trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Brussels, Durham, London, Melbourne, NYC, Paderborn, Vancouver
by FrankAdamek — 2012-12-21T16:37:07.460Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on Dec 14th, and has been moved to discussion. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Brussels meetup: 15 December 2012 01:00PM
Durham HPMoR Discussion, chapters 21-23: 15 December 2012 11:00AM
Vancouver Last call for 2012: 16 December 2012 01:00PM
16/12 London Meetup: 16 December 2012 02:00PM
Paderborn Meetup, December 19th: 19 December 2012 07:00PM
First Purdue Meetup: 11 January 2013 06:50PM

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: 15 December 2018 01:30PM
Winter Solstice Megameetup - NYC: 15 December 2012 05:00PM
Melbourne social meetup: 21 December 2012 07:00PM
Cleveland Ohio Meetup: 23 December 2012 02:52PM

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 currently a mee...
Dying in Many Worlds
by Ghatanathoah — 2012-12-21T11:48:17.319Z

I feel extremely embarrassed about asking for help with this, but I have a philosophical quandary that has been eating at me for days. I'm sure that many of you already have it figured out. I would appreciate it if you would lend your cached thoughts to me, because I can't seem to resolve it.

What has been bothering me are the implications of combining two common views here on Less Wrong. The first is that the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum mechanics is correct. The second is that two identical copies of a person count as the same person, and that therefore you haven't really died if you manage to make another version of yourself that survives while an earlier version dies (for instance, if you sign up for cryonics and then in the future an AI scans your frozen corpse and uses the data to synthesize a new version of you). Robin Hanson has even argued that it would be morally acceptable to create billions of brain emulations of one person for a specific task and then erase them afterward; as long as at least one copy of the emulators remains alive then all you've really done is give one person "mild amnesia." Both these viewpoints seem plausible to me, although I am less sure of Hanson's rather radical extensions of the second view.

Combing these views has the potential for disturbing implications. If the MWI is correct then there already are large amounts of versions of everyone somewhere out there. This has filled me with the distressing thought that the badness of death might somehow be diminished because of this. I am aware that Eliezer has written articles that seem to explain why this is not the case ("Living in Many Worlds" and "For the People Who are Still Alive,") but I have read them and am having trouble grasping his arguments.

It seems obvious to me that it is bad to kill someone under normal circumstances, and that the badness of their death does not decrease because there are other parts of the multiverse containing duplicates of them. Eliezer seems to agree, and I think Robin (who has stated he supports the MWI and has contributed to the work on the subject) does too. I very much doubt that if Robin Hanson was greeted by a knife-wielding maniac who announced that he intended to "give mild amnesia to alternate universe versions of Robin and his family" that he would make any less ef...
Against NHST
by gwern — 2012-12-21T04:45:35.493Z

A summary of standard non-Bayesian criticisms of common frequentist statistical practices, with pointers into the academic literature.

Frequentist statistics is a wide field, but in practice by innumerable psychologists, biologists, economists etc, frequentism tends to be a particular style called “Null Hypothesis Significance Testing” (NHST) descended from R.A. Fisher (as opposed to eg. Neyman-Pearson) which is focused on

setting up a null hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis

calculating a p-value (possibly via a _<_a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%27s_t-test">t-test or more complex alternatives like ANOVA)

and rejecting the null if an arbitrary threshold is passed.

NHST became nearly universal between the 1940s & 1960s (see Gigerenzer 2004, pg18), and has been heavily criticized for as long. Frequentists criticize it for:

practitioners & statistics teachers misinterpret the meaning of a p-value (LessWrongers too); Cohen on this persistent illusion:

What’s wrong with NHST? Well, among other things, it does not tell us what we want to know, and we so much want to know what we want to know that, out of desperation, we nevertheless believe that it does! What we want to know is, “Given these data, what is the probability that H0 is true?” But as most of us know, what it tells us is “Given that H0 is true, what is the probability of these (or more extreme) data?” These are not the same…

(This misunderstanding is incredibly widespread; once you understand it, you'll see it everywhere. I can't count how many times I have seen a comment or blog explaining that a p=0.05 means "the probability of the null hypothesis not being true is 95%", in many different variants.)

cargo-culting the use of 0.05 as an accept/reject threshold based on historical accident & custom (rather than using a loss function chosen through decision theory to set the threshold based on the cost of false positives).

Similarly, the cargo-culting encourages misuse of two-tailed tests, avoidance of multiple correction, data dredging, and in general, “p-value hacking”.

failing to compare many possible hypotheses or models, and limiting themselves to one - sometimes ill-chosen or absurd - null hypothesis and one alternative

deprecating the value of exploratory data analysis and depicting data graphically (see, for example, Anscombe’s quartet)

ignoring the

...
[SEQ RERUN] The Bad Guy Bias
by MinibearRex — 2012-12-21T03:44:12.843Z

Today's post, The Bad Guy Bias was originally published on December 9, 2008. A summary:

Humans have a tendency to perceive tragedies caused by agents as worse than tragedies caused by other sources. This can cause us to, among other things, worry more about future catastrophes as a result of malevolent agents than as a result of unplanned events.

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 True Sources of Disagreement, 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.
newcomb's altruism
by  — 2012-12-21T01:59:01.889Z

Hello lesswrong community. I want to play a game. *jigsaw music plays*

In box B, I have placed either $1,000,000 multiplied by the number of humans on earth or $0. In box A I placed $1000 multiplied by the number of humans on earth. Every human on the planet, including you, will now be asked the following question: do you take just box B, or both? If my friend omega predicted the majority of humans would one-box, box B has the aforementioned quantity of money, and it will be split accordingly (everyone in the world receives $1,000,000). If he predicted the majority of humans would two-box, it has nothing. Everyone who two-boxes receives $1000 in addition to whether or not the $1,000,000 was obtained. In fact forget the predicting, let's just say I'll tally up the votes and *then* decide whether to put the money in box B or not. Would it then be rational to two-box or one-box? If I told you that X is the proportion of humans that one-box in the classical newcomb's problem, should that affect your strategy? What if I told you that Y is the proportion of humans so far that have one-boxed out of those who have chosen so far? Would it even be morally permissible to two-box? Also, let's assume the number of humans are odd (since I know someone's going to ask what happens in a tie).

I do also have a follow-up in both cases. If you chose two-box, let's say I stopped your decision short to tell you that there are N other instances of yourself in the world, for I have cloned you secretly and without consent (sue me). How big would N have to be for you to one-box? If you chose one-box, and I stopped your decision short to say N people in the world have already two-boxed, or have already one-boxed, how big would N have to be for you to decide your effect is inconsequential and two-box?
Gun Control: How would we know?
by rlpowell — 2012-12-20T20:14:44.064Z

I don't know how to keep this topic away from http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ , so I'm just going to exhort everyone to try to keep this about rationality and not about politics as usual. I myself have strong opinions here, which I'm deliberately squelching.

So I got to thinking about the issue of gun control in the wake of a recent school shooting in the US, specifically from the POV of minimizing presumed-innocents getting randomly shot. Please limit discussion to that *specific* issue, or we'll be here all year.

My question is not so much "Is strict gun control or lots of guns better for us [in the sole context of minimizing presumed-innocents getting randomly shot]?", although I'm certainly interested in knowing the answer to that, but I think if that was answerable we as a culture wouldn't still be arguing about it.

Let's try a different question, though: how would we know?

That is, what non-magical statistical evidence could someone give that would actually settle the question reasonably well (let's say, at about the same level as "smoking causes cancer", or so)?

As a first pass I looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate and I noted that the US, which is famously kind of all about the guns, has significantly higher rates than other first-world countries. I had gone into this with a deliberate desire to win, in the less wrong sense, so I accepted that this strongly speaks against my personal beliefs (my default stance is that all teachers should have concealed carry permits and mandatory shooting range time requirements), and was about to update (well, utterly obliterate) those beliefs, when I went "Now, hold on. In the context of first world countries, the US has relatively lax gun control, and we seem to rather enjoy killing each other. How do I know those are causally related, though? Is it not just as likely that, for example, we have all the homicidally crazy people, and that that leads to both of those things? It doesn't seem to be the case that, say, in the UK, you have large-scale secret hoarding of guns; if that was the case, they'd be closer to use in gun-related homicides, I would think. But just because it didn't happen in the UK doesn't mean it wouldn'...
Beware Selective Nihilism
by Wei Dai — 2012-12-20T18:53:05.496Z

In a previous post, I argued that nihilism is often short changed around here. However I'm far from certain that it is correct, and in the mean time I think we should be careful not to discard our values one at a time by engaging in "selective nihilism" when faced with an ontological crisis, without even realizing that's what's happening. Karl recently reminded me of the post Timeless Identity by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which I noticed seems to be an instance of this.

As I mentioned in the previous post, our values seem to be defined in terms of a world model where people exist as ontologically primitive entities ruled heuristically by (mostly intuitive understandings of) physics and psychology. In this kind of decision system, both identity-as-physical-continuity and identity-as-psychological-continuity make perfect sense as possible values, and it seems humans do "natively" have both values. A typical human being is both reluctant to step into a teleporter that works by destructive scanning, and unwilling to let their physical structure be continuously modified into a psychologically very different being.

If faced with the knowledge that physical continuity doesn't exist in the real world at the level of fundamental physics, one might conclude that it's crazy to continue to value it, and this is what Eliezer's post argued. But if we apply this reasoning in a non-selective fashion, wouldn't we also conclude that we should stop valuing things like "pain" and "happiness" which also do not seem to exist at the level of fundamental physics?

In our current environment, there is widespread agreement among humans as to which macroscopic objects at time t+1 are physical continuations of which macroscopic objects existing at time t. We may not fully understand what exactly it is we're doing when judging such physical continuity, and the agreement tends to break down when we start talking about more exotic situations, and if/when we do fully understand our criteria for judging physical continuity it's unlikely to have a simple definition in terms of fundamental physics, but all of this is true for "pain" and "happiness" as well.

I suggest we keep all of our (potential/apparent) values intact until we have a better handle on how we're supposed to deal with ontological crises in general. If we convince ourselves ...
[Link] 'Something feels wrong with the state of philosophy today.'
by alanog — 2012-12-20T13:48:25.271Z

http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=6424

Some interesting thoughts on the current state of philosophy, and Less Wrong gets cited a couple of times.

Something feels wrong with the state of philosophy today. From whence hast this sense of ill-boding come?

For this month’s Carnival, we shall survey a selection of recent posts that are loosely arranged around the theme of existential threats to contemporary philosophy. I focus on four. Pre-theoretic intuitions seem a little less credible as sources of evidence. Talk about possible worlds seems just a bit less scientific. The very idea of rationality looks as though it is being taken over by cognate disciplines, like cognitive science and psychology. And some of the most talented philosophers of the last generation have taken up arms against a scientific theory that enjoys a strong consensus.
Standard and Nonstandard Numbers
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2012-12-20T03:23:28.998Z

Followup to: Logical Pinpointing

"Oh! Hello. Back again?"

Yes, I've got another question. Earlier you said that you had to use second-order logic to define the numbers. But I'm pretty sure I've heard about something called 'first-order Peano arithmetic' which is also supposed to define the natural numbers. Going by the name, I doubt it has any 'second-order' axioms. Honestly, I'm not sure I understand this second-order business at all.

"Well, let's start by examining the following model:"

"This model has three properties that we would expect to be true of the standard numbers - 'Every number has a successor', 'If two numbers have the same successor they are the same number', and '0 is the only number which is not the successor of any number'. All three of these statements are true in this model, so in that sense it's quite numberlike -"

And yet this model clearly is not the numbers we are looking for, because it's got all these mysterious extra numbers like C and -2*. That C thing even loops around, which I certainly wouldn't expect any number to do. And then there's that infinite-in-both-directions chain which isn't corrected to anything else.

"Right, so, the difference between first-order logic and second-order logic is this: In first-order logic, we can get rid of the ABC - make a statement which rules out any model that has a loop of numbers like that. But we can't get rid of the infinite chain underneath it. In second-order logic we can get rid of the extra chain."

I would ask you to explain why that was true, but at this point I don't even know what second-order logic is.

"Bear with me. First, consider that the following formula detects 2-ness:"

x + 2 = x * 2

In other words, that's a formula which is true when x is equal to 2, and false everywhere else, so it singles out 2?

"Exactly. And this is a formula which detects odd numbers:"

∃y: x=(2*y)+1

Um... okay. That formula says, 'There exists a y, such that x equals 2 times y plus one.' And that's true when x is 1, because 0 is a number, and 1=(2*0)+1. And it's true when x is 9, because there exists a number 4 such that 9=(2*4)+1... right. The formula is true at all odd numbers, and only odd numbers.

"Indeed. Now suppose we had some way to detect the existence of that ABC-loop in the model - a formula which w...
Oversimplification when generalizing from DNA?
by  — 2012-12-19T13:18:45.408Z

I changed the old topic because it was misleading and did not convey the questioning intention of this post. Sorry about that.

The point of this post is to examine the proposition that people underestimate the complexity of living beings from examining them through the complexity of their functional DNA included in the genome alone. I don't have sufficient information to answer the question, but I have just about enough information to ask the question, so if you can do a better job drawnig a conclusion that'd be great. Also if you could point out technical errors that'd be nice too.

Genome

The genome contains the DNA which contains each invidual gene and serves as the currency of inherited qualities of the organism. That is evolutionary theories calculate around the frequency of genes and create formalisms, mathematical laws and so forth to predict and understand the phenomenom of natural selection or natural reproduction.

Nothing wrong with this so far. But when it comes to actually thinking about the genes and the protein sequences, it seems to me that often it is forgotten that the entire cell which contaisn the DNA and the mitochondrial DNA and the intracellular devices are part of this replicatory system.

To draw an unreliable surface analogy you could compare the replicatory process to a cellular automata you could think of the system as a generator which accepts a string of numbers to operate the generator. In this surface analogy the entire system is the final organism, the product of the automata, the invidual genes represent the fed in string of numbers and the other parts of the cell - DNA excluded - function as the generator which accepts the string of numbers. This analogue is poor because the distinction isn't real. But it only serves to illustrate a point. Which is that if you have just the string of genome that is contained in the DNA of a human being - you can not make a human being. Something is missing. The devices inside the cells, the mitochondrial DNA, the initial position - which is a fertilized ovum in a suitable environment like the womb.

The point of the post and the proposition is the following:

The genome (mathematically) contains a smaller amount of data than is actually required for an organism as complex as the phenotype produced with the help of it to develop. To illustrate this with the previous surface analogy of a gene...
The "Scary problem of Qualia"
by  — 2012-12-19T12:42:44.956Z

Disclaimer: I don't have sufficient knowledge of the concepts appearing in this post, hopefully though I have categorized them properply and put them into suitable boxes to be used correctly. If you can find a real error here, please point them out. I'm sure there are people (including me) who'd like to know them. I'll probably rewrite this bit soon in case of errors.

For the purpose of this thought experiment let's assume that the reductionist approach to consciousness is truthful and consciousness is indeed reducible to physics and there is no ontologically distinct basic mental element that produces the experience of consciousness - the qualia.

"The Scary problem of Qualia"

This leads to a very strange problem which I'd term "the Scary problem of Qualia" in a little humouristic sense. If mental experience is as proposed, and humans with brains doing thinking are "merely physics", or "ordered physics", physics + logic that is, then that results to the experience of consciousness being logic given the physics...
...Which is to say that whenever there is (a physical arrangement with) a logical structure that matches (is transitive with) the logical structure of consciousness - then there would be consciousness. It gets more complicated. If you draw a line with a pencil on a piece of paper, so that it encodes a three dimensional trajectory over time of a sentient being's consciousness - you basically have created a "soulful" being. Except there's just a drawn line on a piece of paper.
(Assuming you can store a sufficient amount of bits in such an encoding. Think of a "large" paper and a long complicated line if imagining an A4 with something scribbled on is a problem. You can also replace the pencil & paper with a turing machine if you like)

If you now take a device complicated enough to decode the message, and create a representation for this message, for a sci-fi example a "brain modifying device which stimulates" a form of empathic inference, you can partially think the thoughts recorded on the piece of paper. Further yet you could simulate this particular person inside a powerful AI, even save that information to a disk, insert it into an android, and let that person go and live his/her life on. If this isn't sufficient you could engineer a biological being which would have a brain that produces a series of chemical reactions, enzymatic react...