trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[link] Why Self-Control Seems (but may not be) Limited
by Kaj_Sotala — 2014-01-20T16:55:17.133Z

Another attack on the resource-based model of willpower, Michael Inzlicht, Brandon J. Schmeichel and C. Neil Macrae have a paper called "Why Self-Control Seems (but may not be) Limited" in press in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Ungated version here.

Some of the most interesting points:

Over 100 studies appear to be consistent with self-control being a limited resource, but generally these studies do not observe resource depletion directly, but infer it from whether or not people's performance declines in a second self-control task.

The only attempts to directly measure the loss or gain of a resource have been studies measuring blood glucose, but these studies have serious limitations, the most important being an inability to replicate evidence of mental effort actually affecting the level of glucose in the blood.

Self-control also seems to replenish by things such as "watching a favorite television program, affirming some core value, or even praying", which would seem to conflict with the hypothesis inherent resource limitations. The resource-based model also seems evolutionarily implausible.

The authors offer their own theory of self-control. One-sentence summary (my formulation, not from the paper): "Our brains don't want to only work, because by doing some play on the side, we may come to discover things that will allow us to do even more valuable work."

Ultimately, self-control limitations are proposed to be an exploration-exploitation tradeoff, "regulating the extent to which the control system favors task engagement (exploitation) versus task disengagement and sampling of other opportunities (exploration)".

Research suggests that cognitive effort is inherently aversive, and that after humans have worked on some task for a while, "ever more resources are needed to counteract the aversiveness of work, or else people will gravitate toward inherently rewarding leisure instead". According to the model proposed by the authors, this allows the organism to both focus on activities that will provide it with rewards (exploitation), but also to disengage from them and seek activities which may be even more rewarding (exploration). Feelings such as boredom function to stop the organism from getting too fixated on individual tasks, and allow us to spend some time on tasks which might turn out to be even more valuable.

The explanation of the actual proposed psych...
Why don't more rationalists start startups?
by Adam Zerner — 2014-01-20T07:29:08.244Z

My motivation behind this post stems from Aumann's agreement theorem. It seems that my opinions on startups differ from most of the rationality community, so I want to share my thoughts, and hear your thoughts, so we could reach a better conclusion.

I think that if you're smart and hard working, there's a pretty good chance that you achieve financial independence within a decade of the beginning of your journey to start a startup. And that's my conservative estimate.

"Achieve financial independence" only scratches the surface of the benefits of succeeding with a startup. If you're an altruist, you'll get to help a lot of other people too. And making millions of dollars will also allow you the leverage you need to make riskier investments with much higher expected values, allowing you to grow your money quickly so you could do more good.

A lot of this is predicated on my belief that you have a good chance at succeeding if you're smart and hardworking, so let me explain why I think this.

Along the lines of reductionism, "success with a startup" is an outcome (I guess we could define success as a $5-10M exit in under 10 years). And outcomes consist of their components. My argument consists of breaking the main outcome into it's components, and then arguing that the components are all likely enough for the main outcome to be likely.

I think that the 4 components are:

Devise an idea for a product that creates demand.

Build it.

Market and sell it.

Things run smoothly (some might call this luck).

The Idea

Your idea has to be for a product or service (I'll just say product to keep things simple) that creates demand, and can be met profitably. In other words, make something people want (this article spells it out pretty well).

What could go wrong?

Failure to think specifically about benefits. These articles explain what I mean by this better than I could.

Failure to understand customers. To put yourself in their minds and understand what it is that they do and don't want. This is distinct from the first bullet point. You could have a specific benefit in mind, but be wrong about whether it's something your customer really wants (or about how badly they want it).

Failure to research competitors. Maybe you came up with a great idea, but it turns out that it exists already.

The big issue here is the first bullet point. As spelled out by Eliezer's article, people ar

...
Meetup : Lesswrong Boulder CO
by yakurbe0112 — 2014-01-20T02:59:21.759Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Lesswrong Boulder CO

WHEN:
23 January 2014 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2690 Baseline Rd, Boulder, CO 80305

Last week didn't work out so we're doing goal factoring again. This place has really good pizza too.

Discussion article for the meetup : Lesswrong Boulder CO
Using vs. evaluating (or, Why I don't come around here no more)
by PhilGoetz — 2014-01-20T02:36:29.575Z

[Summary: Trying to use new ideas is more productive than trying to evaluate them.]

I haven't posted to LessWrong in a long time. I have a fan-fiction blog where I post theories about writing and literature. Topics don't overlap at all between the two websites (so far), but I prioritize posting there much higher than posting here, because responses seem more productive there.

The key difference, I think, is that people who read posts on LessWrong ask whether they're "true" or "false", while the writers who read my posts on writing want to write. If I say something that doesn't ring true to one of them, he's likely to say, "I don't think that's quite right; try changing X to Y," or, "When I'm in that situation, I find Z more helpful", or, "That doesn't cover all the cases, but if we expand your idea in this way..."

Whereas on LessWrong a more typical response would be, "Aha, I've found a case for which your step 7 fails! GOTCHA!"

It's always clear from the context of a writing blog why a piece of information might be useful. It often isn't clear how a LessWrong post might be useful. You could blame the author for not providing you with that context. Or, you could be pro-active and provide that context yourself, by thinking as you read a post about how it fits into the bigger framework of questions about rationality, utility, philosophy, ethics, and the future, and thinking about what questions and goals you have that it might be relevant to.
Argue against yourself
by Adam Zerner — 2014-01-20T02:03:36.896Z

Often times, you see the flaw in someone else's thinking. You then conclude that they're wrong, and that the opposite is true.

People who believe in god are so stupid! They're wrong because X. God definitely doesn't exist.

But just because their logic was wrong, doesn't mean that their conclusion was also wrong. For example, I could believe that gravity works because the sky is blue. My bad logic doesn't cause gravity to stop working.

What you should do, is argue against yourself. People often derive their beliefs from arguments that they win against other people. You shouldn't do that. You should only derive beliefs from the arguments that you win against yourself.
Book Review: How Learning Works
by whales — 2014-01-19T20:45:58.339Z

As promised, I review and point-by-point summarize How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching by Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, and Marie K. Norman (2010), hereafter HLW as I scratch in futility at the sprawling length of this post.

Review

The authors aim to provide "a bridge between research and practice" for teaching and learning, very much in the spirit of Practical Advice Backed by Deep Theories. They concentrate on widely-supported results that are independent of subject matter and environment, so while the discussion is directed towards instructors in K-12 and college classrooms, there are also implications for essentially anyone in a teaching or learning role.

Let me restate that a little more strongly: any student, autodidact or not, would be well-served by internalizing the models and recommendations presented here. Teachers have even less of an excuse not to read the book, which is written very clearly and without sinking to punchy popularization. This is basic stuff, in the best possible way.

Sure, there are more sophisticated ideas out there; there exist subgenres of domain-specific research (especially for math and physics education); you can find diverse perspectives in homeschooling communities or in philosophy of education. There's even some controversy in the depths of the research on some of the points in this book (though for the most part the scope of disagreements is still contained within the boundaries drawn by the authors). But as far as most people need concern themselves, HLW is an earnest and accurate if not quite comprehensive account of What We Know about learning.

[I do wish there were a similar account of And How We Think We Know It, looking into common research techniques, metrics of learning outcomes, systematic errors to guard against, reliability of longitudinal studies, statistics about replicability and retractions, and so on, but this isn't it. The book lightly describes methods when it sees fit, and my scattered checks of unfamiliar studies leave me fairly confident that the research does in fact bear the claims the book makes.]

The book organizes research on teaching and learning into seven principles in order to "provide instructors with an understanding of student learning that can help them (a) see why certain teaching approaches are or are not supp...
2013 Survey Results
by Scott Alexander — 2014-01-19T02:51:57.048Z

Thanks to everyone who took the 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey. Extra thanks to Ozy, who helped me out with the data processing and statistics work, and to everyone who suggested questions.

This year's results are below. Some of them may make more sense in the context of the original survey questions, which can be seen here. Please do not try to take the survey as it is over and your results will not be counted.

Part I. Population

1636 people answered the survey.

Compare this to 1195 people last year, and 1090 people the year before that. It would seem the site is growing, but we do have to consider that each survey lasted a different amount of time; for example, last survey lasted 23 days, but this survey lasted 40.

However, almost everyone who takes the survey takes it in the first few weeks it is available. 1506 of the respondents answered within the first 23 days, proving that even if the survey ran the same length as last year's, there would still have been growth.
As we will see lower down, growth is smooth across all categories of users (lurkers, commenters, posters) EXCEPT people who have posted to Main, the number of which remains nearly the same from year to year.

We continue to have very high turnover - only 40% of respondents this year say they also took the survey last year.

II. Categorical Data

SEX:
Female: 161, 9.8%
Male: 1453, 88.8%
Other: 1, 0.1%
Did not answer: 21, 1.3%

[[Ozy is disappointed that we've lost 50% of our intersex readers.]]

GENDER:
F (cisgender): 140, 8.6%
F (transgender MtF): 20, 1.2%
M (cisgender): 1401, 85.6%
M (transgender FtM): 5, 0.3%
Other: 49, 3%
Did not answer: 21, 1.3%

SEXUAL ORIENTATION:
Asexual: 47, 2.9%
Bisexual: 188, 12.2%
Heterosexual: 1287, 78.7%
Homosexual: 45, 2.8%
Other: 39, 2.4%
Did not answer: 19, 1.2%

RELATIONSHIP STYLE:
Prefer monogamous: 829, 50.7%
Prefer polyamorous: 234, 14.3%
Other: 32, 2.0%
Uncertain/no preference: 520, 31.8%
Did not answer: 21, 1.3%

NUMBER OF CURRENT PARTNERS:
0: 797, 48.7%
1: 728, 44.5%
2: 66, 4.0%
3: 21, 1.3%
4: 1, .1%
6: 3, .2%
Did not answer: 20, 1.2%

RELATIONSHIP STATUS:
Married: 304, 18.6%
Relationship: 473, 28.9%
Single: 840, 51.3%

RELATIONSHIP GOALS:
Looking for more relationship partners: 617, 37.7%
Not looking for more relationship partners: 993, 60.7%
Did not answer: 26, 1.6%

HAVE YOU DATED SOMEONE YOU MET THROUGH THE LESS WRONG COMMUNITY?
Yes: 53, 3.3%
I didn't meet them through the community but they're part of the c...
Dark Arts of Rationality
by So8res — 2014-01-19T02:47:03.011Z

Note: the author now disclaims this post, and asserts that his past self was insufficiently skilled in the art of rationality to "take the good and discard the bad" even when you don't yet know how to justify it. You can, of course, get all the benefits described below, without once compromising your epistemics.

Today, we're going to talk about Dark rationalist techniques: productivity tools which seem incoherent, mad, and downright irrational. These techniques include:

Willful Inconsistency

Intentional Compartmentalization

Modifying Terminal Goals

I expect many of you are already up in arms. It seems obvious that consistency is a virtue, that compartmentalization is a flaw, and that one should never modify their terminal goals.

I claim that these 'obvious' objections are incorrect, and that all three of these techniques can be instrumentally rational.

In this article, I'll promote the strategic cultivation of false beliefs and condone mindhacking on the values you hold most dear. Truly, these are Dark Arts. I aim to convince you that sometimes, the benefits are worth the price.

Changing your Terminal Goals

In many games there is no "absolutely optimal" strategy. Consider the Prisoner's Dilemma. The optimal strategy depends entirely upon the strategies of the other players. Entirely.

Intuitively, you may believe that there are some fixed "rational" strategies. Perhaps you think that even though complex behavior is dependent upon other players, there are still some constants, like "Never cooperate with DefectBot". DefectBot always defects against you, so you should never cooperate with it. Cooperating with DefectBot would be insane. Right?

Wrong. If you find yourself on a playing field where everyone else is a TrollBot (players who cooperate with you if and only if you cooperate with DefectBot) then you should cooperate with DefectBots and defect against TrollBots.

Consider that. There are playing fields where you should cooperate with DefectBot, even though that looks completely insane from a naïve viewpoint. Optimality is not a feature of the strategy, it is a relationship between the strategy and the playing field.

Take this lesson to heart: in certain games, there are strange playing fields where the optimal move looks completely irrational.

I'm here to convince you that life is one of those games, and that you occupy a strange playing field right now.

Here'...
Meetup : West LA: Surreal Numbers
by Scott Garrabrant — 2014-01-18T20:56:50.724Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA: Surreal Numbers

WHEN: 22 January 2014 07:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE: 10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064, USA

How to get in: Go to the Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking is free for 3 hours.

Discussion: 'In the beginning, everything was void, and J. H. W. H. Conway began to create numbers. Conway said, "Let there be two rules which bring forth all numbers large and small. This shall be the first rule: Every number corresponds to two sets of previously created numbers, such that no member of the left set is greater than or equal to any member of the right set. And the second rule shall be this: One number is less than or equal to another number if and only if no member of the first number's left set is greater than or equal to the second number, and no member of the second number's right set is less than or equal to the first number." And Conway examined these two rules he had made, and behold! They were very good.' -D. E. Knuth

No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA: Surreal Numbers
Tell Culture
by LoganStrohl — 2014-01-18T20:13:09.414Z

Followup to: Ask and Guess

Ask culture: "I'll be in town this weekend for a business trip. Is it cool if I crash at your place?" Response: “Yes“ or “no”.

Guess culture: "Hey, great news! I'll be in town this weekend for a business trip!" Response: Infer that they might be telling you this because they want something from you, conclude that they might want a place to stay, and offer your hospitality only if you want to. Otherwise, pretend you didn’t infer that.
The two basic rules of Ask Culture: 1) Ask when you want something. 2) Interpret things as requests and feel free to say "no".

The two basic rules of Guess Culture: 1) Ask for things if, and *only* if, you're confident the person will say "yes". 2) Interpret requests as expectations of "yes", and, when possible, avoid saying "no".
Both approaches come with costs and benefits. In the end, I feel pretty strongly that Ask is superior.

But these are not the only two possibilities!
"I'll be in town this weekend for a business trip. I would like to stay at your place, since it would save me the cost of a hotel, plus I would enjoy seeing you and expect we’d have some fun. I'm looking for other options, though, and would rather stay elsewhere than inconvenience you." Response: “I think I need some space this weekend. But I’d love to get a beer or something while you’re in town!” or “You should totally stay with me. I’m looking forward to it.”
There is a third alternative, and I think it's probably what rationalist communities ought to strive for. I call it "Tell Culture".
The two basic rules of Tell Culture: 1) Tell the other person what's going on in your own mind whenever you suspect you'd both benefit from them knowing. (Do NOT assume others will accurately model your mind without your help, or that it will even occur to them to ask you questions to eliminate their ignorance.) 2) Interpret things people tell you as attempts to create common knowledge for shared benefit, rather than as requests or as presumptions of compliance.

Suppose you’re in a conversation that you’re finding aversive, and you can’t figure out why. Your goal is to procure a rain check.

Guess: *You see this annoyed body language? Huh? Look at it! If you don’t stop talking soon I swear I’ll start tapping my foot.* (Or, possibly, tel

...
The Onrushing Wave
by Douglas_Reay — 2014-01-18T13:10:01.806Z

There's a long article in this week's The Economist:

The onrushing wave

discussing the effect of changing technology upon the amount of employment available in different sectors of the economy.

Sample paragraph from it:

The case for a highly disruptive period of economic growth is made by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, professors at MIT, in “The Second Machine Age”, a book to be published later this month. Like the first great era of industrialisation, they argue, it should deliver enormous benefits—but not without a period of disorienting and uncomfortable change. Their argument rests on an underappreciated aspect of the exponential growth in chip processing speed, memory capacity and other computer metrics: that the amount of progress computers will make in the next few years is always equal to the progress they have made since the very beginning. Mr Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee reckon that the main bottleneck on innovation is the time it takes society to sort through the many combinations and permutations of new technologies and business models.

(There's a summary online of their previous book: Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy)

What do people think are society's practical options for coping with this change?
Meetup : February Rationality Dojo: Planning Fallacy
by  — 2014-01-18T09:46:16.988Z

Discussion article for the meetup : February Rationality Dojo: Planning Fallacy

WHEN:
02 February 2014 03:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
Isengard, 5 Caraval Lane, Docklands, VIC

The Less Wrong Sunday Rationality Dojos are crafted to be serious self-improvement sessions for those committed to the Art of Rationality and personal growth. Each month a community member will run a session involving a presentation of content, discussion, and exercises.

Following our first immensely successful Sunday Rationality Dojo, Brayden will present in February on the Planning Fallacy.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jg/planning_fallacy/

Additionally, we will review the personal goals we committed to at the previous Dojo (I will have done X by the next Dojo). Scott Fowler recorded the commitments, if you didn't make it but would like to add your own goal to the records, send him a message (shokwave.sf@gmail.com).

The Dojo is likely to run for 2-3 hours, after which some people will get dinner together.

If you would like to present at a future Dojo or suggest a topic, please fill it in on the Rationality Dojo Roster: http://is.gd/dojoroster

RSVP on the facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1450425828502790/

Discussion article for the meetup : February Rationality Dojo: Planning Fallacy
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Nomic
by Mestroyer — 2014-01-17T23:43:46.585Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Nomic

WHEN:
19 January 2014 02:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
40.109545,-88.227318

Ever played Nomic? Neither have I. But I am curious to see what LessWrongers will make of it.

Coordinates are: 40.109545,-88.227318
Meetup will be held in the the Courtyard Cafe in the Illini Union, on the ground floor, at 2PM.

Cross-posted on the mailing list.

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Nomic
Meetup : Pittsburgh Meetup 24 January 2014 06:00 PM
by Matt_Duing — 2014-01-17T23:21:27.387Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh Meetup 24 January 2014 06:00 PM

WHEN:
24 January 2014 06:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Eat Unique, 305 South Craig Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

We will be meeting from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM to to socialize, discuss our goals for 2014, and plan topics for upcoming meetups.

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh Meetup 24 January 2014 06:00 PM