trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meta: Meetup Section of the Site
by Spencer_Sleep — 2011-04-12T18:34:40.515Z

Recently there has been an explosion in the number of posts about meetups. I think this is a great thing, as it seems to me like one of the best uses of this site would be to facilitate the formation of rationality groups. The problem with this is that they're starting to take over the main page, to the extent that currently upon going to the main page they are all one sees without scrolling down.

To solve this (perhaps trivial) problem, and more importantly to make the posts themselves more effective, I propose the creation of a section of this site devoted to the creation of and discussion about meetups/meetup groups. I realize the wiki catalogue of groups exists, but I have 2 problems with it. First of all, it is fairly out of the way. Fewer people use the wiki than the main site, and not everyone who uses the wiki reads all the links on the right side. I know I don't. I only found the meetup page because I am one of the organizers of the Toronto group, and I did a Google search of lesswrong looking for posts about meetups. Secondly, the wiki format (compared to the blog post format) is far less conducive to discussion, and gives no priority to newer posts, something we would want for a meetup section to make it easier to start a group. It also gives no way for people to indicate if they are going to be attending a meeting, something that is useful if the venue requires a reservation.

As an organizer, I want to posting on the main page about each meetup, so that we keep getting new members. That being said, I don't want to clog up the main part of the site with posts that only apply to 10 people, most of whom already know everything the post is going to say. The only compromise I can think of is a section of the site devoted to meetups. I am by no means a website designer, so I don't know if this is the best solution or if there is something simpler and more efficient I am overlooking.

This post is aimed mainly at the moderators, as they are the ones who would have to implement anything we come up with, but input from everyone is appreciated. Let me know if you think this is the best idea since sliced bread, or if (far more likely) you think it's highly unnecessary.
Language, intelligence, rationality
by curiousepic — 2011-04-12T17:04:58.460Z

Rationality requires intelligence, and the kind of intelligence that we use (for communication, progress, FAI, etc.) runs on language.

It seems that the place we should start is optimizing language for intelligence and rationality. One of SIAI's proposals includes using Lojban to interface between humans and an FAI. And of course, I should hope the programming language used to build a FAI would be "rational". But it would seem to me that the human-generated priors, correct epistemic rationality, decision theory, metaethics, etc. all depend on using a language that sufficiently rigorously maps to our territory.

Are "naturally evolved" languages such as English sufficient, with EY-style taboos and neologisms? Or are they sick to the core?

Please forgive and point me towards previous discussion or sequences about this topic.
The Singularity as Religion (yes/no links)
by lukeprog — 2011-04-12T16:55:22.827Z

The Cult of Kurzweil

The Singularity as Religion

Rapture of the Nerds, Not

My own opinion is that it's not worth much to argue over the boundaries around a vague term like 'religion,' and of course the question should not be 'Does the Singularity hypothesis share some features with religious hypotheses' but instead 'Is the Singularity hypothesis plausible, and what are its likely consequences?'
NEW TIME: Sydney Less Wrong meetup, 23/4, 3PM
by meta_ark — 2011-04-12T13:12:05.935Z

Hi everyone! There was an attempt for a Sydney (Australia) Less Wrong meetup a while ago, which failed, which was sad. So I'm starting a new one!

I'll definitely be at the meetup for three hours, regardless of who else is able to make it. So this is definitely going ahead, no matter what.

Place: James Squire Bar (22 The Promenade, King Street Wharf)

Date: Saturday, 23rd of April

Time: 3PM - 6PM (note new time)

I'll have a Less Wrong sign on the table and will probably be working on a uni assignment or reading Godel, Escher, Bach.

Hope to see you there!
"Is there a God" for noobs (followup)
by loup-vaillant — 2011-04-12T09:56:12.564Z

After having submitted it here, I published my essay on my web site, then submitted it to reddit (on r/religion and on r/atheism respectively). While I was very pleased by Less Wrong (your feedback were quite informative), reddit was quite… disappointing.

On r/atheism, my essay was ignored into oblivion in less than an hour. I guess there's just too much activity there, and I got lost in the flood. There's one comment though, which lead me to seriously question my use of the word "universal". I feel that "truth is universal", though accurate, doesn't sound obvious enough. And I'd like to avoid this heavy dependency.

On r/religion, my essay is still in the front page. There are a few votes (5 ups besides my own, and 2 or 3 downs). No comments at all. I guess there's too little activity here.

Overall, I'm now confident this essay is now good enough for my family to read.
On Debates with Trolls
by prase — 2011-04-12T08:46:25.853Z

One of the best achievements of the LessWrong community is our high standard of discussion. More than anywhere else, people here are actively trying to interpret others charitatively, argue to the point, not use provocative or rude language, apologise for inadvertent offenses while not being overtly prone to take offense themselves, avoid their own biases and fallacies instead seeking them in others, and most importantly, find the truth instead of winning the argument. Maybe the greatest attribute of this approach is its infectivity - I have observed several newcomers to change their discussing habits for better in few weeks. However, not everybody is susceptible to the LW standards and our attitude produces somewhat bizarre results when confronted with genuine trolls.

Recent posts about epistemology1 have all generated large number of replies; in fact, the discussions were among the largest in the last few months. People have commented there (yes, I too am guilty) even if it was clear that the author of the posts doesn't actually react to our arguments. After he was rude and had admitted to do it on purpose. After commiting several fallacies, after generating an unreasonable amount of text of mediocre to low quality, after saying that he is neither trying to convince anyone nor he is willing to learn anything nor he aims for agreement. In short, perhaps all symptoms of trolling were present, and still, people were repeatedly patiently explaining what's wrong with the author's position. Which reaction is, I must admit, sort of amazing - but on the other hand, it is hard to deny that the whole discussion was detrimental to the quality of LW content and was mostly a waste of time.

So, here is the question: why didn't we apply the don't feed the troll meme, as would probably happen much sooner on most forums? I have several hypotheses on that.

1. We are unable to recognise trolls for lack of training. The first hypothesis is quite improbable, given that the concerned troll was downvoted to oblivion2, but still possible. There are not many trolls on LW and perhaps it is difficult to believe that someone is actively seeking that sort of confrontation. I have never understood the psychology of trolls - I try to avoid combative arguments instinctively and find it hard to imagine why somebody would intentionally try to create one. Perhaps a manifestation of the typical...
Modeling sleep patterns
by pdf23ds — 2011-04-12T02:02:33.923Z

My sleep is unpredictable. Not in a technical sense, but a colloquial one. To be literal, I have no idea how to predict my sleep. I just as often sleep through the day as I do through the night. My sleep itself, as far as a sleep study can tell, is normal. I can vaguely say, 60% confidence, if I'm likely to fall asleep in a given 3-4 hour period, and occasionally I will be fairly sure, 80% confidence, 6-10 hours beforehand, of a 1-2 hour period. I can similarly predict the length of my sleep (which is relatively normal--generally distributed 7, 8, 9.5, 13 hours at .1, .4, .6, .9).

My sleep is seriously disturbed. Without understanding the process behind my sleep, without being able to predict it days beforehand and understand the variables behind it, I find it impossible to wake up at a consistent time every day (+/- 8 hours), despite years of trying, which makes it extremely hard to hold down a job, or do dozens of other normal things. There could be a profession that I could make my sleep work with, but I'm still searching for it.

So I ask you readers: Is there some sort of pattern detecting thing, whose name perhaps includes something like "markov" or "kolmogorov" or "bayesian", that could automatically take a time series data and predict the next values based on an unknown, complex model?

So, I could like enter the times I go to sleep and wake up, and when I have caffeine or I exercise, and maybe other things, and it would puzzle out how my sleep works and forecast my next few sleep cycles?

To have an accurate tool like that would transform my life.

"Hidden Markov models" comes to mind, but at first glance I don't see how a sleep model would count as a Markov process, given that you have to factor in sleep debt, time of day (because of sunlight), and perhaps other variables. But then I know nothing about HMMs.

Also, this is my first post. Is this the sort of thing that goes better in LessWrong or Less Wrong Discussion?
It is OK to publicly make a mistake and change your mind
by JGWeissman — 2011-04-12T01:24:21.227Z

At a recent meetup, we tried having a structured discussion in which we would all choose to talk about a belief that influences our behavior, talk about something we protect, or talk about a mistake we once made and have corrected. And it seemed that people thought it would require exceptional bravery to choose to talk about one's mistake. Elsewhere on Less Wrong, people are concerned about retaining the ability to edit a comment expressing a position they later reconsider and think is wrong.

My first reaction to all of this is that we need a group norm so that it doesn't require bravery to admit a mistake, or to leave a record of previously held positions. My second reaction is that we do in fact have such a norm. Comments expressing a change in position, that accept counter arguments and refutations, get up voted. Old comments reflecting the old wrong position are generally not down voted for being wrong. The problem is not how we treat people that make mistakes, but that people have inaccurate anticipations of how we will react.

So, to everyone who is worried about this, I want to say: It's OK. You can admit your mistakes. You can make a mistake and change your mind. We, the community, will applaud your growth, celebrate your new strength, and leave your mistake in the past where it belongs.
Anthropics makes sense with shorter people
by KatjaGrace — 2011-04-11T22:58:03.869Z

Reproduced from Meteuphoric by request.

Often people think that various forms of anthropic reasoning require you to change your beliefs in ways other than conditionalizing on evidence. This is false, at least in the cases I know of. I shall talk about Frank Arntzenius' paper Some Problems for Conditionalization and Reflection [gated] because it explains the issue well, though I believe his current views agree with mine.

He presents five thought experiments: Two Roads to Shangri La, The Prisoner, John Collins's Prisoner, Sleeping Beauty and Duplication. In each of them, it seems the (arguably) correct answer violates van Fraassen's reflection principle, which basically says that if you expect to believe something in the future without having been e.g. hit over the head between now and then, you should believe it now. For instance the thirder position in Sleeping Beauty seems to violate this principle because before the experiment Beauty believes there is a fifty percent chance of heads, and that when she wakes up she will think there is a thirty three percent chance. Arntzenius argued that these seemingly correct answers really are the correct ones, and claimed that they violate the reflection principle because credences can evolve in two ways other than by conditionalization.

First he said credences can shift, for instance through time. I know that tomorrow I will have a higher credence in it being Monday than I do today, and yet it would not be rational for me to increase my credence in it being Monday now on this basis. They can also 'spread out'. For instance if you know you are in Fairfax today, and that tomorrow a perfect replica of your brain experiencing Fairfax will be made and placed in a vat in Canberra, tomorrow your credence will go from being concentrated in Fairfax to being spread between there and Canberra. This is despite no damage having been done to your own brain. As Arntzenius pointed out, such an evolution of credence looks like quite the opposite of conditionalization, since conditionalization consists of striking out possibilities that your information excludes - it never opens up new possibilities.

I agree that beliefs should evolve in these two ways. However they are both really conditionalization, just obscured. They make sense as conditionalization when you think of them as carried out by different momentary agents, base...
Map & Territory as PDF and org-mode file (& explanation)
by jwhendy — 2011-04-11T22:02:50.097Z

Sequences have been coming up a lot lately (have you read them?, pre-posting reqs, re-runs, and exercises). I received fantastic feedback to a recent request for advice, and the top suggestion that really solidified for me was to finish reading a set quantity of my book list and finish my "statement of non-belief" in order to have a conversation defuser concerning my deconversion.

In any case, I decided that before I read those books, I want to read the core sequences as well as How to Actually Change Your Mind. That's a healthy workload up ahead. I've actually read many of these here and there, but want to read systematically... and take notes.

Which brings me to my main point. I've been using emacs org-mode as my information manager (home and work) for some time now. I found it as a replacement to TiddlyWiki (which I still consider a close second) and it absolutely rocks. I primarily use it for intellectual property related notes at work, but my knowledge of it has advanced to using it to collect and plot data, write reports, track todos, and even track my time. It's a phenomenal program that has helped me with planning and information management a ton.

I've already used this to record notes on reading before, and I decided that I was going to use it for my notes on the sequences. As a result, I need to grab the articles and get them into org-mode. I did this pretty "kludgily" (wget plus a hand-tailored bash script that uses sed to transform the html back into characters and italics/bold into org-mode markup language). As a result, I now have org-mode files for all of Map & Territory. I thought I'd post on why I would even do this as well as to generate any discussion on whether or not this is useful for future sequences (I'll be going through those as well and will likely repeat the process).

Why in the world would you do this?

Well, first of all, it's really not that time-intensive. The bash script takes care of almost everything. The real time killer was the Intro to Bayes which had an insane amount of monospace tags for all the math. I think each article maybe took me 10min to download and clean up. Here's what we're working with after cleanup:

All articles shown collapsed (click to enlarge):

And with What do We Mean By Rationality? expanded:

Looks like something out of the 1970s? Probably because it is. You get used to look...
New Less Wrong Feature: Rerunning The Sequences
by Unnamed — 2011-04-11T17:01:59.047Z

Coauthored by Alexandros and Unnamed
The suggestion to bring back the sequences in a format that is more similar to new blog posts was well received, so the two of us have been working to figure out how to make it happen, taking into account the feedback received on that thread. We've come up with a plan that is ready to be put into action right away, and are presenting it here for further feedback before getting started. Let us know what you think – both whether it's worth doing, and what specific changes could be made to improve on what we have so far.
The plan is to have a regular “Rerunning the Sequences” feature in the discussion section, with one post each day linking to one of Eliezer's old posts. We will go through all of Eliezer's posts in order, minus open threads, administrivia, and quotes threads, following the list here. Starting with "The Martial Art of Rationality" and finishing with "Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories", we count 702 qualifying posts (with help from Alexandros's scraper), so almost two years' worth of continuous posting.
The new post isn't meant to contain original content, so it will follow a standard template (a draft of which is included at the bottom of this post). The template includes a one paragraph summary of the article (extracted from the wiki), a brief explanation of how it's part of the sequence reruns, relevant links, and a standardized format for the title and tags.
Like the rationality quotes threads, this is designed to be implemented by the community rather than by software. It will only work if people are interested and participating. Someone will need to make the new post each day, and a lot of the time it will need to be someone other than us two. We'll post an html version of the template with instructions to make it easy for anyone to make a post with just copy, paste, and a few quick edits. The other way that we'll need folks to contribute, besides making the posts, is by writing summaries of the posts. The LW wiki already has a lot of post summaries, including the first 28 posts, but many posts still lack summaries. Things will work more smoothly if those summaries get written in advance and added to the wiki before we get to them.
The main purpose of the Rerunning the Sequences series is to make it easier for people t...
Controls and bias
by a363 — 2011-04-11T16:57:34.198Z

I'm confused...

If a group of people, from prehistory, believe something to be true (having X will make you feel Y) and that belief affects their behaviour (when they get X, they feel Y - like a placebo - although some who do get X do not feel Y - but they are the minority), then when scientific studies are conducted (by rational members of the same group) into the effects of X on behaviour Y, it should yield results that X is strongly correlated with Y (there is no control group, everyone is exposed to the same belief and social pressure that reinforces that belief).

What will a rational member of that group conclude about the effects of x on y? How can you rationally correct for bias if there is no control?
Rational Communication
by paulfchristiano — 2011-04-11T15:52:51.731Z

Hopefully LW trains its readers to be aware of personal failures of rationality and to correct them over time.

Whenever a small group (all the way down to 2) of rationalists communicate, they should make an equal effort to be aware of failures of their collective rationality (I definitely have failed at this so far in life). In particular: time is valuable, and you can hope to actually learn things from other people. Here are some remarks about communication intended to help you optimize (as opposed to communication intended to help you be happy).

1. Communicate information precisely. I have strong beliefs that contradict the beliefs of other rationalists. I need a better way to express precisely what the disagreement is and my confidence in my beliefs, particularly with people I don't know well. Right now I feel like I have no hope of correctly updating on the beliefs of others or sharing information in a productive way. To this end, I think making precise testable claims about the future and backing them up with probability estimates (as a regular feature of discussion) would be a good idea, even when your probability estimates are horribly miscalibrated. This would help me much more quickly learn about my own miscalibration, evaluate the miscalibration of others, and at least have a definite scale to make precise communication possible.

2. Communicate preferences precisely. Groupmembers often have strong preferences which they fail to coordinate well. I think groups I have been in would have done better if they consistently used any precise semantics for expressing preferences; for example, assigning monetary values or using some other fixed reference commodity. A bigger problem is that statements of preference carry way to much additional meaning in normal communication. I'm not sure how to divorce statements of preference from this other meaning, but its worth thinking about.

3. Explicitly think about the point of communication. There are important things to talk about, and the marginal benefits of spending 10 minutes on one topic versus another can be quite different. There are a lot of free moments in a day, and I think this calculus is worth spending some of them on. I would like to start directing my conversations towards high value topics much more reliably, especially in conversations with rationalists. This may involve doing things like making explic...
The Absolute Self-Selection Assumption
by paulfchristiano — 2011-04-11T15:25:56.262Z

There are many confused discussions of anthropic reasoning, both on LW and in surprisingly mainstream literature. In this article I will discuss UDASSA, a framework for anthropic reasoning due to Wei Dai. This framework has serious shortcomings, but at present it is the only one I know which produces reasonable answers to reasonable questions; at the moment it is the only framework which I would feel comfortable using to make a real decision.

I will discuss 3 problems:

1. In an infinite universe, there are infinitely many copies of you (infinitely many of which are Boltzmann brains). How do you assign a measure to the copies of yourself when the uniform distribution is unavailable? Do you rule out spatially or temporally infinite universes for this reason?

2. Naive anthropics ignore the substrate on which a simulation is running and count how many instances of a simulated experience exist (or how many distinct versions of that experience exist). These beliefs are inconsistent with basic intuitions about conscious experience, so we have to abandon something intuitive.

3. The Born probabilities seem mysterious. They can be explained (as well as any law of physics can be explained) by UDASSA.

Why Anthropic Reasoning?

When I am trying to act in my own self-interest, I do not know with certainty the consequences of any particular decision. I compare probability distributions over outcomes: an action may lead to one outcome with probability 1/2, and a different outcome with probability 1/2. My brain has preferences between probability distributions built into it.

My brain is not built with the machinery to decide between different universes each of which contains many simulations I care about. My brain can't even really grasp the notion of different copies of me, except by first converting to the language of probability distributions. If I am facing the prospect of being copied, the only way I can grapple with it is by reasoning "I have a 50% chance of remaining me, and a 50% chance of becoming my copy." After thinking in this way, I can hope to intelligently trade-off one copy's preferences against the other's using the same machinery which allows me to make decisions with uncertain outcomes.

In order to perform this reasoning in general, I need a better framework for anthropic reasoning. What I want is a probability distribution over all possible experiences (or "observ...