trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Leadership and Self Deception, Anatomy of Peace
by TimFreeman — 2011-05-06T03:56:55.132Z

I highly recommend reading Leadership and Self Deception (Henceforth "L&SD") by the Arbinger Institute (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Books, Arbinger Institute Home Page). The sequel, Anatomy of Peace, is also good, but this article is based on a reading of L&SD.

They give a simple model of one cause of some or most everyday subtle neurotic behavior, and have practical suggestions for dealing with it. They present this indirectly, as a first-person narrative from a new executive at a fictional company is being taught this by his managers. The book has its good and bad points, with the good points hugely outweighing the bad. This post contains:

a summary of what's good and bad about the book, without spoilers;

a description of the main points of the book, which may or may not prevent people from actually understanding and using that information;

a list of some unanswered questions I had when I finished reading the book; and

some additional plausible assertions that, if true, would clarify the answers to those questions.

A prominent problem with many groups of highly intelligent people is that high intelligence makes it possible to deceive oneself more effectively, so they have pointless social conflict. I hope this model is good enough to help intelligent people identify the tendency to self decieve in social contexts and at least partially compensate for it.

One good point is that, after understanding the material, you can look around you and see the self-deception happening, you can stop doing it yourself somewhat, and you can have ideas about what to do about it when you see it in others.

Another good point is that the indirect approach seems to be useful. Presenting the material directly doesn't always work. Sometimes a direct presentation leads to people responding from within the self deception without seeing it.

A bad point is that they don't say why this happens. You'd expect that something many people appear to do instinctively to have some function, rather than to be broken. I think I do understand why, and in the text after the break below I expand slightly upon their model. This added information explains what sort of self-deceptions people tend to adopt, and what sorts of systematic errors people make they're in the self-deceived mode.

Another bad point is that they don't support their conclusion with research. It seems like the sort...
[Altruist Support] The Plan
by Giles — 2011-05-06T03:53:01.128Z

Here's my plan.

I intend to build a community of aspiring rational leaders. I see three components to this:

A. Becoming more rational

I see this as being about bringing together the spheres of self-identity, rationality and the human. The human is your physical body and brain; it is the human which actually does things, and if the human isn't on board nothing will happen. Instrumental rationality is the art of achieving your goals; it should be a familiar concept to Less Wrong readers. And self-identity, among other things, is about having those goals in the first place.

The spheres will never align entirely, and it is important to recognise that we are only aspiring rationalists, and to recognize and work around our weaknesses when they can't be easily fixed.

You don't have to lead other people to be a rational leader; you might only be leading yourself. But there's no reason to be afraid of it. I see true rationalists as making good leaders.

B. People stuff

In order to achieve your goals, it is likely you will need to interact with other people; to lead them, influence them, cooperate with them. You will also need to influence yourself; learn how to make yourself more effective. You may even need to go beyond basic individual interaction and deal with the issue of why people are the way they are.

This is something I believe may be a problem in the LW community: Not doing the people stuff.

C. Doing good

To give us a common goal, I want to find people who are interested in doing good. It doesn't have to be your only goal, and your definition of doing good doesn't have to be exactly the same as mine or anyone else's. It'll still be enough that we should co-operate.

If I could find such people, and if we could train ourselves and each other into being really effective, what would I see this organization doing?

1. Welcome

I would see us reaching out to altruistic individuals and organizations; finding people who are confused, who need help or who are still looking for the right approach. The idea is not to turn them all into rationalists, but rather to use our own rational skills to help and guide them. I would see this as our public face: the Altruist Support Network.

2. Think

Making a real positive difference in the world is hard. Even if you're motivated to do it, the infrastructure just isn't there to enable it. So we're going to need a lot of ideas, and ways to evaluate ...
Helsinki meetup on May 13, special guest star Patri Friedman (patrissimo)
by Kaj_Sotala — 2011-05-06T00:03:33.422Z

Where: Café Picnic, Yliopistonkatu 5

When: Friday May 13th, 3 PM.

Less Wrong poster Patri Friedman (patrissimo) is coming to Helsinki on the 13th to talk about the Seasteading Institute's work. We're holding a meetup on that day, where he'll be attending.

In all likelyhood, I'll unfortunately be unable to attend myself. However, at least Bongo has promised to attend no matter what, so at least he and Patri will be there.
GiveWell.org interviews SIAI
by Paul Crowley — 2011-05-05T16:29:09.944Z

Holden Karnofsky of GiveWell.org interviewed Jasen Murray of SIAI and published his notes (Edit: PDF, thanks lukeprog!), with updates from later conversations. Lots of stuff to take an interest in there - thanks to jsalvatier for drawing our attention to it. One new bit of information stands out in particular:

Michael Vassar is working on an idea he calls the "Persistent Problems Group" or PPG. The idea is to assemble a blue-ribbon panel of recognizable experts to make sense of the academic literature on very applicable, popular, but poorly understood topics such as diet/nutrition. This would have obvious benefits for helping people understand what the literature has and hasn't established on important topics; it would also be a demonstration that there is such a thing as "skill at making sense of the world."
Your Evolved Intuitions
by lukeprog — 2011-05-05T16:21:15.687Z

Part of the sequence: Rationality and Philosophy

We have already examined one source of our intuitions: attribute substitution heuristics. Today we examine a second source of our intuitions: biological evolution.

Evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology1 has been covered on Less Wrong many times before, but let's review anyway.

Lions walk on four legs and hunt for food. Skunks defend themselves with a spray. Spiders make webs. Each species is shaped by selection pressures, and is different from that of other species.

Certain evolved psychological mechanisms in humans are part of what makes us like each other and not like lions, skunks, and spiders.

These mechanisms evolved to solve specific adaptive problems. It is not an accident that people around the world prefer calorie-rich foods,2 that women around the world prefer men with resources,3 that men around the world prefer women with signs of fertility,4 or that most of us inherently fear snakes and spiders but not cars and electrical outlets.5

An an example of evolutionary psychology at work, consider the 'hunter-gatherer hypothesis' that men evolved psychological mechanisms to aid in hunting, while women evolved psychological mechanisms to aid in gathering.6 This hypothesis leads to a list of bold predictions. If the hypothesis is correct, then:

Men in modern tribal societies should spend a lot of time hunting, and women more time gathering.

Humans should show a greater tendency toward strong male coalitions than similar species in which males do not hunt much, because strong male coalitions are required to hunt big game.

Because meat from most game comes in quantities larger than a single hunter can consume, and because hunting success is highly variable (one week may be a success, but perhaps not the next week), humans should exhibit food sharing and reciprocal altruism.

We should expect to see a sexual division of labor, due to the different traits conducive for hunting vs. gathering.

Men should exploit status gains to be had from 'showing off' large hunting successes.

Men should have superior cognitive ability to navigate across large distances and perform 3D mental rotation tasks required for throwing spears and similar hunting acts. Women should have superior cognitive ability with spacial location memory and object arrays.

And as it turns out, all these predictions are corr...
Edinburgh LW meetup, Saturday May 7, 2pm
by sark — 2011-05-05T13:55:33.580Z

Place: Delhi Cafe (new place!)

I will be the guy with the :59 Seconds book by Richard Wiseman.

Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=208424955846583

But just let this LW meetup post be the 'official' place where you're 'supposed to' confirm your attendance. But just turn up. Anybody's welcome!

The meetup's weekly now.

ETA: Oh yes, do prepare some mini-presentation to give at the meetup. 3 people have already committed to doing this, so you won't feel alone :)

Sorry for such short notice. See you there!
San Francisco Meetup every Tues 5/10, 7 pm
by Mass_Driver — 2011-05-05T06:28:23.386Z

Tuesday, May 10th at 7:00 PMGreen Papaya825 Mission Street (4th and Mission)San Francisco, CA 94103

Welcome back to the next installment of the newest Bay Area Less Wrong meetup: San Francisco! By popular demand, the third meeting of the San Francisco group will be this coming Tuesday, May 10th, from 7:00-9:00 at Green Papaya near 4th and Mission. The theme of the meeting will be "How do you measure how much fun you're having?" Everyone will get a chance to talk about what they do to try to have fun, how well that usually works out for them, and what they might do to try to improve their odds of having lots of fun.

Hopefully this will help us get to know each other a little bit while also starting to plan out the broad strokes of what kinds of things we'll do together at future meet-ups. Once we know what at least some do for fun (or want to do for fun), we can brainstorm ways of making that happen together.

If you have any questions at all about the Meetup, feel free to call me, [redacted], at [redacted], or to e-mail me at [redacted]. You can also PM me on the Less Wrong blog at Mass_Driver. If you'd like to help organize this or future meetings, you should definitely get in touch -- help is welcome and probably needed!

If you've never been to a LessWrong meetup before, this is a good chance to go to your first one! Chances are other people feel awkward too, and we'll all be a little uneasy about the whole thing together. Less Wrong meetups are so new that nobody really knows the right way to run them yet, let alone the right way to participate in them. So, come! Help us figure it out. It doesn't matter if you've read the whole blog or even if you've graduated high school -- if you show up and try to be less wrong, we'll be glad you came.

If you want to stay informed about upcoming events in the Bay Area, join the Bay Area LessWrong Google Group! There are other chapters in Tortuga and Berkeley, and together we aim to throw so many events that the global Less Wrong blog won't have room to post them all.

Note that the day-of-the-week has been changed from Thursday to Tuesday, so that it is now possible to attend three (3!!) Bay Area LW meetups each week. Meetups will continue every Tuesday for at least the next three weeks, and hopefully until the Singularity.

See you soon!
Hollow Adjectives
by Psychohistorian — 2011-05-05T03:44:41.890Z

[This is a draft intended to be developed into a top-level post - it wouldn't feel wrong to make it such right now, but it wouldn't quite feel right. I am not entirely sure how to end it or if I could generalize better at the end. I kind of like the ending I have, but I'm not sure if the point overall is coherent enough. Thoughts/suggestions/criticism would all be appreciated. ETA: The problem here may be that this is actually a follow up (or a footnote) to another article I've been thinking of about Weasel Words and the art of misleading through langauge; related to my earlier post on Not Technically Lying]

When I was a teenager, I remember hearing a couple of riddles that I thought were neat:

"Could God draw a square circle?"
"Could God create a stone so large that even He could not lift it?"

Let me just disclaim that this post has pretty nothing to do with religion. I just think that these are great examples that many people may be familiar with. That said, consider: do either of these problems pose a threat to the existence of an omnipotent God?

The answer, as will be clear on a full exposition, is a resounding "No." These are terrible, awful, misleading arguments, and the second one illustrates a relatively common trick used to sneak past an audience's intellectual defenses.

These riddles both fail to provide relevant counterexamples for the exact same reason, even though the second may seem to make more sense. The first is simpler: a square circle is not a thing. In a practical sense, we can put the words next to each other, but there is simply no way to translate the sound "square circle" into some kind of expectation or thing in the real world, in the same way one could translate, "red barn" or "white unicorn" into an expected observation. It is impossible for anything to be both square and circular, so the fact that God cannot do something that cannot be done does not limit His omnipotence. By the same token, God could not create a married bachelor (using the strict definitions of the terms), as a bachelor is an unmarried man. The inability to violate the law of non-contradiction does not appear to be a legitimate refutation of omnipotence. If we taboo, "square circle," there isn't really a meaningful way of describing the thing you are insisting God be able to draw.

"A stone so large that God cannot lift it," is exactly the same thing as a square ci...
Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3)
by DavidM — 2011-05-04T22:38:14.340Z

This post is the second in a series; you can read the first here.

I have already given a brief overview of what the goal of a particular style of meditation is, and why some individuals in this community might find it beneficial to pursue. The basic structure of this article will be as follows: a brief restatement of my major claims, a highly abridged history of meditation in one Buddhist-associated tradition and of models of the path towards enlightenment (from its ancient Buddhist roots to the modern day), and then a short-but-explicit set of instructions which an interested individual can use to see for themselves whether this style of meditation leads to what I have claimed it does.

My basic claims from Part 1:

The human mind, by default, involves cognitive processes that are fundamentally defective, and which distort one's views about how things are; the result of such processes is a collection of various delusions.

Due to the distortions these processes cause, neither introspection nor attempts at rational thought / armchair philosophizing reveal them.

The distortions these processes produce are so severe that, without training, it is unlikely that one will even be able to conceptualize what they are, or what it would mean for the assertion that one's cognitive processes are distorted in this particular way to be true or false.

Because of this inability to conceptualize the problem, there are no words I can type which will serve to explain it to you (what I would intend to convey with them is a meaning which you cannot entertain; whatever you think I mean is almost certainly not what I mean). The best I can do is say that it has something to do with the way you think about your 'self'.

Meditation, a series of attentional and perceptual exercises, can lead to the end of these delusions by fixing the processes which generate them. The end of these delusion is called 'enlightenment.' These delusions are ended in steps; the various steps are called 'partial enlightenment.'

Enlightenment is not an altered state of consciousness and does not require any effort to maintain. Enlightenment is a permanent change in the way one's mind functions.

These exercises have been studied, practiced, and refined over millennia, though the knowledge so-acquired has not been freely available until recently due to social factors.

The exercises that most people call 'medi

...
Apology for delay and [link] rationality comic
by Skatche — 2011-05-04T19:08:35.177Z

Link.

To provide some background: Kimiko, the main character, is moving to Nephilopolis, where all empiricism is strictly regulated by the Department of Inquisition: "You couldn't so much as make an observation based judgment without a license." Since her bag is lost, she has no references, so she was rejected and is attempting to appeal.

My first reaction was that the Department is acting ridiculous. But on further consideration, given the futuristic setting, it would actually be quite plausible that she's a hologram or an automaton or something of the sort (I do wonder why they don't mention this hypothesis).

So, discuss! Just how ridiculous are they being? What do you think of this "credibility score" idea? Or, if you were to implement such a score, how would it be determined and how would it be administrated?

This comic was also a convenient excuse to offer my apologies for delays getting started on the sequence I posted about. I've been having a really rough time with some house issues, though it looks like the worst of it may blow over in the next day or two. I'm going to cautiously say the first post will be out early- to mid-next week.
No coinductive datatype of integers
by cousin_it — 2011-05-04T16:37:30.333Z

Followup to: What's a "natural number"?

While thinking about how to make machines understand the concept of "integers", I accidentally derived a tiny little math result that I haven't seen before. Not sure if it'll be helpful to anyone, but here goes:

You're allowed to invent an arbitrary scheme for encoding integers as strings of bits. Whatever encoding you invent, I can give you an infinite input stream of bits that will make your decoder hang and never give a definite answer like "yes, this is an integer with such-and-such value" or "no, this isn't a valid encoding of any integer".

To clarify, let's work through an example. Consider an unary encoding: 0 is 0, 1 is 10, 2 is 110, 3 is 1110, etc. In this case, if we feed the decoder an infinite sequence of 1's, it will remain forever undecided as to the integer's value. The result says we can find such pathological inputs for any other encoding system, not just unary.

The proof is obvious. (If it isn't obvious to you, work it out!) But it seems to strike at the heart of the issue why we can't naively explain to computers what a "standard integer" is, what a "terminating computation" is, etc. Namely, if you try to define an integer as some observable interface (get first bit, get last bit, get CRC, etc.), then you inevitably invite some "nonstandard integers" into your system.

This idea must be already well-known and have some standard name, any pointers would be welcome!
Rationality Quotes: May 2011
by DSimon — 2011-05-04T16:13:07.804Z

WARNING WARNING YE HAIRY GODS THIS IS A WARNING:

This is not the proper quotes thread for this month. The correct page is here. Sorry about the confusion!

I will leave this post up for a day or so to let the few people who've already posted here move their quotes over, then I'll delete it.

Can you has quotes? Yes, you can has quotes!

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down 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 comments/posts on LW/OB.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
[LINK, TED video] Kathryn Schulz on Being Wrong
by bogus — 2011-05-04T15:52:43.415Z

http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html

Kathryn Schulz is a self-identified "Wrongologist" (in fact, @wrongologist is her user name on Twitter). She has written a popular book ("Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error", web site) and also writes the Slate column 'The Wrong Stuff'. Her TED talk covers the problem of disagreement, the nature of belief, overconfidence bias and how to actually change your mind. She maintains that most folks actively avoid the unpleasant feeling of "being wrong", which is an important point I have not seen before (but see The Importance of Saying 'Oops' and Crisis of Faith). Unfortunately, she does not discuss reasoning about uncertainty, so her arguments against 'the feeling of right' end up seeming rather shallow.

Discuss her TED talk here. (Her broader work is also obviously on topic.)
[Link] Skeptics Stack Exchange
by Wilka — 2011-05-04T12:53:44.275Z

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/

"Beta Q&A site for skeptics, rationalists, free thinkers, or anyone who questions woo and pseudoscience. Skeptics is aimed at applied skepticism -- researching specific areas of woo or pseudoscience. It is not for philosophical discussions about skepticism."

It seems like it might of interest to folks here.

For those that don't know, the Stack Exchange sites use a pretty successful Q&A format and (at least the sites I use so far) have a high signal-to-noise ratio. More info on how the Q&A system works is here.
CFAI doc in SIAI FAQ
by Dr_Manhattan — 2011-05-04T12:49:53.598Z

I found a link to "Creating Friendly AI" http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html in the SIAI FAQ, which I think was recently updated. The document looks quite dated, and considering the length and the title I wonder why it hasn't been kept up. Is it even worth reading, considering it seems 10 years old?

BTW, there are many dead links in it, also the 'printable version' link is dead.
A Delayed Epiphany on Motivation
by LucasSloan — 2011-05-04T04:27:29.657Z

During lunch today, I had a conversation with my mother about the lives of my younger brothers. She mentioned to me that my brother, who is taking an SAT class, found the practice test he took to be extremely boring. I replied that I was sorry for my brother and that I felt very privileged not to find standardized tests boring. I went on to express my sorrow that I do not know how to inculcate in others the sublime joy I take in solving particularly interesting problems. Much later, I decided to spend an hour exercising, something that I very rarely do. It wasn't until about 45 minutes in that I realized the proper implication of what I had said to my mother - I have the natural advantage in test taking, but my brother has the natural advantage in exercise. The obvious solution was to find a way to find a similar sense of sublime joy in exercise, and make myself remember that I can find it in exercise. I played around with a few things I could do while on the treadmill, and found that rolling my head while walking felt awesome. I'm definitely going to do more of that in the future. It took me far too long to realize it, but when ever you wish you could help someone in some way, ask yourself if you could benefit from the same sort of thing.