trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist
by Apprentice — 2014-01-06T00:16:09.532Z

A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.

http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/

I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:

In other words, prizing discourse without limitations (I tried to find a convenient analogy for said limitations and failed. Fenders? Safety belts?) will result in an environment in which people are more comfortable speaking the more social privilege they hold.

The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?

An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.
Marijuana: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
by Scott Alexander — 2014-01-05T20:41:27.000Z

This month I work on my hospital’s Substance Abuse Team, which means we treat people who have been hospitalized for alcohol or drug-related problems and then gingerly suggest that maybe they should use drugs a little less.

The two doctors leading the team are both very experienced and have kind of seen it all, so it’s interesting to get a perspective on drug issues from people on the front line. In particular, one of my attendings is an Obama-loving long-haired hippie who nevertheless vehemently opposes medical marijuana or any relaxation on marijuana’s status at all. He says that “just because I’m a Democrat doesn’t mean I have to support stupid policies I know are wrong” and he’s able to back up his opinion with an impressive variety of studies.

To be honest, I had kind of forgotten that the Universe was allowed to contain negative consequences for legalizing drugs. What with all the mental energy it took protesting the the Drug War and getting outraged at police brutality and celebrating Colorado’s recently permitting recreational cannabis use and so on, it had completely slipped my mind that the legalization of marijuana might have negative consequences and that I couldn’t reject it out of hand until I had done some research.

So I’ve been doing the research. Not to try to convince my attending of anything – as the old saying goes, do not meddle in the affairs of attendings, because you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup – but just to figure out where exactly things stand.

I. Would Relaxation Of Penalties On Marijuana Increase Marijuana Use?

Starting in the 1970s, several states decriminalized possession of marijuana – that is, possession could not be penalized by jail time. It could still be penalized by fines and other smaller penalties, and manufacture and sale could still be punished by jail time.

Starting in the 1990s, several states legalized medical marijuana. People with medical marijuana cards, which in many cases were laughably easy to get with or without good evidence of disease, were allowed to grow and use marijuana, despite concerns that some of this would end up on the illegal market.

Starting last week, Colorado legalized recreational use of marijuana, as well as cultivation and sale (subject to heavy regulations). Washington will follow later this year, and ...
[LINK] The Mathematics of Gamification - Application of Bayes Rule to Voting
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2014-01-05T20:34:48.388Z

Fresh from slashdot: A smart application of Bayes' rule to web-voting.

http://engineering.foursquare.com/2014/01/03/the-mathematics-of-gamification/

[The results] are exactly the equations for voting you would expect. But now, they’re derived from math!

The Benefits

Efficient, data-driven guarantees about database accuracy. By choosing the points based on a user’s accuracy, we can intelligently accrue certainty about a proposed update and stop the voting process as soon as the math guarantees the required certainty.

Still using points, just smart about calculating them. By relating a user’s accuracy and the certainty threshold needed to accept a proposed update to an additive point system (2), we can still give a user the points that they like. This also makes it easy to take a system of ad-hoc points and convert it over to a smarter system based on empirical evidence.

Scalable and easily extensible. The parameters are automatically trained and can adapt to changes in the behavior of the userbase. No more long meetings debating how many points to grant to a narrow use case.
So far, we’ve taken a very user-centric view of pk (this is the accuracy of user k). But we can go well beyond that. For example, pk could be “the accuracy of user k’s vote given that they have been to the venue three times before and work nearby.” These clauses can be arbitrarily complicated and estimated from a (logistic) regression of the honeypot performance. The point is that these changes will be based on data and not subjective judgments of how many “points” a user or situation should get.

I wonder whether and how this could be applied to voting here as LW posts are not 'correct' per se.

One rather theoretical possibility would be to assign prior correctness to some posts e.g. the sequences and then use that to determine the 'accuracy' of users based on that.
Meetup : Atlanta, January Meetup & Movie Night!
by Nova_Division — 2014-01-05T18:15:11.244Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta, January Meetup & Movie Night!

WHEN:
11 January 2014 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
1575 Clairmont Road Decatur, Apartment 718, GA 30033

A whole new year! Woah.

We'll start January's meetup with an introduction for new members, discussions of New Year's resolutions and how to achieve them (contribution totally voluntary, of course). Followed up with club stuffs, and then a movie night! Vote for your movie choice on our facebook group! https://www.facebook.com/groups/Atlanta.Lesswrong/
Bring your snuggies and popcorn!

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta, January Meetup & Movie Night!
Introducing .impact
by Peter Wildeford — 2014-01-05T15:35:38.166Z

.impact is a new network of volunteers coordinating effective altruist projects.

There are many project ideas that could be really useful for the effective altruist community. There are people with the skills and free time to make things happen but who lack guidance or support. .impact aims to provide infrastructure to get people and useful projects together. We hope to help volunteers learn useful skills, meet great people, and create something substantial.

We're soon launching Skillshare.im, a place to share skills and services for free. We've collaborated on several Trello boards to organize projects, research topics, and useful resources. We’ve brainstormed and started outlining projects like a vegetarian advocacy study, an EA wiki, and argument mapping software. We’ve had several weekly group hangouts and discussions with a variety of individuals. Most of our general discussion holds place in our Facebook group, which now has 114 members and seems to be growing organically at a rate of 5 per week.

Our Purpose and Values

We’re guided first and foremost by a desire to do the most good. This is our purpose. But it’s difficult to do this without having some additional values. The following are heuristics we think will best guide future volunteering in order to optimize our purpose. These are will be changed as we gain experience.

We value action. "Help people" is a good rule, and it’s often a more useful one than "understand how to help people optimally." There appears to be a lot of low-hanging fruit—we can achieve a lot by simply motivating people to do something.

We value effectiveness. We encourage and promote projects according to our expectations of their impact and probability of success. We vet and brainstorm ideas before putting them into action. We use lean methodology to get things out quickly and then decide whether to expand, pivot, or end a project.

We value openness and transparency. Our meetings and projects are documented; published work is open source or creative commons. We’ll release information on the success of applications, and we’ll publish lessons we’ve learned on our wiki and blog.

We value decentralization. We believe that volunteers will do best with little outside authority. We will try to limit individual ideologies in favor of coll...
Another Critique of Effective Altruism
by jsteinhardt — 2014-01-05T09:51:12.231Z

Cross-posted from my blog. It is almost certainly a bad idea to let this post be your first exposure to the effective altruist movement. You should at the very least read these two posts first.

Recently Ben Kuhn wrote a critique of effective altruism. I'm glad to see such self-examination taking place, but I'm also concerned that the essay did not attack some of the most serious issues I see in the effective altruist movement, so I've decided to write my own critique. Due to time constraints, this critique is short and incomplete. I've tried to bring up arguments that would make people feel uncomfortable and defensive; hopefully I've succeeded.

Briefly, here are some of the major issues I have with the effective altruism movement as it currently stands:

Over-focus on “tried and true” and “default” options, which may both reduce actual impact and decrease exploration of new potentially high-value opportunities.

Over-confident claims coupled with insufficient background research.

Over-reliance on a small set of tools for assessing opportunities, which lead many to underestimate the value of things such as “flow-through” effects.

The common theme here is a subtle underlying message that simple, shallow analyses can allow one to make high-impact career and giving choices, and divest one of the need to dig further. I doubt that anyone explicitly believes this, but I do believe that this theme comes out implicitly both in arguments people make and in actions people take.

Lest this essay give a mistaken impression to the casual reader, I should note that there are many examplary effective altruists who I feel are mostly immune to the issues above; for instance, the GiveWell blog does a very good job of warning against the first and third points above, and I would recommend anyone who isn't already to subscribe to it (and there are other examples that I'm failing to mention). But for the purposes of this essay, I will ignore this fact except for the current caveat.

Over-focus on "tried and true" options

It seems to me that the effective altruist movement over-focuses on “tried and true” options, both in giving opportunities and in career paths. Perhaps the biggest example of this is the prevalence of “earning to give”. While this is certainly an admirable option, it should be c

...
[Link] Valproic acid, a drug for brain plasticity
by  — 2014-01-05T07:41:18.034Z

NPR reports on a study giving volprioc acid to adults and training them on pitch (singing):

Hensch is studying a drug which might allow adults to learn perfect pitch by recreating this critical period in brain development. Hensch says the drug, valprioc acid, allows the brain to absorb new information as easily as it did before age 7.

"It's a mood-stabilizing drug, but we found that it also restores the plasticity of the brain to a juvenile state," Hensch tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer.

Brain plasticity is useful for a whole lot more than learning pitch. As the article notes it would be invaluable for training one's ear to pick up sounds of foreign languages, but also it seems reasonable to this commentator that high levels of plasticity during rationality training or other forms of self-development would result in more transformative results.
Fascists and Rakes
by philh — 2014-01-05T00:41:00.257Z

Cross-posted from my blog

It feels like most people have a moral intuition along the lines of "you should let people do what they want, unless they're hurting other people". We follow this guideline, and we expect other people to follow it. I'll call this the permissiveness principle, that behaviour should be permitted by default. When someone violates the permissiveness principle, we might call them a fascist, someone who exercises control for the sake of control.

And there's another moral intuition, the harm-minimising principle: "you should not hurt other people unless you have a good reason". When someone violates harm-minimisation, we might call them a rake, someone who acts purely for their own pleasure without regard for others.

But sometimes people disagree about what counts as "hurting other people". Maybe one group of people believes that tic-tacs are sentient, and that eating them constitutes harm; and another group believes that tic-tacs are not sentient, so eating them does not hurt anyone.

What should happen here is that people try to work out exactly what it is they disagree about and why. What actually happens is that people appeal to permissiveness.

Of course, by the permissiveness principle, people should be allowed to believe what they want, because holding a belief is harmless as long as you don't act on it. So we say something like "I have no problem with people being morally opposed to eating tic-tacs, but they shouldn't impose their beliefs on the rest of us."

Except that by the harm-minimising principle, those people probably should impose their beliefs on the rest of us. Forbidding you to eat tic-tacs doesn't hurt you much, and it saves the tic-tacs a lot of grief.

It's not that they disagree with the permissiveness principle, they just think it doesn't apply. So appealing to the permissiveness principle isn't going to help much.

I think the problem (or at least part of it) is, depending how you look at it, either double standards or not-double-enough standards.

I apply the permissiveness principle "unless they're hurting other people", which really means "unless I think they're hurting other people". I want you to apply the permissiveness principle "unless they're hurting other people", which still means "unless I think they're hurting other people".

Meanwhile, you apply the permissiveness principle unless you think someone is hurting other p...
Rationality Quotes January 2014
by Mestroyer — 2014-01-04T19:39:54.264Z

Rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Meetup : Moscow, First New Year
by Yuu — 2014-01-04T18:05:54.713Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, First New Year

WHEN:
12 January 2014 04:00:00PM (+0400)

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

It will be our next meet up, so there is no gathering on 5th.

We will gather at the same second entrance, but we will go to the new room at 16:00. So please do not be late.

Main topics and activities:

Consequentialism and deontology, short presentation

Training game

Dutch booking

If you are going for the first time:
We gather in the Yandex office, you need the second revolving door with the sign “Яндекс”, here is the photo of the entrance you need. You need to pass the first entrance and the bicycle parking on you way. Here is additional guide how to get there: link.

You can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information.

We start at 16:00 and sometimes finish at night. Please pay attention that we only gather near the second entrance and then move to the new room.

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow, First New Year
[Link] More ominous than a [Marriage] strike
by GLaDOS — 2014-01-04T17:34:24.183Z

Dalrock writes an interesting article related to Dr. Helen Smith's book the Marriage Strike. I really have to bump it up on my too rapidly growing reading list. (^_^)

Dr. Helen has a thoughtful post up asking if the title of her book is an accurate description of men’s response to the changes in the law and culture. While the title of her book is extremely effective in opening the discussion (which is what it needs to do), it isn’t an accurate description of problem we face in the West. A strike can be negotiated with; offer them a bit more and they’ll get back to work. Better yet, offer a few of them a side deal and break the cohesion. True strikes require moral or legal force to avoid this sort of peeling off. The problem for the modern West is far worse. What we are seeing isn’t men throwing a collective temper tantrum, noble or otherwise. What we are seeing is men responding to incentives. Even worse, inertia has delayed the response to incentives, which means much more adjustment is likely on the way.

There was an old joke in the Soviet Union to the effect of:

""We pretend to work. They pretend to pay us.""

The problem for the Soviets was this wasn’t a movement. They knew how to handle a movement, and Siberia had plenty of room above ground and below. The Soviets were masters at coercion through fear, but the problem wasn’t a rebellion, it was that they had reached the limits of incentive through fear. In the short and even medium term fear is a very effective motivator. But over time if overused it loses some of its power, especially when it comes to the kind of productivity which requires creativity and risk taking. Standing out is risky; you don’t want to be the worst worker on the line in a fear based system, but you also have reason to fear being the best worker on the line. This doesn’t happen so much by conscious choice, but due to the influence of the incentive structure on the culture over time. Conscious choices can be bargained with, and threats of punishment are still effective. The culture itself is far harder to negotiate with. No one is refusing anything. So the Soviets had no choice but to assign quotas, and severely punish those who failed to meet them. But whil

...
Soft Paternalism in Parenting
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2014-01-04T15:52:09.980Z

Reading the recently featured Beware of Trivial Inconveniences I realized that this is the method that makes Say Yes really work and thus this is Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories.

The trick of saying "yes" instead of "no" is *not* to say less often "no" at the cost at allowing things when you say "yes". That just trades the stress of saying "no" (staying consequent despite a clash of wills) against the effort to fulfill, monitor, pay or clean up after the "yes".

Soft paternalism applied to parenting means saying "Yes, but" or "Yes, later" or "Yes, if". This signals to the child that you understand his/her wish but also supplies some context the child may not be aware of. It reduces your cost of saying "yes" at the expense of a cost to cash in the "yes" for the child.

Disclaimer: This 'cost reversal' works if

the condition is no artificial construction to make the "yes" into an effective "no" (in which case the child will learn this pattern of disguised "no" and might e.g. feel cheated. Though this may still be more polite than saying plain "no".

The condition/context for the "yes" provides real information for the child.

The child is old enough to at least grasp the concept of a condition (is in its Zone of Proximal Development)

Examples:

I use this pattern...

For my oldest (10) when he wants to do some larger/elaborate projects and e.g. asks "may I organize event X" I don't want to stiffle his motivation to show responsibility, learn required tasks and socialize. But I also don't want to do significant parts of this. So I e.g. say: "Yes, but you have to consult the calendar for a time, write the invitation yourself and clean up afterwards".

For my second oldest (7) if he wants some book or other piece of parent stuff like bowls I request: "yes, but put it back afterwards".

This will not work on his younger brother (5) who is not yet disciplined enough to remember to put things back afterwards. For him a limitation like "yes, but not now; after I have done the dishes" is more applicable. It a) places a condition he can monitor (or is motivated to monitor) and b) it moves the fulfillment into a position where I am more willing to do/allow/give it and c) when he forgets about it I got rid of it at no cost.

When applying this to the youngest (2) the conditions need to be most simple as he doesn't understand the condition yet. He hears...
Critiquing Gary Taubes, Final: The Truth About Diets and Weight Loss
by ChrisHallquist — 2014-01-04T05:16:23.985Z

Previously: Mainstream Nutrition Science on Obesity, Atkins Redux, Did the US Government Give Us Absurd Advice About Sugar?, What Causes Obesity?

If you've been wondering what these posts are doing on LessWrong and you haven't read this comment yet, I urge you to do so. Thanks to commenter FiftyTwo for suggesting I say something like this.

To recap: so taking in more calories than you burn will cause you to gain weight, though calorie intake and expenditure are in turn controlled by a number of mechanisms. This suggests a couple of options for losing weight. You can try to intervene directly in the mechanisms controlling food intake, one of the most well-known examples of this being gastric bypass surgery, admittedly a bit of a drastic option. But intervening at the point of calorie intake is also an option.

Now it turns out that it's relatively easy to lose weight by dieting. That catch is that it's much harder to keep the weight off. A commonly cited rule (for example here) is that most people who lose weight through dieting will regain it all in five years. However, it's important to emphasize that some people do lose weight through dieting and keep it off long-term. An organization called the National Weight Control Registry has made an effort to track those people, and have published quite a few studies based on their work (many of which can be easily found through Google Scholar).

Unfortunately, the NWCR is working with a self-selected sample and asking them what they did after the fact. They're not randomly assigning people to treatments. So for example, a high percentage of the NWCR group reports successful long-term weight loss following low-fat and/or calorie-restricted diets and exercising a lot. And the percentage following low-carb diets was originally small, but it's risen over time. But both of these observations may just reflect the relative popularity of those approaches in the general population.

We may not be able to conclude anything more from the NWCR data than that a significant minority of dieters do succeed at long-term weight loss, some through calorie-restricted diets, some through low-fat diets, and some through low-carb diets. Remember, though, that as discussed in previous posts there's little reason to think low-fat or low-carb diets could cause weight loss except by indirectly affecting energy balance.

And now, one last tim...