trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Luck I: Finding White Swans
by fowlertm — 2013-12-12T17:56:30.191Z

Quoth the Master, great in Wisdom, to the Novice: "Ye, carry with thee all thy days a cheque folded up in your wallet. For there may be many situations in which thou shalt have need of it."

And the Novice, of high intelligence but lesser wisdom, replied, saying unto the Master: "Of what situations dost thou speak?"

To which the Master replied: "imagine that thou dost come upon a nice piece of land, and wish to make a down payment on it. The real estate market moveth quickly in these troubled economic times, and you may soon find your opportunity dried up like dead leaves in summer. What would you do?" The Master, you see, did dabble in real estate development a little, and his knowledge was deep in these matters.

The Novice thought for a moment, saying: "But always I carry with me a credit card. Surely this is sufficient for my purposes."

And the Master replied: "Thou knoweth not the ways of commerce. Thinketh thee that all dealings are conducted within feet of a machine that can read credit cards?!"

The Novice knew the ways of Traditional Rationality and Skepticism, and felt it his duty to take the opposite stance to the Master, lest he unthinkingly obey an authority figure. Undeterred, he replied, saying unto the Master: "But always I carry with me cash. Surely this is sufficient for my purposes."

Upon hearing this, the Master did reply, incredulously: "Would thee carry with thee always an amount of cash equal to the reasonable asking price of a down payment for a piece of land?!"

And lo, the Novice did understand, though he could not put it into these words, that the Master did speak of a certain stance with respect to the unknown. The swirling chaos of reality may be impossible to predict, but there are things an aspiring empirimancer can do to make it more likely that ve will have good fortune.

Verily, know that that which people call 'luck' is not the smile of a beneficent god, but the outcome of how some people interact with chance.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Consider for a moment two real people, whom we will call ''Martin" and "Brenda", that considers themselves lucky and unlucky, respectively. Both are part of the group of exceptionally lucky/unlucky people which psychologist Dr. Ric...
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 28, chapter 99-101
by palladias — 2013-12-12T05:10:56.208Z

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 99, 100, and 101. The previous thread is at nearly 500 comments.

There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system.

Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
Karma awards for proofreaders of the Less Wrong Sequences ebook
by alexvermeer — 2013-12-12T00:18:53.375Z

MIRI is gathering a bunch of Eliezer’s writings into a nicely-edited ebook, currently titled The Hard Part is Actually Changing Your Mind. This book will ultimately be released in various digital formats (Kindle MOBI, EPUB, and PDF). Much of the initial work for this project is complete. What we need now are volunteers to review the book's chapters to:

verify that all the content has been correctly transferred (text, equations, and images),

proofread for any typographical errors (spelling, punctuation, layout, etc.),

verify all internal and external links,

and more.

This project has been added to Youtopia, MIRI’s volunteer system. (Click “Register as a Volunteer” here to sign up. Already signed up? Go here.)

LW Karma Bonus

For this special project, every point earned in Youtopia will also earn you 3 karma on LW!

Points are awarded based on the amount of time spent proofreading the book. For example, an hour of work logged in Youtopia earns you 10 points, which will also get you 30 LW karma. Karma is awarded by admins in a publicly-accountable way: all manual karma additions are listed here.

Questions about this project can be directed to alexv@intelligence.org or in the comments.
Circular belief updating
by irrational — 2013-12-11T06:26:18.484Z

This article is going to be in the form of a story, since I want to lay out all the premises in a clear way. There's a related question about religious belief.

Let's suppose that there's a country called Faerie. I have a book about this country which describes all people living there as rational individuals (in a traditional sense). Furthermore, it states that some people in Faerie believe that there may be some individuals there known as sorcerers. No one has ever seen one, but they may or may not interfere in people's lives in subtle ways. Sorcerers are believed to be such that there can't be more than one of them around and they can't act outside of Faerie. There are 4 common belief systems present in Faerie:

Some people believe there's a sorcerer called Bright who (among other things) likes people to believe in him and may be manipulating people or events to do so. He is not believed to be universally successful.

Or, there may be a sorcerer named Invisible, who interferes with people only in such ways as to provide no information about whether he exists or not.

Or, there may be an (obviously evil) sorcerer named Dark, who would prefer that people don't believe he exists, and interferes with events or people for this purpose, likewise not universally successfully.

Or, there may either be no sorcerers at all, or perhaps some other sorcerers that no one knows about, or perhaps some other state of things hold, such as that there are multiple sorcerers, or these sorcerers don't obey the above rules. However, everyone who lives in Faerie and is in this category simply believes there's no such thing as a sorcerer.

This is completely exhaustive, because everyone believes there can be at most one sorcerer. Of course, some individuals within each group have different ideas about what their sorcerer is like, but within each group they all absolutely agree with their dogma as stated above.

Since I don't believe in sorcery, a priori I assign very high probability for case 4, and very low (and equal) probability for the other 3.

I can't visit Faerie, but I am permitted to do a scientific phone poll. I call some random person, named Bob. It turns out he believes in Bright. Since P(Bob believes in Bright | case 1 is true) is higher than the unconditional probability, I believe I should adjust the probability of case 1 up, by Bayes rule. Does everyone agree? Likewis...
LINK: AI Researcher Yann LeCun on AI function
by Shmi — 2013-12-11T00:29:52.608Z

Yann LeCun, now of Facebook, was interviewed by The Register. It is interesting that his view of AI is apparently that of a prediction tool:

"In some ways you could say intelligence is all about prediction," he explained. "What you can identify in intelligence is it can predict what is going to happen in the world with more accuracy and more time horizon than others."

rather than of a world optimizer. This is not very surprising, given his background in handwriting and image recognition. This "AI as intelligence augmentation" view appears to be prevalent among the AI researchers in general.
Ethical Intuitionism, part 1
by KatjaGrace — 2013-12-10T21:03:38.000Z

I read Michael Huemer’s book Ethical Intuitionism at Bryan Caplan’s suggestion. Before reading it I thought that Ethical Intuitionism seemed an unlikely position and that Bryan and Michael seemed like smart guys, so I hoped I might be persuaded to significantly change my mind. I still believe both of the premises, but did not get as far as changing my mind, so here I’ll report back on some of my reasons. I actually read it a while ago, and am reconstructing some of this post from memories and scribbles in margins, so apologies if this causes any inaccurate criticism.

Ethical intuitionism is the position that there exist real, irreducible, moral properties, and that these can be known about through intuition. i.e. some things are ‘good’ or ‘right’ independent of anyone’s feelings or preferences, and you can learn about this through finding such ideas in your head. I found Huemer’s case for it well written, thought provoking, and for the most part valid. However I thought it had some problems, and was overall not compelling.

Huemer divides metaethics as into five types of theories then argues against non-cognitivism, relativism, nihilism, and naturalism. The last theory standing is intuitionism, which Humer goes on to defend from the criticisms it has been attacked with before. Note that these metaethical theories are both theories of what ethics is and theories of how we can know about it.

I

The first problem is related to intuitionism being primarily a theory of how we can know about ethics (through intuitions), while being hazier on what exactly ethics is, in terms of anything else. It’s something real that we can learn about through our intuitions. It is normative. If the theory contained any more concrete specification of the nature of ethics or how it got there, I think it would become more obviously subject to the same criticisms made of other metaethical theories. For instance, this is one of Huemer’s criticisms of subjectivism:

Fourth, consider the question, why do I approve of the things I approve of? If there is some reason why I approve of things, then it would seem that that reason, and not the mere fact of my approval, explains why they are good. If I approve of x because of some feature that makes it desirable, admirable, etc., in some respect, then x’s desirability (etc.) would be an evaluative fact existing prior to my approval. On the other han

...
Chocolate Ice Cream After All?
by pallas — 2013-12-09T21:09:10.841Z

I have collected some thoughts on decision theory and am wondering whether they are any good, or whether I’m just thinking non-sense. I would really appreciate some critical feedback. Please be charitable in terms of language and writing style, as I am not a native English speaker and as this is the first time I am writing such an essay.

Overview

The classical notion of free will messes up our minds, especially in decision-theoretic problems. Once we come to see it as confused and reject it, we realize that our choices in some sense not only determine the future but also the past.

If determining the past conflicts with our intuitions of how time behaves, then we need to adapt our intuitions.

The A,B-Game shows us that, as far as the rejection of free will allows for it, it is in principle possible to choose our genes.

Screening off only applies if we consider our action to be independent of the variable of interest – at least in expectation.

When dealing with Newcomblike problems, we have to be clear about which forecasting powers are at work. Likewise, it turns out to be crucial to precisely point out which agent knows how much about the setting of the game.

In the standard version of Newcomb’s Soda, one should choose chocolate ice cream – unless the game were specified in a way that previous subjects did not (unlike us) know of any interdependence of soda and ice cream.

Variations of Newcomb’s Soda suggest that the evidential approach makes us better off.

The analysis of Newcomb’s Soda shows that its formulation fundamentally differs from the formulation of Solomon’s Problem.

Given all study-subjects make persistent precommitments, a proper use of evidential reasoning suggests precommitting to take chocolate ice cream. This is why Newcomb’s Soda does not show that the evidential approach is dynamically inconsistent.

The tickle defense does not apply to the standard medical version of Solomon’s Problem. In versions where it applies, it does not tell us anything non-trivial.

Evidential reasoning seems to be a winning approach not only in Newcomb’s Problem, but also in Newcomb’s Soda and in the medical version of Solomon’s Problem. Therefore, we should consider a proper use of evidential reasoning as a potentially promising component when building the ultimate decision algorithm.

...
Meetup : Book Mini-Review: Doug Hubbard's How to Measure Anything
by rule_and_line — 2013-12-09T16:25:17.725Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Book Mini-Review: Doug Hubbard's How to Measure Anything

WHEN:
15 December 2013 04:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
869 Stockton Street, Suite 1-2 , Jacksonville, FL

Folks who are enjoying this fine Jacksonville winter: come hang out on a Sunday afternoon! I'll start things off with a mini-summary of a book I've been reading and how I apply some of the concepts in work and life. With luck we'll rapidly move on to structured discussion, unstructured discussion, and social fun and games time!

Discussion article for the meetup : Book Mini-Review: Doug Hubbard's How to Measure Anything
Meetup : Bratislava Meetup VIII.
by Viliam_Bur — 2013-12-09T09:08:48.835Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava Meetup VIII.

WHEN:
09 December 2013 06:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Bistro The Peach, Heydukova 21, Bratislava

The same place, free discussion.

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava Meetup VIII.
The Statistician's Fallacy
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-12-09T04:48:18.532Z

[Epistemic status | Contains generalization based on like three data points.]

In grad school, I took a philosophy of science class that was based around looking for examples of bad reasoning in the scientific literature. The kinds of objections to published scientific studies we talked about were not stupid ones. The professor had a background in statistics, and as far as I could tell knew her stuff in that area (though she dismissed Bayesianism in favor of frequentism). And no, unlike some of the professors in the department, she wasn't an anti-evolutionist or anything like that.

Instead she was convinced that cellphones cause cancer. In spite of the fact that there's scant evidence for that claim, and there's no plausible physial mechanism for how that could happen. This along with a number of other borderline-fringe beliefs that I won't get into here, but that was the big screaming red flag.*

Over the course of the semester, I got a pretty good idea of what was going on. She had an agenda—it happened to be an environmentalist, populist, pro-"natural"-things agenda, but that's incidental. The problem was that when she saw a scientific study that seemed at odds with her agenda, she went looking for flaws. And often she could find them! Real flaws, not ones she was imagining! But people who've read the rationalization sequence will see a problem here...

In my last post, I quoted Robin Hanson on the tendency of some physicists to be unduly dismissive of other fields. But based the above case and a couple others like it, I've come to suspect statistics may be even worse than physics in that way. That fluency in statistics sometimes causes a supercharged sophistication effect.

For example, some anthropogenic global warming skeptics make a big deal of alleged statistical errors in global warming research, but as I wrote in my post Trusting Expert Consensus:

Michael Mann et al's so-called "hockey stick" graph has come under a lot of fire from skeptics, but (a) many other reconstructions have reached the same conclusion and (b) a panel formed by the National Research Council concluded that, while there were some problems with Mann et al's statistical analysis, these problems did not affect the conclusion. Furthermore, even if we didn't have the pre-1800 reconstructions, I understand that given what we know about

...
Walkthrough of "Definability of Truth in Probabilistic Logic"
by So8res — 2013-12-09T03:44:42.065Z

I recently went through the paper Definability of Truth in Probabilistic Logic for a second time. Explaining things to others often helps me solidify my own knowledge, so I'm doing a walkthrough of the paper.

Within, I explain things that I found confusing and expand on sections where the paper is somewhat brief. This is designed to be something that I could send to a copy of myself that has not read the paper, along with the paper, to help my clone learn the concepts as fast as possible. Your mileage may vary: its quite likely that your sticking points differ from my own.

I'll assume competence in the subject area, including knowledge of Tarski's theorem and the impossibility of adding a truth predicate to a sufficiently expressive language.

Because this paper is an early draft, I've included a few suggestions for edits that would have helped me out. You can find them throughout, or collected at the bottom of the post.

Motivation

Section 1 of the paper is well put together. For posterity, I'll summarize it here:

Given a sufficiently expressive language of first-order logic, you cannot embed that language's truth predicate into the language itself. For if a language has access to its own truth predicate, it can express the liar's paradox: G ⇔ True('¬G').

Responses to this include:

Working with a tower of meta-languages, each containing the previous system's truth predicate

Allowing some sentences must take on a third "undefined" value, instead of true or false

This paper explores a third alternative: assign probabilities to sentences instead of binary (or trinary) truth-values. This is potentially far stronger than a tri-valued logic: it's all well and good to say that some sentences are "undefined", but it turns out that many sentences of interest — not just pathological paradoxes — become undefined. A probability function, by contrast, allows you to retain much more information about sentences which cannot be assigned values "true" or "false".

Preliminaries

Throughout the paper, we'll fix a language L that we're working with. It doesn't matter what language L is, so long as it's strong enough to perform a Gödel numbering, and that it has terms corresponding to the rational numbers.

We also consider a particular theory T (for example, ZFC) and assume that the rationals have their usual properties in T. Furthermore:

'&p

...
How to not be a fatalist? Need help from people who care about true beliefs.
by Laoch — 2013-12-07T19:17:53.389Z

Dear LessWrongers

I've been struggling a bit with the idea of fatalism or at least I keep find myself slipping that direction.To be clear the only reason I use the word fatalism is because of it's dictionary definition. I have not allegiance to the concept. Are there powerful arguments to counter fatalism? I've read the sequence about dissolving the question about free will for example, i.e. I understand how the question itself(have I free will?) is incoherent. I.e. free from what?

I also accept that I am a physics and that my cognition and subjective experience are more than adequately accounted for by non mysterious understandings of the evolution of life. However I can't seem to figure out a way of reconciling my current understanding of those ideas with the idea that I'm in control of my future. Maybe I already have the answer and haven't got the corresponding affective/emotional state which is not an unprecedented problem for me.

My biggest fear is that for me to believe that my future is not set that I'm going to take on some irrational silly belief? Can anybody give some useful algo's for thinking about this in a coherent, detached from desire way?

One thing that I've heard is that physics is non-deterministic but I always thought that had to do with the observer. Surely particles were going to do what they were going to do anyway regardless of whether I can determine the reason or not?

Thanks for reading,

Laoch
The Limits of Intelligence and Me: Domain Expertise
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-12-07T08:23:47.600Z

Related to: Trusting Expert Consensus

In the sequences, Eliezer tells the story of how in childhood he fell into an affective death spiral around intelligence. In his story, his mistakes were failing to understand until he was much older that intelligence does not guarantee morality, and that very intelligent people can still end up believing crazy things because of human irrationality.

I have my own story about learning the limits of intelligence, but I ended up learning a very different lesson than the one Eliezer learned. It also started somewhat differently. It involved no dramatic death spiral, just being extremely smart and knowing it from the time I was in kindergaarden. To the point that I grew up with the expectation that, when it came to doing anything mental, sheer smarts would be enough to make me crushingly superior to all the other students around me and many of the adults.

In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Harry complains of having once had a math teacher who didn't know what a logarithm is. I wonder if this is autobiographical on Eliezer's part. I have an even better story, though: in second grade, I had a teacher who insisted there was no such thing as negative numbers. The experience of knowing I was right about this, when the adult authority figure was so very wrong, was probably not good for my humility.

But such brushes with stupid teachers probably weren't the main thing that drove my early self-image. It was enough to be smarter than the other kids around me, and know it. Looking back, there's little that seems worth bragging about. I learned calculus at age 15, not age 8. But that was still younger than any of the other kids I knew took calculus (if they took it at all). And knowing I didn't know any other kids as smart as me did funny things to my view of the world.

I'm honestly not sure I realized there were any kids in the whole world smarter than me until sophomore year, when I qualified to go to a national-level math competition. That was something that no one else at my high school managed to do, not even the seniors... but at the competition itself, I didn't do particularly well. It was one of the things that made me realize that I wasn't, in fact, going to be the next Einstein. But all I took from the math competition was that there were people smarter than me in the world. It didn't, say, occur to me th...
Meetup : Vancouver Weekly meetup
by Kytael — 2013-12-07T00:20:30.981Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Weekly meetup

WHEN:
08 December 2013 03:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
Benny's Bagels 2505 W Broadway, Vancouver, British Columbia

bring your rationality problems! we'll provide computing power to help. unofficial topic if nothing else: we'll continue our discussion of the value of rationality/what rationality looks like to outsiders

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Weekly meetup