trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Rational Groups Kick Ass
by talisman — 2009-04-25T02:37:31.992Z

Reply to: Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great
Belaboring of: Rational Me Or We?
Related to: A Sense That More Is Possible

The success of Yvain's post threw me off completely. My experience has been opposite to what he describes: x-rationality, which I've been working on since the mid-to-late nineties, has been centrally important to successses I've had in business and family life. Yet the LessWrong community, which I greatly respect, broadly endorsed Yvain's argument that:

There seems to me to be approximately zero empirical evidence that x-rationality has a large effect on your practical success, and some anecdotal empirical evidence against it.

So that left me pondering what's different in my experience. I've been working on these things longer than most, and am more skilled than many, but that seemed unlikely to be the key.

The difference, I now think, is that I've been lucky enough to spend huge amounts of time in deeply rationalist organizations and groups--the companies I've worked at, my marriage, my circle of friends.

And rational groups kick ass.

An individual can unpack free will or figure out that the Copenhagen interpretation is nonsense. But I agree with Yvain that in a lonely rationalist's individual life, the extra oomph of x-rationality may well be drowned in the noise of all the other factors of success and failure.

But groups! Groups magnify the importance of rational thinking tremendously:

Whereas a rational individual is still limited by her individual intelligence, creativity, and charisma, a rational group can promote the single best idea, leader, or method out of hundreds or thousands or millions.

Groups have powerful feedback loops; small dysfunctions can grow into disaster by repeated reflection, and small positives can cascade into massive success.

In a particularly powerful feedback process, groups can select for and promote exceptional members.

Groups can establish rules/norms/patterns that 1) directly improve members and 2) counteract members' weaknesses.

Groups often operate in spaces where small differences are crucial. Companies with slightly better risk management are currently preparing to dominate the financial space. Countries with slightly more rational systems have generated the 0.5% of extra annual growth that leads, over centuries, to dramatically improved ways of life.

...
What's in a name? That which we call a rationalist…
by badger — 2009-04-24T23:53:51.129Z

Who are we? I've heard a couple of comments about what Less Wrong members should be called lately. "Rationalist" is the word most commonly used, although use of that term might presume we are something we are not. "Aspiring rationalist" avoids that problem, but is awkward to use casually. Something unique to this site might insulate us from the rest of the world, however.

What are your suggestions? Please make one suggestion per comment to facilitate voting.

Update: I think "Less Wrong reader" works well for referring to members of this site as members of this site, but what are we trying to be in a broader sense? Maybe my intent in asking for suggestions was unclear. Is there a word that could replace "rationalist" in the following titles:

Tell Your Rationalist Story

The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist

Selecting Rationalist Groups

Rationalist Poetry Fans, Unite!

Tarski Statements as Rationalist Exercise

or is "rationalist" just the least bad term?
Less Wrong: Progress Report
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-04-24T23:49:28.000Z

Less Wrong is emerging from beta as bugs continue to get fixed. This is an open-source project, and if any Python-fluent programmers are willing to contribute a day or two of work, more would get done faster.

The character of the new site is becoming clear. The pace of commenting is higher; the threaded comments encourage short replies and continuing conversations. The pace of posting exceeds my fondest hopes - apparently not being able to post automatically on OB was a much greater barrier to potential contributors than I realized.

We've had 12,428 comments so far on 113 articles, 100 of them posted since contributing was enabled for all users over 20 karma on March 5th.

Browsing to the Top Scoring articles on Less Wrong will give you an idea of how things are developing. A quick view of all posts can be found here, with the current top scorer being "Cached Selves" by Salamon and Rayhawk, followed by "Rational Me or We?" by Hanson. If this looks like a blog you like, go ahead and add it to your blog roll now, please!

Yvain has emerged as a prolific and highly upvoted contributor with too many excellent posts to mention, but The Apologist and the Revolutionary (on brain damage and rationalization) and The Least Convenient Possible World (an exercise in not avoiding painful questions) are two places to start.

Our most highly commented thread was And's Closet survey #1: What do you believe that most people on this site don't? with 314 comments.

Johnicholas brings us Information Cascades showing how taking other people's ratings into account in your own vote vastly decreases the information content...

...which inspired Marcello to build the anti-kibitzer Firefox extension that hides comment authors and vote counts. (We'd like to integrate these sorts of features into the site, but we need more Python programmers!)

Alicorn observes that systems of rationality must have two tiers: an ideal tier, and a tier that can actually be implemented (analyzing consequentialism as an example).

Kaj_Sotala asks whether blind review slows down science by preventing old scientists from championing new ideas.

MBlume asks what resources are available for raising young rationalists.

Jimrandomh notes that support can sound like dissent, creating a false picture of the overall reaction, and suggest

...
This Didn't Have To Happen
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-04-23T19:07:48.215Z

My girlfriend/SO's grandfather died last night, running on a treadmill when his heart gave out.

He wasn't signed up for cryonics, of course. She tried to convince him, and I tried myself a little the one time I met her grandparents.

"This didn't have to happen. Fucking religion."

That's what my girlfriend said.

I asked her if I could share that with you, and she said yes.

Just so that we're clear that all the wonderful emotional benefits of self-delusion come with a price, and the price isn't just to you.
Fix it and tell us what you did
by JulianMorrison — 2009-04-23T14:54:10.191Z

The main danger for LW is that it could become rationalist-porn for daydreamers.

I suggest a pattern of counterattack:

Find a nonrational aspect of your nature that is hindering you right now.

Determine privately to fix it.

Set a short deadline. Do the necessary work.

Write it up on LW at the deadline. Whether or not it worked.

(This used to be a comment, here.)
Go Forth and Create the Art!
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-04-23T01:37:14.442Z

I have said a thing or two about rationality, these past months. I have said a thing or two about how to untangle questions that have become confused, and how to tell the difference between real reasoning and fake reasoning, and the will to become stronger that leads you to try before you flee; I have said something about doing the impossible.

And these are all techniques that I developed in the course of my own projects—which is why there is so much about cognitive reductionism, say—and it is possible that your mileage may vary in trying to apply it yourself. The one's mileage may vary. Still, those wandering about asking "But what good is it?" might consider rereading some of the earlier posts; knowing about e.g. the conjunction fallacy and how to spot it in an argument, hardly seems esoteric. Understanding why motivated skepticism is bad for you can constitute the whole difference, I suspect, between a smart person who ends up smart and a smart person who ends up stupid. Affective death spirals consume many among the unwary...

Yet there is, I think, more absent than present in this "art of rationality"—defeating akrasia and coordinating groups are two of the deficits I feel most keenly. I've concentrated more heavily on epistemic rationality than instrumental rationality, in general. And then there's training, teaching, verification, and becoming a proper experimental science based on that. And if you generalize a bit further, then building the Art could also be taken to include issues like developing better introductory literature, developing better slogans for public relations, establishing common cause with other Enlightenment subtasks, analyzing and addressing the gender imbalance problem...

But those small pieces of rationality that I've set out... I hope... just maybe...

I suspect—you could even call it a guess—that there is a barrier to getting started, in this matter of rationality. Where by default, in the beginning, you don't have enough to build on. Indeed so little that you don't have a clue that more exists, that there is an Art to be found. And if you do begin to sense that more is possible—then you may just instantaneously go wrong. As David Stove observes—I'm not going to link it, because it deserves its own post—most "great ...
Escaping Your Past
by Z_M_Davis — 2009-04-22T21:15:14.171Z

Followup to: Sunk Cost Fallacy

Related to: Rebelling Against Nature, Shut Up and Do the Impossible!

(expanded from my comment)

"The world is weary of the past—
O might it die or rest at last!"
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, from "Hellas"

Probability theory and decision theory push us in opposite directions. Induction demands that you cannot forget your past; the sunk cost fallacy demands that you must. Let me explain.

An important part of epistemic rationality is learning to be at home in a material universe. You are not a magical fount of originality and free will; you are a physical system: the same laws that bind the planets in their orbits, also bind you; the same sorts of regularities in these laws that govern the lives of rabbits or aphids, also govern human societies. Indeed, in the last analysis, free will as traditionally conceived is but a confusion—and bind and govern are misleading metaphors at best: what is bound as by ropes can be unbound with, say, a good knife; what is "bound" by "nature"—well, I can hardly finish the sentence, the phrasing being so absurd!

Epistemic rationality alone might be well enough for those of us who simply love truth (who love truthseeking, I mean; the truth itself is usually an abomination), but some of my friends tell me there should be some sort of payoff for all this work of inference. And indeed, there should be: if you know how something works, you might be able to make it work better. Enter intrumental rationality, the art of doing better. We all want to better, and we all believe that we can do better...

But we should also all know that beliefs require evidence.

Suppose you're an employer interviewing a jobseeker for a position you have open. Examining the jobseeker's application, you see that she was expelled from four schools, was fired from her last three jobs, and was convicted of two felonies. You ask, "Given your record, I regret having let you enter the building. Why on Earth should I hire you?"

And the jobseeker replies, "But all those transgressions are in the past. Sunk costs can't play into my decision theory—it would hardly be helping for me to go sulk in a gutter somewhere. I can only seek to maximize expected utility now, and right now that means working ever so hard for you, O dearest future boss! Tsuyoku naritai!"

And you say, "Why should I believe...
Proposal: Use the Wiki for Concepts
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-04-22T05:21:49.377Z

So... the longer I think about this Wiki thing, the more it seems like a really good idea - a missing piece falling into place.

Here's my proposal, which I turn over to this, the larger community that suggested the Wiki in the first place:

The Wiki should consist mainly of short concept introductions plus links to longer posts, rather than original writing. Original writing goes in a post on Less Wrong, which may get voted up and down, or commented on; and this post should reference previous work by linking to the Wiki rather than other posts, to the extent that the concepts referred to can be given short summaries. The intent is to set up a resonance that bounces back and forth between the Wiki (short concept summaries that can be read standalone, and links to more info for in-depth exploration) and the posts (which make the actual arguments and do the actual analyses).

My role model here is TV Tropes, which manages to be, shall we say, really explorable, because of the resonance between the tropes, and the shows/events in which those tropes occur, and the other tropes that occur in those shows/events. And furthermore, you know that the trope explanation itself will be a short bite of joy, and that reading the further references is optional.

There would be exceptions to the "no original research" rule for projects that were multi-editor and not easily prosecuted through comments - for example, a project to make a list of all posts with one-sentence summaries in chronological order.

There are also obvious exceptions to the "link to the wiki" rule, such as for any case where it really was futile to reference anything except the complete argument; or where you wanted to talk about part of the argument, rather than the general concept argued; or when you wanted to talk about a conversational event that happened in a particular post.

I would suggest that the general format of a Wiki entry be a short summary / definition (that can maybe gloss or list some of the arguments if there's room, or even give the argument if it can be put really briefly), with the body of this being no more than a screenful as a general rule. Then links to posts, with descriptions (for each post) of why that post is relevant or what it has to say - probably one or two sentences, as a rule. Then references to outside posts on the same topic - although if the best r...
LessWrong Boo Vote (Stochastic Downvoting)
by Vladimir_Nesov — 2009-04-22T01:18:01.692Z

Related to: Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism.

I wrote a script for the greasemonkey extension for Firefox, implementing less painful downvoting. It inserts a button "Vote boo" in addition to "Vote up" and "Vote down" for each comment. Pressing this button has 30% chance of resulting in downvoting the comment, which is on average equivalent to taking 0.3 points of rating. If pressing the button once has no effect, don't press it twice: the action is already performed, resulting in one of the two possible outcomes.

The idea is to lower the level of punishment from downvoting, thus making it easier to downvote average mediocre comments, not just remarkably bad ones. Systematically downvoting mediocre comments should make their expected rating negative, creating an incentive to focus more on making high-quality comments, and punishing systematic mediocrity. At the same time, low penalty for average comments (implemented through stochastic downvoting) allows to still make them freely, which is essential for supporting a discussion. Contributors may see positive rating of good comments as currency for which they can buy a limited number of discussion-supporting average comments.

The "Vote boo" option is not to be taken lightly, one should understand a comment before declaring it mediocre. If you are not sure, don't vote. If comment is visibly a simple passing remark, or of mediocre quality, press the button.
UC Santa Barbara Rationalists Unite - Saturday, 6PM
by MBlume — 2009-04-22T00:23:12.630Z

Anna Salamon and I are calling for a Less Wrong meetup here in sunny Santa Barbara. Anna and Steve Rayhawk, Less Wrong's most successful (and so far, only) writing duo are on their way through SB, and I know there's a few LWers hiding in Isla Vista and in Santa Barbara. We'll be meeting at the college of creative studies building on the UCSB campus, right between Santa Rosa dorms and the Multicultural Center. I'll also be inviting some folks from the campus secular group, SURE (Scientific Understanding and Reason Enrichment).

You'll also find the event listed on Facebook -- feel free to RSVP there.

Definitely looking forward to seeing you all =).
Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-04-21T02:44:52.788Z

Previously in series: My Way
Followup to: The Sin of Underconfidence

Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves.

Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is happening even now. It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of speech they saw ongoing. But into this garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little—or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting. (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions—for then the fool dominates conversations.)

So the garden is tainted now, and it is less fun to play in; the old inhabitants, already invested there, will stay, but they are that much less likely to attract new blood. Or if there are new members, their quality also has gone down.

Then another fool joins, and the two fools begin talking to each other, and at that point some of the old members, those with the highest standards and the best opportunities elsewhere, leave...

I am old enough to remember the USENET that is forgotten, though I was very young. Unlike the first Internet that died so long ago in the Eternal September, in these days there is always some way to delete unwanted content. We can thank spam for that—so egregious that no one defends it, so prolific that no one can just ignore it, there must be a banhammer somewhere.

But when the fools begin their invasion, some communities think themselves too good to use their banhammer for—gasp!—censorship.

After all—anyone acculturated by academia knows that censorship is a very grave sin... in their walled gardens where it costs thousands and thousands of dollars to enter, and students fear their professors' grading, and heaven forbid the janitors should speak up in the middle of a colloquium.

It is easy to be naive about the evils of censorship when you already live in a carefully kept garden. Just like it is easy to be naive about the universal virtue of unconditional nonviolent pacifism, when your country already has armed soldiers on the borders, and your city already has police. It costs you nothing to be righteous, so long as the police stay on their jobs.

The...
Masochism vs. Self-defeat
by Psychohistorian — 2009-04-20T21:20:50.815Z

Follow up to: Is masochism necessary?, Stuck in the middle with Bruce

Masochism has two very different meanings: enjoyment of pain, and pursuit (not enjoyment) of suffering.

As a rather blunt example of this distinction, consider a sexual masochist. If his girlfriend ties him up and beats him, he'll experience pain, but he certainly won't suffer; he'll probably enjoy himself immensely. Put someone with vanilla sexual tastes in his place, and he would experience both pain and suffering.

Bruce-like behaviour is best understood as pursuit of suffering. People undermine themselves or set themselves up to lose. They may do it so that they have a comfortable excuse, or because they are used to failing and afraid of being happy, or for many other reasons. Most of us do this to some degree, however slight, and it's something we want to avoid.1 Pursuit of suffering, quite simply, gets in the way of winning, and, much like akratic behaviour, it is something that we should try desperately to find and destroy, because we should be happier without it.

This is very, very different from enjoyment of pain. If you like getting beaten up, or spicy foods, or running marathons, this has no effect on whether you win; these become a kind of winning. The fact that these activities cause suffering in some people is wholly irrelevant. For those who enjoy them, they create happiness, and obtaining them is, in a sense, a form of winning. Because of this, there's no reason to try to catch ourselves engaging in them or to worry about engaging in them less. It does not seem like people would be happier if they lost these prefereces.2

Indeed, given that they require some level of initial exposure, and (in the sexual case) have strong social taboos against them, it seems quite likely that masochistic behaviour isn't engaged in enough, though I admit I may be going too far.

Edit: As a point of clarification, "Bruce-like" behaviour may be overbroad. Some people set themselves up to lose because, for whatever reason, they genuinely like losing. That isn't pursuit of suffering, because there's no suffering. However, we do sometimes undermine ourselves when we want to win. The precise cause of this is, for my purposes, immaterial. This is what I'm referring to by "pursuit of suffering," and my entire point is that it is quite distinct from enjoyment or pursuit...
The Sin of Underconfidence
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-04-20T06:30:03.826Z

There are three great besetting sins of rationalists in particular, and the third of these is underconfidence. Michael Vassar regularly accuses me of this sin, which makes him unique among the entire population of the Earth.

But he's actually quite right to worry, and I worry too, and any adept rationalist will probably spend a fair amount of time worying about it. When subjects know about a bias or are warned about a bias, overcorrection is not unheard of as an experimental result. That's what makes a lot of cognitive subtasks so troublesome—you know you're biased but you're not sure how much, and you don't know if you're correcting enough—and so perhaps you ought to correct a little more, and then a little more, but is that enough? Or have you, perhaps, far overshot? Are you now perhaps worse off than if you hadn't tried any correction?

You contemplate the matter, feeling more and more lost, and the very task of estimation begins to feel increasingly futile...

And when it comes to the particular questions of confidence, overconfidence, and underconfidence—being interpreted now in the broader sense, not just calibrated confidence intervals—then there is a natural tendency to cast overconfidence as the sin of pride, out of that other list which never warned against the improper use of humility or the abuse of doubt. To place yourself too high—to overreach your proper place—to think too much of yourself—to put yourself forward—to put down your fellows by implicit comparison—and the consequences of humiliation and being cast down, perhaps publicly—are these not loathesome and fearsome things?

To be too modest—seems lighter by comparison; it wouldn't be so humiliating to be called on it publicly, indeed, finding out that you're better than you imagined might come as a warm surprise; and to put yourself down, and others implicitly above, has a positive tinge of niceness about it, it's the sort of thing that Gandalf would do.

So if you have learned a thousand ways that humans fall into error and read a hundred experimental results in which anonymous subjects are humiliated of their overconfidence—heck, even if you've just read a couple of dozen—and you don't know exactly how overconfident you are—then yes, you might genuinely be in danger of nudging ...