trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
You only need faith in two things
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2013-03-10T23:45:19.782Z

You only need faith in two things: That "induction works" has a non-super-exponentially-tiny prior probability, and that some single large ordinal is well-ordered. Anything else worth believing in is a deductive consequence of one or both.

(Because being exposed to ordered sensory data will rapidly promote the hypothesis that induction works, even if you started by assigning it very tiny prior probability, so long as that prior probability is not super-exponentially tiny. Then induction on sensory data gives you all empirical facts worth believing in. Believing that a mathematical system has a model usually corresponds to believing that a certain computable ordinal is well-ordered (the proof-theoretic ordinal of that system), and large ordinals imply the well-orderedness of all smaller ordinals. So if you assign non-tiny prior probability to the idea that induction might work, and you believe in the well-orderedness of a single sufficiently large computable ordinal, all of empirical science, and all of the math you will actually believe in, will follow without any further need for faith.)

(The reason why you need faith for the first case is that although the fact that induction works can be readily observed, there is also some anti-inductive prior which says, 'Well, but since induction has worked all those previous times, it'll probably fail next time!' and 'Anti-induction is bound to work next time, since it's never worked before!' Since anti-induction objectively gets a far lower Bayes-score on any ordered sequence and is then demoted by the logical operation of Bayesian updating, to favor induction over anti-induction it is not necessary to start out believing that induction works better than anti-induction, it is only necessary *not* to start out by being *perfectly* confident that induction won't work.)

(The reason why you need faith for the second case is that although more powerful proof systems - those with larger proof-theoretic ordinals - can prove the consistency of weaker proof systems, or equivalently prove the well-ordering of smaller ordinals, there's no known perfect system for telling which mathematical systems are consistent just as (equivalently!) there's no way of solving the halting problem. So when you reach the strongest math system you can be convinced of and further assumptions seem dangerously

...
Non-replicability of Some Behavioral Economics Research Across Cultures
by realitygrill — 2013-03-10T22:04:47.275Z

Not our typical cognitive biases, but does raise the question of universality - I am aware of much stronger evidence for the universality of emotions and facial expression. Skimming the paper looks like a lot of fun.

http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135

Actual paper:

http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_final02.pdf
A Quick and Dirty Survey: Textbook Learning
by AmagicalFishy — 2013-03-10T19:55:08.865Z

Hello, folks. I'm one of those long-time lurkers.
I've decided to conduct, as the title suggests, a quick and dirty survey in hopes of better understanding a problem I have (or rather, whether or not what I have is actually a problem).

Here's some context: I'm a Physics & Mathematics major, currently taking multi-variable. Lately, I've been unsatisfied with my understanding and usage of mathematics—mainly calculus. I've decided to go through what's been recommended as a much more rigorous Calculus textbook, Calculus by Michael Spivak. So far I'm really enjoying it, but it's taking me a long time to get through the exercises. I can be very meticulous about things like this and want to do every exercise through every chapter; I feel that there's benefit to actually doing them regardless of whether or not I look at the problem and think "Yeah, I can do this." Sometimes actually doing the problem is much more difficult than it seems, and I learn a lot from doing them. When flipping through the exercises, I also notice that—regardless of how well I think I know the material—there ends up being a section of exercises focused on something I've never heard of before; something very clever or, I think, mathematically enlightening, that's dependent on the exercises before it.

I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that the exercises of the first chapter alone had taken me hours upon hours upon hours of combined work. I consider myself slow when it comes to reading mathematics and physics literature—I have to carefully comb through all the concepts and equations and structure them intuitively in a way I see fit. I hate not having a very fundamental understanding of the things I'm working with.

At the same time, I read/hear people who apparently are familiar with multiple textbooks on the same subject. Familiar enough to judge whether or not it is a good textbook. Familiar enough to place how they fit on a hierarchy of textbooks on the same subject. I think "At the rate I'm going, it will take me a very long time to get through this."
So...

Here's (what I think is) my issue: I don't know whether or not I'm taking too long. Am I doing things inefficiently? Is there a better way to choose which exercises I do and don't work through so that I learn a similar amount of material in less time? Or is it just fine that I...
Rationality Habits I Learned at the CFAR Workshop
by elharo — 2013-03-10T14:15:51.757Z

Recently Leah Libresco asked attendees at the January CFAR Workshop, "What habits have people installed after workshops?" and that got me thinking that now was a good time to write up and review what I learned (or learned and already forgot). I thought that might be of some interest to folks here, and this is what follows.

What I Learned and Implemented

The most immediately useful thing I learned was the Pomodoro Technique, as I've written about here before. In addition to that, there were a number of small items that I'm continuing to work on.

First, I've become quite fond of the question "Does future me have a comparative advantage?" Especially for small items, if the answer is "No" (and it's no far more often than it's yes) then just do it right now. The more trivial the task, the more useful it is. For instance, today I asked myself that while standing in the bedroom wondering whether to take 30 seconds to move my ExOfficio Bugproof socks from the dresser to the correct box in the closet. (Answer from a few minutes ago: if I don't take my dog for a walk right now, he's going to pee all over the floor. Future me does have a comparative advantage of not having to clean up pee on the floor. The socks can wait.)

I've begun to notice my confusion and call it to conscious attention more often, though I suspect I learned this first from HpMOR and the sequences before the workshop. Example: when Leonard Susskind states that conservation of information is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics, I notice that I am confused because A) I have never heard of any such fundamental law of physics as information conservation B) Every definition of information I have ever heard indicates that information most certainly can be destroyed. So just what the heck is he talking about anyway? I am now making a conscious effort to research this topic rather than letting it slide by.

The workshop introduced me to the concepts of System 1 and System 2. System 1 is the faster, reactive, intuitive mind that uses heuristics and experience to react quickly. System 2 is the slower, analytical, logical, mathematical mind. I didn't immediately grok this or see how to apply it. However the workshop did convince me to read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, and I'm beginning to follow this. It could be useful going forward. I particularly like the examples given at the end o...
[SEQ RERUN] Formative Youth
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-10T05:42:18.393Z

Today's post, Formative Youth was originally published on 24 February 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

People underestimate the extent to which their own beliefs and attitudes are influenced by their experiences as a child.

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 On Not Having an Advance Abyssal Plan, 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.
Cognitive Load and Effective Donation
by Neotenic — 2013-03-10T03:11:14.161Z

(previous title: Very low cognitive load)

Trusting choices made by the same brain that turns my hot 9th grade teacher into a knife-bearing possum at the last second every damn night.

Sean Thomason

We can't trust brains when taken as a whole. Why should we trust their subareas?

Cognitive load is the load related to the executive control of working memory. Depending on what you are doing, the more parallel/extraneous cognitive load you have, the worse you'll do it. (The process may be the same as what the literature calls "Ego Depletion" or "system 2 depletion", the jury is still up on that)

If you go here and enter 0 as lower limit and 1.000.000 as upper limit, and try to keep the number in mind until you are done reading post and comments, you'll get a bit of load while you read this post.

Now you may process numbers verbally, visually, or both. More generally, for anything you keep in mind, you are likely allocating it in a part of the brain that is primarily concerned with a sensory modality, so it will have some "flavour","shape", "location", "sound", or "proprioceptual location". It is harder to consciously memorize things using odours, since those have shortcuts within the brain.

Let us in turn examine two domains in which understanding cognitive load can help you win: Moral Dilemmas and Personal Policy

Moral Games/Dilemmas

In Dictator game (you're given $20 and you can give any amount to a stranger and keep the rest) the effect of load is negligible.

In the tested versions of the Trolley problems (kill/indirectly kill/let die one to save five) people are likely to become less utilitarian when under non-visual load. It is assumed that higher functions of the brain (in VMPF cortex) - which integrate higher moral judgement with emotional taste buttons - fails to integrate, making the "fast thinking", emotional mode be the only one reacting.

Visual information about the problem brings into salience the gory aspect of killing someone, and other lower level features that incline non-utilitarian decisions. So when visual load requires you to memorize something else, like a bird drawing, you become more utilitarian since you fail to visualize the one person being killed (which we do more than the five) in as much gory detail. (Greene et al,2011)

(Bednar et al.2012) show that when playing two games simultaneously, the s

...
Meetup : Vienna Meetup #2
by Ratcourse — 2013-03-09T19:07:02.575Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vienna Meetup #2

WHEN:
13 April 2013 04:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Schottengasse 2, 1010 Innere Stadt (1.Bez)

WHEN: 13 April 2013 16:00

WHERE: Cafe Im Schottenstift (Schottengasse 2)

Agenda: we will be discussing developments since last meeting, future projects, and also have some nice and decent discussions regarding rational living.

Join our facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalityvienna/?fref=ts

Discussion article for the meetup : Vienna Meetup #2
Co-Working Collaboration to Combat Akrasia
by ShannonFriedman — 2013-03-09T18:17:04.977Z

Before I was very involved in the Less Wrong community, I heard that Eliezer was looking for people to sit with him while he worked, to increase writing productivity. I knew that he was doing important work in the world, and figured that this was the sort of contribution to improving humanity that I would like to make, which was within the set of things that would be easy and enjoyable for me.

So I got a hold of him and offered to come and sit with him, and did that once/week for about a year. As anticipated, it worked marvelously. I found it easy to sit and not talk, just getting my own work done. Eventually I became a beta reader for his "Bayes for Everyone Else" which is really great and helped me in my ability to estimate probabilities a ton. (Eliezer is still perfecting this work and has not yet released it, but you can find the older version here.)
In addition to learning the basics of Bayes from doing this, I also learned how powerful it is to have someone just to sit quietly with you to co-work on a regular schedule.
I’ve experimented with similar things since then, such as making skype dates with a friend to watch informational videos together. This worked for awhile until my friend got busy. I have two other recurring chat dates with friends to do dual n-back together, and those have worked quite well and are still going.
A client of mine, Mqrius, is working on his Master’s thesis and has found that the only way he has been able to overcome his akrasia so far is by co-working with a friend. Unfortunately, his friend does not have as much time to co-work as he’d like, so we decided to spend Mqrius’s counseling session today writing this Less Wrong post to see if we can help him and other people in the community who want to co-work over skype connect, since this will probably be much higher value to him as well as others with similar difficulties than the next best thing we could do with the time.
I encourage anyone who is interested in co-working, watching informational videos together, or any other social productivity experiments that can be done over skype or chat, to coordinate in the comments. For this to work best, I recommend being as specific as possible about the ideal co-working partner for you, in addition to noting if you are open to general co-working.
If you are specific, you are much more likely to succeed...
Rationalist fiction brainstorming funtimes
by Manfred — 2013-03-09T13:53:52.270Z

The title should make things clear enough, so let's start with my description of the target, rationalist fiction: fiction that tries to teach the audience rationalist cognitive skills by having characters model those skills for the reader.

So for example, Luminosity is to a large extent about the questions "What do I want?, What do I have?, and How can I best use the latter to get the former?" Oh, and using empiricism on magic.

Another example is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which goes more in-depth about the laundry list of human biases. In fact, many of the more iconic moments (measured by what I remember and what other people like to copy) are about biases to avoid, rather than about modeling good behavior.

This thread is about ideas, from general to specific, for rationalist fiction. I'll give some obvious examples.

General idea: having a rational character encountering magic or amazing technology is a great chance to showcase the power of empiricism. (Has anyone gotten on this one yet? :3 )

Story idea: Okay, so we take the Dresden Files universe, and our rational protagonist is some smart kid who just started a summer job as an assistant radio technician or something. It turns out he's got one in a hundred magical talent, enough to cut off his budding career, he manages to find the magic community, figures out just enough, embarks on heroic quest to run a magitech radio station. (Okay, this last bit isn't obvious - for one, more character development would probably have him wanting something else. For another, the obvious thing is to take over the world if Luminosity and HPMOR are anything to go by.)

Specific idea: A character could model the skill of testing stuff by testing stuff. When characters are performing a big search, have someone actually stop to think about false positives, or more generally "how could things be going wrong, and how can I prevent that?", and have it actually be a false positive once.

But really, there's an explosion of possibilities out there to explore, and I feel like we have "Rationalist meets magic. Rationalist does science to magic. Rationalist kicks butt with magic" fairly well-covered. We have all these different biases categorized, with corresponding right ways to do things, and there are plenty of good behaviors we can try to teach an audience without the empir...
Meetup : Vancouver!
by  — 2013-03-09T07:12:04.284Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver!

WHEN:
09 March 2013 03:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
2505 west broadway, vancouver bc

I haven't been able to think of a worthy topic, so we can have a rambling topicless general hangout meetup. I'm sure it will be much fun.

As is usual lately, 15:00 at Bennys on saturday. Look for a medium-sized group of geeks, and maybe text me if you're lost (778 714 0234). Sorry for the short notice.

Also, join us on our mailing list.

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver!
[SEQ RERUN] On Not Having an Advance Abyssal Plan
by MinibearRex — 2013-03-09T01:37:18.563Z

Today's post, On Not Having an Advance Abyssal Plan was originally published on 23 February 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Don't say that you'll figure out a solution to the worst case scenario if the worst case scenario happens. Plan it out in advance.

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 Fairness vs. Goodness, 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.
Meetup : [Reading Group, HAEFB-05]
by Sohum — 2013-03-08T21:36:42.641Z

Discussion article for the meetup : [Reading Group, HAEFB-05]

WHEN:
10 March 2013 11:00:00AM (+0000)

WHERE:
Trinity College JCR, Cambridge, UK

This week, we'll be continuing on in our meetup series of reading the new sequence, Highly Advanced Epistemology for Beginners. Specifically, we're upto Casual Reference, almost at the end of the Causality/Physics subsequence.
If this has gotten a bit stale for you, though, watch this space in the coming weeks for some new stuff we're planning. Oh yes, plans are happening. Muahahah, etc.
See you there!
-Sohum

Discussion article for the meetup : [Reading Group, HAEFB-05]
Meetup : Montreal Meetup - Biased Pandemic
by Paul_G — 2013-03-08T21:20:36.893Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal Meetup - Biased Pandemic

WHEN:
11 March 2013 05:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
655 Avenue du Président Kennedy, Montréal, QC H3A 3H9

Weekly meetup!

We're going to be doing biased boardgaming, specifically with the game Pandemic. We have two copies, so we should have enough for all members.

See you then!

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal Meetup - Biased Pandemic
Meetup : Moscow, Theory and Practice
by Yuu — 2013-03-08T18:32:04.260Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, Theory and Practice

WHEN:
17 March 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

Please use the following guide to get to the meetup: link. You need the second revolving door with the sign “Yandex Money” in Russian. We will meet you at 15:45 MSK with “LW” sign. And we will also check the entrance at 16:00 and 16:15, so please do not be late.

Main topics:

Short presentations. Two or three people will tell us about something interesting.

Practical rationality. We will train useful skills.

If you are going for the first time, you can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information. You can also use personal messages here, or drop a message at lw@lesswrong.ru to contact me for any reason.

Reports from previous sessions can be found here, in Russian, now with photos.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, Theory and Practice
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Paderborn, Moscow, Tokyo, Vancouver
by FrankAdamek — 2013-03-08T16:46:26.647Z

This summary was posted to LW main on March 1st. The following week's summary is posted here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Tokyo Meetup: 01 March 2013 07:00PM
Vancouver Personal Productivity: 02 March 2013 03:00PM
Moscow, Expanding rationality: 03 March 2013 04:00PM
(Buffalo NY) Sunday Meetup at Buffalo Labs: 03 March 2013 04:00PM
Paderborn Meetup March 6th: 06 March 2013 07:00PM
Vienna Meetup 9th March: 09 March 2013 04:00PM
London Meetup, 10th March: 10 March 2013 02:00PM
Brussels meetup: 16 March 2013 01:00PM
Munich Meetup: 01 April 2013 05:00PM

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

Austin, TX: 02 March 2019 01:30PM
Cambridge, UK LW Meetup [Reading Group, HAEFB-04]: 03 March 2013 11:00AM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

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 will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be 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, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

Whether or not there's curr...