Today's post, Anchoring and Adjustment was originally published on 07 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Exposure to numbers affects guesses on estimation problems by anchoring your mind to an given estimate, even if it's wildly off base. Be aware of the effect random numbers have on your estimation ability.

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 Why is the Future So Absurd?, 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 a practical plan for Friendly AI looks like
by Mitchell_Porter — 2011-08-20T09:50:23.686Z

I have seen too many discussions of Friendly AI, here and elsewhere (e.g. in comments at Michael Anissimov's blog), detached from any concrete idea of how to do it. Sometimes the issue is the lack of code, demos, or a practical plan from SIAI. SIAI is seen as a source of wishful thinking about magic machines that will solve all our problems for us, or as a place engaged in a forever quest for nebulous mathematical vaporware such as "reflective decision theory". You will get singularity enthusiasts who say, it's great that SIAI has given the concept of FAI visibility, but enough with the philosophy, let's get coding! ... does anyone know where to start? And you will get singularity skeptics who say, unfriendly AI is a bedtime ghost story for credulous SF fans, wake me up when SIAI actually ships a product. Or, within this subculture of rationalist altruists who want to do the optimal thing, you'll get people saying, I don't know if I should donate, because I don't see how any of this is supposed to happen.

So in this post I want to sketch what a "practical" plan for Friendly AI looks like. I'm not here to advocate this plan - I'm not saying this is the right way to do it. I'm just providing an example of a plan that could be pursued in the real world. Perhaps it will also allow people to better understand SIAI's indirect approach.

I won't go into the details of financial or technical logistics. If we were talking about how to get to the moon from Earth, then the following plan is along the lines of "Make a chemical-powered rocket big enough to get you there." Once you have that concept, you still have a lot of work to do, but you are at least on the right track - compared to people who want to make a teleportation device or a balloon that goes really high. But I will make one remark about how the idea of Friendly AI is framed. At present, it is discussed in conjunction with a whole cornucopia of science fiction notions such as: immortality, conquering the galaxy, omnipresent wish-fulfilling super-AIs, good and bad Jupiter-brains, mind uploads in heaven and hell, and so on. Similarly, we have all these thought-experiments: guessing games with omniscient aliens, decision problems in a branching multiverse, "torture versus dust specks". Whatever the ultimate relevance of such ideas, it is clearly possible to divorce the notion of Friendly AI from all of them. If a...
Meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday August 24
by JGWeissman — 2011-08-20T03:52:30.709Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday August 24

WHEN:
24 August 2011 06:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
4187 Campus Dr, University Center, Irvine, CA 92612

This continues the weekly meetups in Irvine. As always the meetup at the outdoor food court in the University Center near UCI, from 6:00 to 8:00 (or whenever we actually decide to leave). Look for the sign with naive neural classifiers for bleggs and rubes. See also the email group and calendar for the Southern California Meetup Group

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday August 24