trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Brain structure and the halo effect
by saph — 2012-02-18T15:10:08.331Z

Introduction

When people on LW want to explain a bias, they often turn to Evolutionary psychology. For example, Lukeprog writes

Human reasoning is subject to a long list of biases. Why did we evolve such faulty thinking processes? Aren't false beliefs bad for survival and reproduction?

I think that ''evolved faulty thinking processes'' is the wrong way to look at it and I will argue that some biases are the consequence of structural properties of the brain, which 'cannot' be affected by evolution.

Brain structure and the halo effect

I want to introduce a simple model, which relates the halo effect to a structural property of the brain. My hope is that this approach will be useful to understand the halo effect more systematically and shows that thinking in evolutionary terms is not always the best way to think about certain biases.

One crucial property of the brain is that it has to map a (essentially infinite) high-dimensional reality onto a finite low-dimensional internal representation. (If you know some Linear Algebra, you can think of this as a projection from a high-dimensional space into a low-dimensional space.) This is done more or less automatically by the limitation of our senses and brain's structure as a neural network.

An immediate consequence of this observation is that there will be many states of the world, which are mapped to an almost identical inner representation. In terms of computational efficiency it makes sense to use overlapping set of neurons with similar activation level to represent similar concepts. (This is also a consequence of how the brain actually builds representations from sense inputs.)

Now compare this to the following passage from here.

The halo effect is that perceptions of all positive traits are correlated. Profiles rated higher on scales of attractiveness, are also rated higher on scales of talent, kindness, honesty, and intelligence.

This shouldn't be a surprise, since 'positive' ('feels good') seems to be one of the evolutionary hard-wired concepts. Other concepts that we acquire during our life and associate with positive emotions, like kindness and honesty are mapped to 'nearby' neural structures. When one of those mental structures is activated, the 'closed ones' will be activated to a certain degree as well.

Since we differentiate concepts more when we are learning about a subject, the above reasoning sho...
Mini-review: 'Judgment and Decision Making as a Skill'
by lukeprog — 2012-02-18T10:42:16.936Z

A new book from Cambridge University Press describes the impetus of the forthcoming Rationality Group in its title: Judgment and Decision Making as a Skill. It begins:

Our scientific understanding of human judgment and decision making (JDM) has grown considerably over the past 60 years in terms of the normative benchmarks... by which we assess performance, the descriptive models we use to describe JDM, and the prescriptive models we offer to improve JDM...

...[But] how do we learn to make good decisions? How can we improve or aid our decision making? Fortunately, there is an emerging body of work that is interested in long-term and short-term changes in JDM skills... There is research on the acquisition of expertise in JDM, and training and aiding of JDM. Researchers more interested in short-term changes have begun to study learning of JDM tasks...

[We] introduce a new conception of JDM, seeing it as a dynamic skill rather than a static capacity...

Chapters 1 and 2 survey the evolution and neurobiology of JDM, while the chapters 3-5 discuss JDM in young children, adolescents, and the aged. Chapters 6-10 were the most interesting to me, because they concern the learning and improving of JDM skills.

In particular, chapter 7 discusses the use of causal Bayes nets to model JDM processes and thereby make better-informed choices among possible debiasing interventions, and chapter 8 discusses JDM in the context of skill-learning (from feedback). Chapter 9 reviews the ways in which JDM can be improved simply by communicating and representing information in particular ways. Chapter 10 reviews "procedures or devices that are intended to improve the quality of people's decisions."

Chapter 11 contains personal reflections on JDM as a skill from nine past presidents of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.

Overall, the book is a handy collection of review articles on JDM (what LW calls epistemic and instrumental rationality) written from a useful perspective. But it is not as useful as Stanovich's Rationality and the Reflective Mind, and I anticipate it being less useful than the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning.
[LINK] The NYT on Everyday Habits
by Alex_Altair — 2012-02-18T08:23:32.820Z

The New York Times just published this article on how companies use data mining and the psychology of habit formation to effectively target ads.

The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop — cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges.

It has some decent depth of discussion, including an example of the author actually using the concepts to stop a bad habit. The article is based on an upcoming book by the same author titled The Power of Habit.

I haven't seen emphasis of this particular phenomenon—habits consisting of a cue, routine, and reward—on Lesswrong. Do people think it's a valid, scientifically supported phenomenon? The article gives this impression but, of course, doesn't cite specific academic work on it. It ties in to the System 1/System 2 theory easily as a System 1 process. How much of the whole System 1 can be explained as an implementation of this cue, routine, reward process?

And most importantly, how can this fit into the procrastination equation as a tool to subvert akrasia and establish good habits?

Let's look at each of the four factors. If you've formed a habit, it means that the reward happened consistently, which means you have high expectancy. Given that it is a reward, the value is at least positive, but probably not large. Since habits mostly work on small time scales, delay is probably very small. And maybe increased habit formation means your impulsiveness is low. Each of these effects would increase motivation. In addition, because it's part of System 1, there is little energy cost to performing the habit, like there would be with many other conscious actions.

Does this explanation sound legitimate, or like an argument for the bottom line?

Personally, I can tell that context is a strong cue for behavior at work, school, and home. When I go into work, I'm automatically motivated to perform well, and that motivation remains for several ...
SI wants to hire a remote LaTeX guru
by lukeprog — 2012-02-18T05:39:51.383Z

The Singularity Institute needs to hire 1-2 people who are fluent in LaTeX to help us transform past and future SI publications from looking like this to looking like this.

As with the remote researcher positions, pay is hourly and starts at $14/hr but that will rise if the product is good. You must be available to work at least 20 hrs/week to be considered.

Perks:

Work from home, with flexible hours.

Age and credentials are irrelevant; only the product matters.

If you're interested, contact luke@intelligence.org and describe past LaTeX work you've done, with attached PDF examples.
Weekly LW Meetups: Brussels, Houston, Madison, Melbourne, Moscow, Philadelphia (2), Sydney
by FrankAdamek — 2012-02-18T00:07:43.048Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Jazz meetup in Philadelphia: 10 February 2012 06:00PM
First Brussels meetup: 11 February 2012 11:00AM
Moscow 11 February meetup: 11 February 2012 06:00PM
Houston Meetup - 2/12: 12 February 2012 02:00PM
Sydney Rationality meet-up No.2: 15 February 2012 06:00PM
Philadelphia LW: Macroeconomics crash course and general meetup: 15 February 2012 06:30PM
Ongoing Ohio Meetup: 19 February 2012 04:00PM
Tucson Meetup: 24 February 2012 07:00PM
Twin Cities South Metro: 06 March 2012 08:00PM
[Ohio/Washington DC] Interest in Reason Rally meetup?: 24 March 2012 04:14PM

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:

Madison Monday Meetup: 13 February 2012 06:30PM
Melbourne social meetup: 17 February 2012 06:30PM
Monthly Bay Area meetup: Berkeley: 18 February 2012 07:00PM

Also, the Salt Lake City group now has a website!

Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, 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).

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, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Southern California (Los Angel...
Not insane. Unsane.
by loup-vaillant — 2012-02-17T23:43:08.196Z

Edit :Excellent suggestions in the comments. Two of them stood out for me:

"Untaught" may be better. It is less connoted (if at all), conveys about the right meaning, and can be understood by about anyone (thanks, shminux).

Using a word to name a category can raise walls around it. In this case, we must be extra careful not to stigmatize the very people we'd like to join us (thanks, daenerys).

We often use "insane" to describe people whose behaviour or beliefs are below the sanity waterline. But as most must would agree here, you cannot call someone insane with a straight face just because he happens to believe in magic.

I'm currently watching Future by Design, a documentary featuring Jacque Fresco and the Venus Project. Jacque came up with this word, "unsane", to describe people who basically, aren't rational because they haven't been exposed to the right ideas yet. Which would be different from "insane", which is more about irrevocably irrational people.

I like this word, because there isn't the tone of accusation we find in "insane". This neutrality makes it easier to say that we can do something about it. Insanity should be eradicated like vermin. Unsanty on the other hand can be fixed.

So, do you think this word, "Unsanity" might be worth using?
Impressions from a panel discussion on AGI 
by Shmi — 2012-02-17T21:22:22.585Z

I went to this event to listen to Jaan Tallinn, Scott Aaronson and Don Eigler discuss the AGI, the Singularity and the [F]AI research. Not surprisingly, Jaan, whose ideas are significantly influenced by what EY preaches, advocated the urgent need for research into AGI friendliness as much as the AGI research proper.

Scott was rather more laid back, estimating that a "FOOMable" AGI is probably 10,000 years away, and that, while the AGI problem is already really really hard, the FAI problem is harder still, so expending significant effort on the FAI problem before we understand the AGI issues better is probably not a good use of resources.

Don, who makes atom-sized gates in his lab, suggested that the Moore's law will probably level out before the AGI becomes a reality. When asked, he said that he can see another 10^3-10^4 times improvement in chip complexity with technological innovations only, without the need for new scientific breakthroughs. This includes both the miniaturization of gates to near-atomic size and introducing 3D layouts with multiple interconnects. He expects the latter to be a significant breakthrough, provided the power consumption and dissipation issues are solved. 10^4 times corresponds to about 30-50 years given the current slope.

A large chunk of the discussion was rehashing the standard points about the FAI (Pascal's wager type of arguments and counterarguments, augmentation and upload as some ways around UFAI, etc.), all of which have been discussed here to no end, so I will not repeat it.

The video of the event will apparently be posted eventually, no time frame given. I have a marginal quality voice recording with my phone, available if anyone really wants to listen.

If any of the Vancouver LWers attended, please feel free to share your impressions.
A new (?) anthropic principle, and motivation thereof
by BrianNachbar — 2012-02-17T20:47:54.987Z

The discussions of anthropic principles that I've seen on LW and, say, Katja Grace's list, are limited to SIA and SSA. These both give some results that most people find unintuitive (Doomsday for SIA, presumptuous philosopher for SIA), and the debate between them seems to typically focus on which bullets are easier to bite. This seems strange to me, because a good universal prior should tell us which worlds we're most likely to be in without any dependency on intuition. What follows is my attempt to derive the correct anthropic principle in such a manner [1]. With some assumptions I find plausible, the result is something neither SIA nor SSA, resembling the former regarding doomsday and the latter regarding the presumptuous philosopher.

So far, I've only done the reasoning informally, and there are admittedly many places it could be fatally flawed. One assumes that one lives in a multiverse consisting of universes corresponding to programs on a universal Turing machine, each with prior probability inversely proportional to 2 to the power of the length of the program. One then updates on one's evidence, namely, one's experience [2]. I'll make a logical leap and assume that (it's as though) a conscious experience corresponds to a certain substring of output. We then take every possible output string ending with that substring, weight them equally (?), and take the sum over all such strings of the programs producing that string as a prefix of output, weighted by their prior probability. That is, each program ends up with posterior probability proportional to its prior probability times the number of times it produces the experience you just had.

Reading the wiki article on Solomonoff Induction as I write this, it looks like applying this process with your prior given by Solomonoff Induction will give you SIA (suggesting a new backronym?). This is where I become even more presumptuous. I take issue with the assumption that we necessarily find ourselves in a halting program. As far as I know, cosmologists don't think our universe is going to halt. Instead, I would suggest that all possible programs are running, unless they've halted. (Maybe the halting ones get restarted after they halt, maybe not). There are then infinitely many outputs that end with any given conscious experience, and the sum of their prior probabilities may not be finite. So, you e...
Meetup : Melbourne practical rationality meetup
by matt — 2012-02-17T18:43:07.320Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne practical rationality meetup

WHEN:
02 March 2012 07:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
55 walsh st, west melbourne, austraila

Practical rationality, as distinct from the social and rationality outreach meetups. Look for a social meetup on the 3rd Friday of each month.

Discussion:
http://groups.google.com/group/melbourne-less-wrong http://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=6a317

This meetup repeats on the 1st Friday of each month.

All welcome from 6:30pm. Call the phone number on the door and I'll let you in.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne practical rationality meetup
Meetup : Buenos Aires meetup: Saturday, February 25th, 4pm
by Pablo — 2012-02-17T17:57:06.548Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Buenos Aires meetup: Saturday, February 25th, 4pm

WHEN:
25 February 2012 04:00:00PM (-0300)

WHERE:
Starbucks Coffe, Florida 1, Buenos Aires, Argentina

This will be our second Buenos Aires LessWrong meetup. Our nominal discussion topic will be cognitive biases, though we'll keep things flexible so that the conversation can move naturally towards other topics of interest and relevance. If you read and like this blog. and live in BA or just happen to be visiting the city, do join us. It will be a great opportunity to meet like-minded folks in the area. We will be sitting upstairs; a copy of Greg Egan's Diaspora will be displayed at our table.

Discussion article for the meetup : Buenos Aires meetup: Saturday, February 25th, 4pm
Meetup : At the University of Chicago
by falenas108 — 2012-02-17T17:27:47.294Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Meetup at the University of Chicago

WHEN: 25 February 2012 01:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE: 1135 E. 57th Street Chicago, IL 60637

It's been a while since the last meetup, so we're having another one!

It'll be at the University of Chicago, in Hutch Commons from 1-4 PM.

The building itself is known as Reynold's Club, and Hutch Commons is a dining area found at the first door on the right as you walk in.

Go to the Chicago list host for my contact info if you have trouble finding us, or just PM me. I'll try to get a center table and a LW sign.

Discussion article for the meetup : Chicago Meetup at the University of Chicago
Hassa Deega Ebowai or the paradox of religiousness in front of adversity
by  — 2012-02-17T16:01:13.060Z

Hasa Diga Ebowai (["Does it mean "no worries for the rest of our lives?"" *"Kinda"*](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=AhxChl9bGl0)) is a song from Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "The Book of Mormon", an affectionate parody of religion in general. A lot of the comedy in that song is drawn from the unexpectedness of the reaction to adversity displayed within. Do listen to it before proceeding.

The stereotype is that, when troubled and in a position of weakness, where they have no power over their fates, humans tend to turn towards the LORD for consolation. Especially if the religion promises a good afterlife to the patient, meek and submissive, and a bad one to the defiant and insolent. Even when it doesn't (such as in most denominations of Judaism, AFAIK), people are encouraged to not "curse His rotten" name when everything goes wrong for them and they can't do anything about it (see book of Job).

The other side of the stereotype is that, the more powerful, confident and knowledgeable humans become, the less religious they become. This can also be seen on the time axis of a single individual's existence when, young, they care little about sin and the afterlife, and, old, they do nothing but pray all day to make up for all the awful stuff they did (and there might be some genuinely awful behavior in there).

So I've been trolling Wikipedia for examples of demographics and populations that would have commonly practiced the cursing of the LORD, but I only found reference to vikings doing that, in a "I won't believe in you, but I will believe in me, and live by my own strength" kind of way, which isn't exactly what I'm looking for.

Does anyone here know anything about these different ways people react to adversity, and what they mean from a rationalistic standpoint?
A defense of formal philosophy
by lukeprog — 2012-02-17T14:45:17.024Z

Gregory Wheeler has written an eloquent new defense of formal philosophy.

Quotes:

...formal epistemology is an interdisciplinary research program that includes work by philosophers, mathematicians, computer scientists, statisticians, psychologists, operations researchers, and economists which aims to give mathematical and sometimes computational representations of, along with sound strategies for reasoning about, knowledge, belief, judgment and decision making.

...

Why... bother being so formal? [Rich] Thomason, commenting on philosophers who view formal methods as a distraction to real philosophical advancement, observed that the only real advantage that we have over the great philosophers of the past are the new methods that we have at our disposal. Probability. First-order logic. Calculus. The number zero. It is hard to imagine improving on Aristotle without resorting to methods that were simply unavailable to him. Knowing just this much about history, a better question is this: why limit your options?

...

The problem with aspiring to counterexample-proof philosophy without taking into account either formal or empirical constraints is that the exercise can quickly devolve into a battle of wits rather than a battle of ideas. And the problem is only compounded by pseudo-formal philosophy — the unfortunate practice of using formal logic informally — because this encourages philosophers to describe rather than define the fundamental operations of their theories. Memories are ‘accessed in the right way’; justified beliefs are ‘based’ on one’s ‘evidence’; coherent beliefs ‘hang together’. But, like a bump in a rug carefully pushed from one corner of a crowded room to another, this reliance on pseudo-formalisms to avoid any and all counterexamples inevitably means that the hard, unsolved philosophical problems are artfully avoided rather than addressed. At its worst, rampant counterexample avoidance turns philosophy into little more than a performance art.

But, one way to arrest this slide is by constraining epistemological theories by a combination of empirical evidence and formal models. For if you replace those fudged terms with a formal model, or a provably correct algorithm, and hem

...
Water Fluoridation
by Alexei — 2012-02-17T04:33:00.064Z

I've recently learned about alleged dangers to drinking fluoridated water. Amongst them is increased rate of cancer and lowering of IQ. Interestingly enough, wiki doesn't mention this at all, but searching for it brings up a decent amount of (what look like) reasonable results. I am really curious about this, and want to learn more about this. I was wondering if anyone on LW has already conducted a research literature investigation on this topic, or if you just have tips/advice on what to pay attention to when I read the literature.

Thanks!
Seeking education
by APMason — 2012-02-17T00:55:11.064Z

This will not be a long post; I have a simple question to ask: if you wanted to educate yourself to graduate level in mathematics, but didn't actually want to go to university, what would you do? I would ask for text-book recommendations, but I don't want to limit your responses (however, bear in mind that the wikipedia articles on, say, cardinality or well-ordering go over my head – they may skim my hairline, but over they go). Also bear in mind that while I personally have A-levels (British qualifications) in both Maths and Further Maths (which is to say, I know some calculus at least), there are probably plenty of people on lesswrong who don't and who desire the same information – so assume as much ignorance as you feel necessary (it's a shame, actually, that there isn't a sequence here on lesswrong for maths). What do you advise (if you think the query ill-defined, I would like to know that as well)?