trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
On Seeking a Shortening of the Way
by Annoyance — 2009-03-27T17:11:52.039Z

"The most instructive experiences are those of everyday life." - Friedrich Nietzsche

What is it that the readers of lesswrong are looking for? One claim that's been repeated frequently is that we're looking for rationality tricks, shortcuts and clever methods for being rational. Problem is: there aren't any.

People generally want novelty and gimmicks. They're exciting and interesting! Useful advice tends to be dull, tedious, and familiar. We've heard it all before, and it sounded like a lot of hard work and self-discipline. If we want to lose weight, we don't do the sensible and quite difficult thing and eat a balanced diet while increasing our levels of exercise. We try fad diets and eat nothing but grapefruits for a week, or we gorge ourselves on meats and abhor carbohydrates so that our metabolisms malfunction. We lose weight that way, so clearly it's just as good as exercising and eating properly, right?

We cite Zen stories but don't take the time and effort to research their contexts, while at the same time sniggering a the actual beliefs inherent in that system. We wax rhapsodic about psychedelics and dismiss the value of everyday experiences as trivial - and handwave away praise of the mundane as utilization of "applause lights".

We talk about the importance of being rational, but don't determine what's necessary to do to become so.

Some of the greatest thinkers of the past had profound insights after paying attention to parts of everyday life that most people don't give a second thought. Archimedes realized how to determine the volume of a complex solid while lounging in a bath. Galileo recognized that pendulums could be used to reliably measure time while letting his mind drift in a cathedral.

Sure, we're not geniuses, so why try to pay attention to ordinary things? Shouldn't we concern ourselves with the novel and extraordinary instead?

Maybe we're not geniuses because we don't bother paying attention to ordinary things.
Can Humanism Match Religion's Output?
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-27T11:32:29.359Z

Perhaps the single largest voluntary institution of our modern world—bound together not by police and taxation, not by salaries and managers, but by voluntary donations flowing from its members—is the Catholic Church.

It's too large to be held together by individual negotiations, like a group task in a hunter-gatherer band. But in a larger world with more people to be infected and faster transmission, we can expect more virulent memes. The Old Testament doesn't talk about Hell, but the New Testament does. The Catholic Church is held together by affective death spirals—around the ideas, the institutions, and the leaders. By promises of eternal happiness and eternal damnation—theologians don't really believe that stuff, but many ordinary Catholics do. By simple conformity of people meeting in person at a Church and being subjected to peer pressure. &c.

We who have the temerity to call ourselves "rationalists", think ourselves too good for such communal bindings.

And so anyone with a simple and obvious charitable project—responding with food and shelter to a tidal wave in Thailand, say—would be better off by far pleading with the Pope to mobilize the Catholics, rather than with Richard Dawkins to mobilize the atheists.

For so long as this is true, any increase in atheism at the expense of Catholicism will be something of a hollow victory, regardless of all other benefits.

True, the Catholic Church also goes around opposing the use of condoms in AIDS-ravaged Africa. True, they waste huge amounts of the money they raise on all that religious stuff. Indulging in unclear thinking is not harmless, prayer comes with a price.

To refrain from doing damaging things, is a true victory for a rationalist...

Unless it is your only victory, in which case it seems a little empty.

If you discount all harm done by the Catholic Church, and look only at the good... then does the average Catholic do more gross good than the average atheist, just by virtue of being more active?

Perhaps if you are wiser but less motivated, you can search out interventions of high efficiency and purchase utilons on the cheap... But there are few of us who really do that, as opposed to planning to do it someday.

Now you might at this point throw up your hands, saying: "For so long as we don't have direct control ...
Crowley on Religious Experience
by Scott Alexander — 2009-03-26T22:59:39.625Z

Reply to: The Sacred Mundane, BHTV: Yudkowsky vs. Frank on "Religious Experience"

Edward Crowley was a man of many talents. He studied chemistry at Cambridge - a period to which he later attributed his skeptical scientific outlook - but he soon abandoned the idea of a career in science and turned to his other passions. For a while he played competitive chess at the national level. He took to mountain-climbing, and became one of the early 20th century's premier mountaineers, co-leading the first expedition to attempt K2 in the Himalayas. He also enjoyed writing poetry and travelling the world, making it as far as Nepal and Burma in an era when steamship was still the fastest mode of transportation and British colonialism was still a thin veneer over dangerous and poorly-explored areas.
But his real interest was mysticism. He travelled to Sri Lanka, where he studied meditation and yoga under some of the great Hindu yogis. After spending several years there, he achieved a state of mystical attainment the Hindus call dhyana, and set about trying to describe and promote yoga to the West.

He was not the first person to make the attempt, but he was certainly the most interesting. Although his parents were religious fanatics and his father a fundamentalist preacher, he himself had been an atheist since childhood, and he considered the vast majority of yoga to be superstitious claptrap. He set about eliminating all the gods and chants and taboos and mysterian language, ending up with a short system of what he considered empirically validated principles for gaining enlightenment in the most efficient possible way.

Reading Crowley's essay on mysticism and yoga at age seventeen rewrote my view of religion. I had always wondered about eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, which seemed to have some underlying truth to all their talk of "enlightenment" and "meditation" but which seemed too vague and mysterious for my liking. Crowley stripped the mystery away in one fell swoop.

When listening to Eliezer debate Adam Frank on "religious experience", I was disappointed but not surprised to hear just how little they had to say. Even Frank, who was fascinated enough to write a book about it, considered it little more than a sense that something was inspiring or especially impressive. I quoted a bit of Crowley's essay on the thread, and people seemed to like it and want to kno...
Sleeping Beauty gets counterfactually mugged
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2009-03-26T11:44:04.156Z

Related to: Counterfactual Mugging, Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality

Omega is continuing his eternal mission: To explore strange new philosophical systems... To seek out new paradoxes and new counterfactuals... To boldly go where no decision theory has gone before.

In his usual totally honest, quasi-omniscient, slightly sadistic incarnation, Omega has a new puzzle for you, and it involves the Sleeping Beauty problem as a bonus.

He will offer a similar deal to that in the counterfactual mugging: he will flip a coin, and if it comes up tails, he will come round and ask you to give him £100.

If it comes up heads, instead he will simulate you, and check whether you would give him the £100 if asked (as usual, the use of randomising device in the decision is interpreted as a refusal). From this counterfactual, if you would give him the cash, he’ll send you £260; if you wouldn’t, he’ll give you nothing.

Two things are different from the original setup, both triggered if the coin toss comes up tails: first of all, if you refuse to hand over any cash, he will give you an extra £50 compensation. Second of all, if you do give him the £100, he will force you to take a sedative and an amnesia drug, so that when you wake up the next day, you will have forgotten about the current day. He will then ask you to give him the £100 again.

To keep everything fair and balanced, he will feed you the sedative and the amnesia drug whatever happens (but will only ask you for the £100 a second time if you accepted to give it to him the first time).

Would you want to precommit to giving Omega the cash, if he explained everything to you? The odds say yes: precommitting to accepting to hand over the £100 will give you an expected return of 0.5 x £260 + 0.5 x (-£200) = £30, while precommitting to a refusal gives you an expected return of 0.5 x £0 + 0.5 x £50 = £25.

But now consider what happens at the moment when he actually asks you for the cash.

A standard way to approach these types of problems it to act as if you didn’t know whether you were the real you or the simulated you. This avoids a lot of complications and gets you to the heart of the problem. Here, if you decide to give Omega the cash, there are three situations you can be in: the simulation, reality on the first day, ...
Your Price for Joining
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-26T07:16:21.397Z

In the Ultimatum Game, the first player chooses how to split $10 between themselves and the second player, and the second player decides whether to accept the split or reject it—in the latter case, both parties get nothing. So far as conventional causal decision theory goes (two-box on Newcomb's Problem, defect in Prisoner's Dilemma), the second player should prefer any non-zero amount to nothing. But if the first player expects this behavior—accept any non-zero offer—then they have no motive to offer more than a penny. As I assume you all know by now, I am no fan of conventional causal decision theory. Those of us who remain interested in cooperating on the Prisoner's Dilemma, either because it's iterated, or because we have a term in our utility function for fairness, or because we use an unconventional decision theory, may also not accept an offer of one penny.

And in fact, most Ultimatum "deciders" offer an even split; and most Ultimatum "accepters" reject any offer less than 20%. A 100 USD game played in Indonesia (average per capita income at the time: 670 USD) showed offers of 30 USD being turned down, although this equates to two week's wages. We can probably also assume that the players in Indonesia were not thinking about the academic debate over Newcomblike problems—this is just the way people feel about Ultimatum Games, even ones played for real money.

There's an analogue of the Ultimatum Game in group coordination. (Has it been studied? I'd hope so...) Let's say there's a common project—in fact, let's say that it's an altruistic common project, aimed at helping mugging victims in Canada, or something. If you join this group project, you'll get more done than you could on your own, relative to your utility function. So, obviously, you should join.

But wait! The anti-mugging project keeps their funds invested in a money market fund! That's ridiculous; it won't earn even as much interest as US Treasuries, let alone a dividend-paying index fund.

Clearly, this project is run by morons, and you shouldn't join until they change their malinvesting ways.

Now you might realize—if you stopped to think about it—that all things considered, you would still do better by working with the common anti-mugging project, than striking out on your own to...
Two Blegs
by talisman — 2009-03-26T04:42:32.223Z

I'm not sure where to post this, so, using this comment thread as cover, I will hereby bleg for the following:

A good OB-level proof or explication of the innards of Aumann's theorem, much more precise than Hanson and Cowen's but less painful than Aumann's original or this other one.

Stories of how people have busted open questions or controversies using rationalist tools. (I think this in particular will be useful to learners.)
Why *I* fail to act rationally
by bentarm — 2009-03-26T03:56:57.416Z

There is a lot of talk here about sophisticated rationality failures - priming, overconfidence, etc. etc. There is much less talk about what I think is the more common reason for people failing to act rationally in the real world - something that I think most people outside this community would agree is the most common rationality failure mode - acting emotionally (pjeby has just begun to discuss this, but I don't think it's the main thrust of his post...).

While there can be sound evolutionary reasons for having emotions (the thirst for revenge as a Doomsday Machine being the easiest to understand), and while we certainly don't want to succumb to the fallacy that rationalists are emotionless Spock-clones. I think overcoming (or at least being able to control) emotions would, for most people, be a more important first step to acting rationally than overcoming biases.

If I could avoid saying things I'll regret later when angry, avoid putting down colleagues through jealousy, avoid procrastinating because of laziness and avoid refusing to make correct decisions because of fear, I think this would do a lot more to make me into a winner than if I could figure out how to correctly calibrate my beliefs about trivia questions, or even get rid of my unwanted Implicit Associations.

So the question - do we have good techniques for preventing our emotions from making bad decisions for us? Something as simple as "count to ten before you say anything when angry" is useful if it works. Something as sophisticated as "become a Zen Master" is probably unattainable, but might at least point us in the right direction - and then there's everything in between.
Fight Biases, or Route Around Them?
by Scott Alexander — 2009-03-25T22:23:28.281Z

Continuation of: The Implicit Association Test
Response to: 3 Levels of Rationality Verification

I've not yet seen it pointed out before that we use "bias" to mean two different things.
Sometimes we use "bias" to mean a hard-coded cognitive process that results in faulty beliefs. Take as examples the in-group bias, the recall bias, the bad guy bias, and various other things discovered by Tversky and Kahneman.
Other times, we use "bias" to mean a specific faulty belief generated by such a process, especially one that itself results in other faulty beliefs. For example, Jews are sometimes accused of having a pro-Israel bias. By this we mean that they have a higher opinion of Israel than the evidence justifies; this is a specific belief created by the in-group bias. This belief may itself generate other faulty beliefs; for example, they may have a more negative opinion of Palestinians than the evidence justifies. It is both the effect of a bias, and the cause of other biases.
Let's be clear about this "more than the evidence justifies" bit. Hating Hitler doesn't mean you're biased against Hitler. Likewise, having a belief about a particular ethnic group doesn't mean you're biased for or against them. My Asian friends hate it when people sheepishly admit in a guilty whisper that they've heard Asians are good at academics. Asians are good at academics. Just say "55% chance an average Asian has a GPA above the American population mean" and leave it at that. This is one of Tetlock's critiques of the Implicit Association Test, and it's a good one. I'd probably link Asians to high achievement on an IAT, but it wouldn't be a bias or anything to get upset about.
And let's also be clear about this faulty belief thing. You don't have to believe something for it to be a belief; consider again the skeptic who flees the haunted house. She claims she doesn't belief in ghosts, and she's telling the truth one hundred percent. She's still going to be influenced by her belief in ghosts. She's not secretly supernaturalist any more than someone who gets "strongly biased" on the IAT is secretly racist. But she needs to know she's still going to run screaming from haunted houses, and IAT-takers should be aware they're still probably going to discriminate against black people in some tiny imperceptible way.

Okay, back to the example. So the President appoints Isaac, a synagogue-going Jew, a...
The Good Bayesian
by Sideways — 2009-03-25T21:39:18.934Z

I've talked religion with people of many different ages and creeds, and none of them have ever been content to practice their religion in private. All belong to a religious community; many contribute money and time above and beyond the minimum requirement. And in all the religious discussions I've ever had, I've never heard anyone decline to participate because their religion is "intensely private and individual."

So Eliezer's quote from William James by way of Adam Frank left me scratching my head, as well. I think of religion first and foremost as a social behavior rather than an individual one. It's not just that religious people use the claim of private revelation as a defense against reason; it's that they can attend sermons, sing in a choir, recite prayers in unison--and then make that claim of "solitary" experience with a straight face!
Eliezer's post listed some of the ways that theodicy warps rational thought on the individual level, as sort of warning label on the "poisoned chalice." Religious people are liable to respond that religion may not make people rational, but it makes them altruistic "good Samaritans." (Never mind that in the parable, the Samaritan is more altruistic than a high priest!) They claim that any harm religion does to the individual is outweighed by its benefits to the group.
Rationalists should make the case that religion is harmful to society as a whole, as well as individuals:

Religious groups waste resources. I couldn't find exact figures, but Austin Cline claims that tax-exempt religious organizations own 20-25% of land in the US, denying the government billions in tax revenue. Donations and tithes to churches are wasted on funding monasteries, missionaries, and "bible schools." Rationality dojos, or even the government, could allocate these resources more effectively.

Religion degrades political discourse. Clergymen have an inappropriate amount of involvement and influence in the politics of their congregations, e.g. Catholic bishops denying communion to politicians who support abortion rights. The Terry Schiavo debacle demonstrated that American right-wing religious groups are willing to use political power in unethical ways. It's a national disgrace that no non-Christian could

...
Spock's Dirty Little Secret
by pjeby — 2009-03-25T19:07:21.908Z

Related on OB: Priming and Contamination
Related on LW: When Truth Isn't Enough

When I was a kid, I wanted to be like Mr. Spock on Star Trek. He was smart, he could kick ass, and he usually saved the day while Kirk was too busy pontificating or womanizing.

And since Spock loved logic, I tried to learn something about it myself. But by the time I was 13 or 14, grasping the basics of boolean algebra (from borrowed computer science textbooks), and propositional logic (through a game of "Wff'n'Proof" I picked up at a garage sale), I began to get a little dissatisfied with it.

Spock had made it seem like logic was some sort of "formidable" thing, with which you could do all kinds of awesomeness. But real logic didn't seem to work the same way.

I mean, sure, it was neat that you could apply all these algebraic transforms and dissect things in interesting ways, but none of it seemed to go anywhere.

Logic didn't say, "thou shalt perform this sequence of transformations and thereby produce an Answer". Instead, it said something more like, "do whatever you want, as long as it's well-formed"... and left the very real question of what it was you wanted, as an exercise for the logician.

And it was at that point that I realized something that Spock hadn't mentioned (yet): that logic was only the beginning of wisdom, not the end.

Of course, I didn't phrase it exactly that way myself... but I did see that logic could only be used to check things... not to generate them. The ideas to be checked, still had to come from somewhere.

But where?

When I was 17, in college philosophy class, I learned another limitation of logic: or more precisely, of the brains with which we do logic.

Because, although I'd already learned to work with formalisms -- i.e., meaningless symbols -- working with actual syllogisms about Socrates and mortals and whatnot was actually a good bit harder.

We were supposed to determine the validity of the syllogisms, but sometimes an invalid syllogism had a true conclusion, while a valid syllogism might have a false one. And, until I learned to mentally substitute symbols like A and B for the included facts, I found my brain automatically jumping to the wrong conclusions about validity.

So "logic", then -- or rationality -- seemed to require three things to actually work:

A way to generate possibly-useful idea

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Extreme updating: The devil is in the missing details
by PhilGoetz — 2009-03-25T17:55:15.999Z

Today Ed Yong has a post on Not Exactly Rocket Science that is about updating - actually, the most extreme case in updating, where a person gets to choose between relying completely on their own judgement, or completely on the judgement of others. He describes 2 experiments by Daniel Gilbert of Harvard in which subjects are given information about experience X, and asked to predict how they would feel (on a linear scale) on experiencing X; they then experience X and rate what they felt on that linear scale.

In both cases, the correlation between post-experience judgements of different subjects is much higher than the correlation between the prediction and the post-experience judgement of each subject. This isn't surprising - the experiments are designed so that the experience provides much more information than the given pre-experience information does.

What might be surprising is that the subjects believe the opposite: that they can predict their response from information better than from the responses of others.

Whether these experiments are interesting depends on how the subjects were asked the question. If they were asked, before being given information or being told what that information would be, whether they could predict their response to an experience better by making their own judgement based on information, or from the responses of others, then the result is not interesting. The subjects in that case did not know that they would be given only a trivial amount of information relative to those who had the experience.

The result is only interesting if the subjects were given the information first, and then asked whether they could predict their response better from that information than from someone else's experience. Yong's post doesn't say which of these things happened, and doesn't cite the original article, so I can't look it up. Does anyone know?

I've heard studies like this cited as strong evidence that we should update more; but never heard that critical detail given for any such studies. Are there any studies which actually show what this study purports to show?

EDIT: Robin posted the citation. The original paper does not contain the crucial information. Details in my response to Robin.

EDIT: The original paper DOES contain the crucial info for the first experiment. I missed it the fi...