trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Machine Learning Personality Test
by PhilGoetz — 2009-08-04T23:36:37.364Z

You've probably heard of the Briggs-Myers personality test, which is a classification system of 16 different personality types based on the writings of Carl Jung, a man who believed that his library books sometimes spontaneously exploded. Its main advantage is that it manages to classify people without insulting them. (This is accomplished by confounding dimensions: Instead of measuring one property of personality along one dimension, which leads to some scores being considered better than others, you subtract a measurement along one desirable property of personality from a measurement along another desirable property of personality, and call the result one dimension.)

You've probably also heard of the MMPI, a test designed by giving lots of questions to mental patients and seeing which ones were answered differently by people with particular diagnoses. This is more like personality clustering for fault diagnosis than a personality test. You may find it useful if you're crazy. (One of the criticisms of this test is that religious people often test as psychotic: "Do you sometimes think someone else is directing your actions? Is someone else trying to plan events in your life?" Is that a bug, or a feature?)

You may have heard of the Personality Assessment Inventory, a test devised by listing things that psychotherapists thought were important, and trying to come up with questions to test them.

The Big 5 personality test is constructed in a well-motivated way, using factor analysis to try to discover from the data what the true dimensions of personality are.

But these all work from the top down, looking at human behavior (answers), and trying to uncover latent factors farther down. I'm instead going to propose a personality system that, instead, starts from the very bottom of your hardware and leaves it to you to work your way up to the variables of interest: the Machine Learning Personality Test ("MLPT").

Other personality tests try to measure things that people want to measure, but that might not be psychologically real. The MLPT is just the opposite: It tries to measure things that are probably psychologically real, but are at such a low level that people aren't interested in them. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out the connection between the dimensions of th...
She Blinded Me With Science
by Jonathan_Graehl — 2009-08-04T19:10:49.712Z

Scrutinize claims of scientific fact in support of opinion journalism.

Even with honest intent, it's difficult to apply science correctly, and it's rare that dishonest uses are punished. Citing a scientific result gives an easy patina of authority, which is rarely scratched by a casual reader. Without actually lying, the arguer may select from dozens of studies only the few with the strongest effect in their favor, when the overall body of evidence may point at no effect or even in the opposite direction. The reader only sees "statistically significant evidence for X". In some fields, the majority of published studies claim unjustified significance in order to gain publication, inciting these abuses.

Here are two recent examples:

Women are often better communicators because their brains are more networked for language. The majority of women are better at "mind-reading," than most men; they can read the emotions written on people's faces more quickly and easily, a talent jump-started by the vast swaths of neural real estate dedicated to processing emotions in the female brain.

- Susan Pinker, a psychologist, in NYT's "DO Women Make Better Bosses"

Twin studies and adoptive studies show that the overwhelming determinant of your weight is not your willpower; it's your genes. The heritability of weight is between .75 and .85. The heritability of height is between .9 and .95. And the older you are, the more heritable weight is.

- Megan McArdle, linked from the LW article The Obesity Myth

Mike, a biologist, gives an exasperated explanation of what heritability actually means:

Quantitative geneticists use [heritability] to calculate the changes to be expected from artificial or natural selection in a statistically steady environment. It says nothing about how much the over-all level of the trait is under genetic control, and it says nothing about how much the trait can change under environmental interventions.

Susan Pinker's female-boss-brain cheerleading is refuted by Gabriel Arana. A specific scientific claim Pinker makes ("the thicker corpus callosum connecting women's two hemispheres provides a swifter superhighway for processing social messages") is contradicted by a meta-analysis (Sex Differences in the Human Corpus Callosum: Myth or Reality?), and without that, you have only just-so evolutionary psychology argument.

The Bishop and Wahlsten meta-analysis clai...
The usefulness of correlations
by Richard_Kennaway — 2009-08-04T19:00:44.114Z

I sometimes wonder just how useful probability and statistics are. There is the theoretical argument that Bayesian probability is the fundamental method of correct reasoning, and that logical reasoning is just the limit as p=0 or 1 (although that never seems to be applied at the meta-level: what is the probability that Bayes' Theorem is true?), but today I want to consider the practice.

Casinos, lotteries, and quantum mechanics: no problem. The information required for deterministic measurement is simply not available, by adversarial design in the first two cases, and by we know not what in the third. Insurance: by definition, this only works when it's impossible to predict the catastrophes insured against. No-one will offer insurance against a risk that will happen, and no-one will buy it for a risk that won't. Randomised controlled trials are the gold standard of medical testing; but over on OB Robin Hanson points out from time to time that the marginal dollar of medical spending has little effectiveness. And we don't actually know how a lot of treatments work. Quality control: test a random sample from your production run and judge the whole batch from the results. Fine -- it may be too expensive to test every widget, or impossible if the test is destructive. But wherever someone is doing statistical quality control of how accurately you're filling jam jars with the weight of jam it says on the label, someone else will be thinking about how to weigh every single one, and how to make the filling process more accurate. (And someone else will be trying to get the labelling regulations amended to let you sell the occasional 15-ounce pound of jam.)

But when you can make real measurements, that's the way to go. Here is a technical illustration.

Prof. Sagredo has assigned a problem to his two students Simplicio and Salviati: "X is difficult to measure accurately. Predict it in some other way."

Simplicio collects some experimental data consisting of a great many pairs (X,Y) and with high confidence finds a correlation of 0.6 between X and Y. So given the value y of Y, his best prediction for the value of X is 0.6y. [Edit: that formula is mistaken. The regression line for Y against X is Y = bcX/a, assuming the means have been normalised to zero, where a and b are the standard deviations of X and Y respectively. For the Y=X+D1 model below, bc/a is equal ...
The Difficulties of Potential People and Decision Making
by FrankAdamek — 2009-08-04T06:14:48.531Z

In connection to existential risk and the utility of bringing future people into being as compared with the utility of protecting those currently alive, I’ve been looking into the issues and paradoxes present in the ethics of potential persons. This has led to an observation that I can find no record of anyone else making, which may help explain why those issues and paradoxes arise. For some time all I had was the observation, but a few days ago an actual prescriptive rule came together. This got long however so for the sake of readers I’ll make a post about the normative rule later.

A dichotomy in utilitarianism exists between total utilitarianism and average utilitarianism, one suggesting that the greatest good comes from the highest total sum of utility and the other suggesting the greatest good comes from the highest utility per capita. These can come to heads when discussing potential persons as the total view holds we are obligated to bring new people into existence if they will have worthwhile lives and won’t detract from others’ wellbeing, and the average view suggests that it is perfectly acceptable not to.

Both the total and average utilitarian views have surprising implications. Default total utilitarianism leads to what Derek Parfit and others call “The Repugnant Conclusion”: For any population in which people enjoy very high welfare there is an outcome in which [a much larger group of] people enjoy very low welfare which is preferable, all other things being equal. On the other hand average utilitarianism suggests that in a population of individuals possessed of very high utility it would be unethical to bring another person into being if they enjoyed positive but less than average utility. There are some attempts to resolve these oddities which are not explained here. From my reading I came across few professional philosophers or ethicists fully satisfied with [any such attempt]( http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/#EigWayDeaRepCon) (without rejecting one of the views of utilitarianism).

To explain my observation I will make the assumptions that an ethical decision should be measured with reference to the people or beings it affects, and that actions do not affect nonexistent entities (assumptions which seem relatively widespread and I hope are considered reasonable). Assuming a negligib...
Unspeakable Morality
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-08-04T05:57:39.009Z

It is a general and primary principle of rationality, that we should not believe that which there is insufficient reason to believe; likewise, a principle of social morality that we should not enforce upon our fellows a law which there is insufficient justification to enforce.

Nonetheless, I've always felt a bit nervous about demanding that people be able to explain things in words, because, while I happen to be pretty good at that, most people aren't.

"I remember this paper I wrote on existentialism. My teacher gave it back with an F. She’d underlined true and truth wherever it appeared in the essay, probably about twenty times, with a question mark beside each. She wanted to know what I meant by truth." —Danielle Egan (journalist)

This experience permanently traumatized Ms. Egan, by the way. Because years later, at a WTA conference, one of the speakers said that something was true, and Ms. Egan said "What do you mean, 'true'?", and the speaker gave some incorrect answer or other; and afterward I quickly walked over to Ms. Egan and explained the correspondence theory of truth: "The sentence 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white"; if you're using a bucket of pebbles to count sheep then an empty bucket is true if and only if the pastures are empty. I don't know if this cured her; I suspect that it didn't. But up until that point, at any rate, it seems Ms. Egan had been so traumatized by this childhood experience that she believed there was no such thing as truth - that because her teacher had demanded a definition in words, and she hadn't been able to give a good definition in words, that no good definition existed.

Of which I usually say: "There was a time when no one could define gravity in exquisitely rigorous detail, but if you walked off a cliff, you would fall."

On the other hand - it is a general and primary principle of rationality that when you have no justification, it is very important that there be some way of saying "Oops", losing hope, and just giving up already. (I really should post, at some point, on how the ability to just give up already is one of the primary distinguishing abilities of a rationalist.) So, really, if you find yourself totally unable to justify something in words, one possibility is that there is no justification. To ignore this and just casually strol...
Why You're Stuck in a Narrative
by  — 2009-08-04T00:31:41.782Z

For some reason the narrative fallacy does not seem to get as much play as the other major cognitive fallacies. Apart from discussions of "The Black Swan", I never see it mentioned anywhere. Perhaps this is because it's not considered a "real" bias, or because it's an amalgamation of several lower-level biases, or because it's difficult to do controlled studies for. Regardless, I feel it's one of the more pernicious and damaging fallacies, and as such deserves an internet-indexable discussion.

From Taleb's "The Black Swan"

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.

Essentially, the narrative fallacy is our tendency to turn everything we see into a story - a linear chain of cause and effect, with a beginning and an end. Obviously the real world isn't like this - events are complex and interrelated, direct causation is extremely rare, and outcomes are probabilistic. Verbally, we know this - the hard part, as always, is convincing our brain of the fact.

Our brains are engines designed to analyze the environment, pick out the important parts, and use those to extrapolate into the future. To trot out some theoretical evolutionary support, only extremely basic extrapolation would be required in the ancestral evolutionary environment. Things like [Gather Food -> Eat Food -> Sate Hunger] or [See Tiger -> Run -> Don't Die]. Being able to produce simple chains of cause and effect would confer a significant survival advantage, but you wouldn't need anything more than that. The world was simple enough that we didn't have to deal with complex interactions - linear extrapolation was "good enough". The world is much different and much more complex today, but unforunately, we're still stuck with the same linear extrapolation hardware.

You can see the results of this 'good enough' solution in the design and function of our brain. Cognitively, it's much cheaper to interpret a group of things as a story - a pattern - than to remember each one of them seperately. Simplifying, summarizing, clustering, and chai

...
Markets marketed better
by KatjaGrace — 2009-08-03T16:39:49.000Z

What do you call a system where costs and benefits return to those who cause them? Working markets or karma, depending on whether the accounting uses money or magic.

In popular culture karma generally has good connotations, and markets generally have bad. Reasons for unease about markets should mostly apply just as well to karma, but nobody complains for instance that inherent tendencies to be nice are an unfair basis for wellbeing distribution. Nor that people who have had a lot of good fortune recently might have cheated the system somehow. Nor that the divine internalizing of externalities encourages selfishness. Nor that people who are good out of desperation for fair fortune are being exploited. So why the difference?

Perhaps mysterious forces are just more trustworthy than social institutions? Or perhaps karma seems nice because its promotion is read as ‘everyone will get what they deserve’, while markets seem nasty because their promotion is read as ‘everyone deserves what they’ve got’. Better ideas?
Suffering
by Tiiba — 2009-08-03T16:02:38.270Z

For a long time, I wanted to ask something. I was just thinking about it again when I saw that Alicorn has a post on a similar topic. So I decided to go ahead.

The question is: what is the difference between morally neutral stimulus responces and agony? What features must an animal, machine, program, alien, human fetus, molecule, or anime character have before you will say that if their utility meter is low, it needs to be raised. For example, if you wanted to know if lobsters suffer when they're cooked alive, what exactly are you asking?

On reflection, I'm actually asking two questions: what is a morally significant agent (MSA; is there an established term for this?) whose goals you would want to further; and having determined that, under what conditions would you consider it to be suffering, so that you would?

I think that an MSA would not be defined by one feature. So try to list several features, possibly assigning relative weights to each.

IIRC, I read a study that tried to determine if fish suffer by injecting them with toxins and observing whether their reactions are planned or entirely instinctive. (They found that there's a bit of planning among bony fish, but none among the cartilaginous.) I don't know why they had to actually hurt the fish, especially in a way that didn't leave much room for planning, if all they wanted to know was if the fish can plan. But that was their definition. You might also name introspection, remembering the pain after it's over...

This is the ultimate subjective question, so the only wrong answer is one that is never given. Speak, or be wrong. I will downvote any post you don't make.

BTW, I think the most important defining feature of an MSA is ability to kick people's asses. Very humanizing.
Pain
by Alicorn — 2009-08-02T19:12:38.493Z

Some time ago, I came across the All Souls College philosophy fellowship exam. It's interesting reading throughout, but one question in particular brought me up short when I read it.

What, if anything, is bad about pain?

The fact that I couldn't answer this immediately was fairly disturbing. Approaching it from the opposite angle was much simpler. It is in fact trivially easy to say what is good about pain. To do so, all you need to do is look at the people who are born without the ability to feel it: CIPA patients. You wouldn't want your kid saddled with this condition, unless for some reason you'd find it welcome for the child to die (painlessly) before the age of three, and if that fate were escaped, to spend a lifetime massively inconvenienced, disabled, and endangered by undetected and untreated injuries and illnesses great and small.

But... what, if anything, is bad about pain?

I don't enjoy it, to be sure, but I also don't enjoy soda or warm weather or chess or the sound of vacuum cleaners, and it seems that it would be a different thing entirely to claim that these things are bad. Most people don't enjoy pain, but most people also don't enjoy lutefisk or rock climbing or musical theater or having sex with a member of the same sex, and it seems like a different claim to hold that lutefisk and rock climbing and musical theater and gay sex are bad. And it's just not the case that all people don't enjoy pain, so that's an immediate dead end.

So... what, if anything, is bad about pain?

Let's go back to the CIPA patients. I suggested that they indicate what's good about pain by showing us what happens to people without any: failure to detect and respond to injury and illness leads to exacerbation of their effects, up to and including untimely death. What's bad about those things? If we're doubting the badness of pain, we may as well doubt the badness of other stuff we don't like and try to avoid, like death. With death, there are some readier answers: you could call it a tragic loss of a just-plain-inherently-valuable individual, but if you don't like that answer (and many people don't seem to), you can point to the grief of the loved ones (conveniently ignoring that not everybody has loved ones) which is... um... pain. Whoops. Well, you could try making it about the end of the product...
An Alternative Approach to AI Cooperation
by Wei Dai — 2009-07-31T12:14:48.507Z

[This post summarizes my side of a conversation between me and cousin_it, and continues it.]

Several people here have shown interest in an approach to modeling AI interactions that was suggested by Eliezer Yudkowsky: assume that AIs can gain common knowledge of each other's source code, and explore the decision/game theory that results from this assumption.

In this post, I'd like to describe an alternative approach*, based on the idea that two or more AIs may be able to securely merge themselves into a joint machine, and allow this joint machine to make and carry out subsequent decisions. I argue that this assumption is as plausible as that of common knowledge of source code, since it can be built upon the same technological foundation that has been proposed to implement common knowledge of source code. That proposal, by Tim Freeman, was this:

Entity A could prove to entity B that it has source code S by
consenting to be replaced by a new entity A' that was constructed by a
manufacturing process jointly monitored by A and B. During this
process, both A and B observe that A' is constructed to run source
code S. After A' is constructed, A shuts down and gives all of its
resources to A'.

Notice that the same technology can be used for two AIs to merge into a single machine running source code S (which they both agreed upon). All that needs to be changed from the above process is for B to also shut down and give all of its resources to A' after A' is constructed. Not knowing if there is a standard name for this kind of technology, I've given it the moniker "secure joint construction."

I conjecture that the two approaches are equal in power, in the sense that any cooperation made possible by the common knowledge of source code is also possible given the secure merger ability, and vice versa. This is because under the assumption of common knowledge of source code, the likely outcome is for all AIs to modify themselves into using the same decision algorithm, with that algorithm making and carrying out subsequent decisions. The collection of these cooperative machines running the same algorithm can be viewed as one distributed machine, thus suggesting the equivalence of the two approaches.

It is conceptually simpler to assume that AIs will merge into a centralized joint machine. This causes no loss of generality, since if for some reason the AIs find it mo...