trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Mini-camp was indeed awesome, and so was Luke (just add Bayes)
by Academian — 2011-09-02T08:55:04.487Z

Yep, I'm saying that without hard data. But I was there. So let me say it again, in response to numerous comments I've seen complaining that no judgement should be passed until a quantitative analysis confirms it:

Mini-camp was awesome. Note that mini-camp was far from the first time I've travelled to an event to surround myself with like-minded peers working toward common goals... I find such events events extremely motivating and enjoyable, which is why I've been to many such workshops, inside and outside academia (~3 per year for the past 10 years).

Yet mini-camp is still topping my charts. Specifically, the camp is tied for the title of the most life-altering workshop-like event of my life, and the tie is with the workshop that got me onto my PhD topic (graphical causal modelling), so that's saying something.

In particular, I've been visibly-to-myself-and-others more motivated and hard-working since the camp. I've had more energy for learning and adaptation, and I find Luke to have been a highly inspiring input to that result.

(I'm talking about Luke because his position is the one being discussed right now, but I got a lot of really inspiring ideas and motivation from Anna before, during, and after the camp as well.)

Hard data will be great to have, but it's hard to get, especially certifiably causal data (though the prospect is not hopeless, with enough conditional independence tests), especially since the camp was planned and executed on short notice.

In the meantime, let's do a little Bayes. First, assign priors to how well you expect a week-long sustained interaction between growth-oriented rationalists to go. (If your prior is something like 80%[failure], I'd like to know where you're getting your growth-oriented rationalists). Now which of the following theories, "failure" or "success", assigns a higher likelihood to the following observations?

-----

1. People wrote these:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AnoM_ZsIBBwEdGNicUMzRkNJNzRKLVpEb2RxZzU3V0E

In particular,

“The week I spent in minicamp had by far the highest density of fun and learning I have ever experienced. It's like taking two years of college and condensing it to a week: you learn just as much and you have just as much fun. The skills I've learned will help me set and achieve my own l

...
Rationality Quotes September 2011
by dvasya — 2011-09-02T07:38:10.556Z

Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Consequentialism Need Not Be Nearsighted
by orthonormal — 2011-09-02T07:37:08.154Z

Summary: If you object to consequentialist ethical theories because you think they endorse horrible or catastrophic decisions, then you may instead be objecting to short-sighted utility functions or poor decision theories.

Recommended: Decision Theory Paradox: PD with Three Implies Chaos?

Related: The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism"

The simple idea that we ought to choose actions according to their probable consequences, ever since it was formulated, has garnered a rather shocking amount of dissent. Part of this may be due to causes other than philosophical objections, and some of the objections get into the metaphysics of metaethics. But there's a fair amount of opposition on rather simple grounds: that consequentialist reasoning appears to endorse bad decisions, either in the long run or as an effect of collective action.

Every so often, you'll hear someone offer a reductio ad absurdum of the following form: "Consider dilemma X. If we were consequentialists, then we would be forced to choose Y. But in the long run (or if widely adopted) the strategy of choosing Y leads to horrible consequence Z, and so consequentialism fails on its own terms."

There's something fishy about the argument when you lay it out like that: if it can be known that the strategy of choosing Y has horrible consequence Z, then why do we agree that consequentialists choose Y? In fact, there are two further unstated assumptions in every such argument I've heard, and it is those assumptions rather than consequentialism on which the absurdity really falls. But to discuss the assumptions, we need to delve into a bit of decision theory.

In my last post, I posed an apparent paradox: a case where it looked as if a simple rule could trump the most rational of decision theories in a fair fight. But there was a sleight of hand involved (which, to your credit, many of you spotted immediately). I judged Timeless Decision Theory on the basis of its long-term success, but each agent was stipulated to only care about its immediate children, not any further descendants! And indeed, the strategy of allowing free-riding defectors maximizes the number of an agent's immediate children, albeit at the price of hampering future generations by cluttering the field with defectors.1

If instead we let the TDT agents care about their distant descendants, then t...
Contrarians judged mad after being proven right (John Hempton)
by Jonathan_Graehl — 2011-09-02T06:41:12.500Z

I recommend John Hempton's blog post on how badly people judge seeming madmen in the case the conventional view has only conventional-wisdom support. I also like how he explains his research and conclusions in general.

the gist:

In early June Carson Block and his firm Muddy Waters research published a report which made outrageous sounding allegations against Sino Forest - then a highly respected Canadian listed Chinese forestry company that had borrowed well over $2 billion to develop and expand forestry operations in China.
The base allegation in the report was that most the forests did not exist and by implication the (more than) $2 billion borrowed was stolen. Presumably many more shares have been sold too taking the total theft well above $2 billion.

I am obsessed about discovering the ways my positions can be wrong.

Dundee Securities was the most prominent Sino-supporter labeling Muddy Water's research a "pile of crap". Somewhat more considered sounding (but also flat wrong just more reasonable sounding) was Metal Augmentor who found Carson "loose with the facts and somewhat breathless". On the naive-sounding side was Susan Mallin whose complaint was that she had "never seen a research report written in this manner". More prominent people were fooled too.

The analysis of these people was staggeringly weak and self-referential. They judged Sino Forest against data provided by Sino Forest or people associated with Sino Forest. This is an elementary mistake in assessing fraud. To find fraud you need to be able to judge against things you are fairly sure are not fraudulent.
Everything the Carson Block doubters said sounded reasonable. Certainly more reasonable than Carson Block sounded because Carson Block held the radical position. Sounding reasonable however was wrong.
I think what is going on here is a general problem. When someone says something - anything - that is so far from the consensus as to sound outrageous then they will be considered mad, and sometimes they will be considered mad even after they are proven right.
Another treatment of Direct Instruction getting more into the technical details of the theory
by Owen_Richardson — 2011-09-02T06:06:35.017Z

[NOTE: This was a discussion post asking if anyone would mind giving feedback on a very rough draft in progress.

If you are downvoting it because you do not want to see discussion posts asking for feedback like this, then by all means, that's a valid use of a downvote.

But if you are downvoting it in order to express your opinion of the quality of the draft, I urge you to reconsider]

This is another work in progress coming at the DI issue from a somewhat different direction. It's contained in the comments of the original, and I'm posting this to ask for more wonderful beta-reader critics to tell me if it's a step in the right direction. (It's still very informal writing, but it's the ideas I'm dealing with now.)

And about what I'm looking for in the LW audience, someone asked me in a private message:

... who is the audience, here? Are you hoping that LW readers are school administrators, who will introduce DI into their schools? Are you hoping that they are teachers, who will introduce DI into their classes? Are you hoping that they are students, who will be able to seek out instructors using DI? ...

I'm personally interested because I have an interest in alternate education methods; I think the method sounds promising and what I know matches up with what I know about solid epistemology. The people who are interested in epistemic rationality (another group you could tailor posts towards) would probably be interested in learning about epistemic methods that are quantitatively superior to others.

And I said:

Oh, I dunno about DI involving "epistemic methods that are quantitatively superior to others". The founder recently wrote a book about what John Stuart Mill could have done for education, so that's the epistemology that DI is applying.

So actually, another reason I keep using Newton's laws analogies is that I suspect there's an analogious 'general relativity' to be found.

So what I really want is for the people from the LW audience to learn DI theory themselves, because I think they could improve the theory.

Well, that's the major part of what I want that's important here. I also had to add:

you remember how I mentioned 'creative strategic twists' [for how we could help DI win, and how DI could help us win], and indicated that the inspiration for that came from comparing the Michel Thomas lessons with DI proper (the internal details of each and their s

...
Meetup : Orange County Atheist Meetup Thursday September 8
by JGWeissman — 2011-09-02T03:07:29.640Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Orange County Atheist Meetup Thursday September 8

WHEN:
08 September 2011 07:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
18542 MacArthur Blvd Irvine, CA 92612

Once again we are going adjust the weekly Irvine meetup to join the Orange County Atheists for their September Meetup. The main event starts at 7:30 at the upstairs table at the IHOP. Some members also show up for drinks and appetizers at the El Torito across the street at 6:30. They would appreciate if you RSVP in the comments of the linked announcement.

Discussion article for the meetup : Orange County Atheist Meetup Thursday September 8
Job Postings?
by Daniel_Burfoot — 2011-09-02T03:01:35.670Z

I often come across job postings that require a skill set - math, statistics, programming, etc - that might make them ideal for some LW readers. Since finding fun jobs for LWers seems like a good thing to do, I often think I should post these job profiles to the discussion section.

But nobody else has done this, and it seems like the kind of thing that people might get annoyed about. Certainly we don't want LW to be overrun with recruiters.

Any thoughts?
LW September WebDiplomacy Games: Starting soon!
by Vaniver — 2011-09-02T02:00:45.191Z

Check out this post for background details.
The final list for the 48 hour game is:
Prismattic
ahartell
Kutta
Randaly
GuySrinivasan
prase
RobertLumley
The final list for the 24 hour game is:
folkTheory
printing-spoon
handoflixue
Vaniver
ahartell
shokwave
Randaly

In order to accommodate handoflixue, the short game will not start until Wednesday, September 7th. This has the positive side effects that the long game should have gone through around 2 turns by then, easing the load on people playing in both games. The long game will start as soon as possible.

You can follow the long game here. Various things have derailed the short game; not quite sure what's going to happen there.
Meetup : Austin, TX
by Vaniver — 2011-09-02T00:30:44.006Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX

WHEN:
03 September 2011 01:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
2222B Guadalupe St Austin, Texas 78705

Once again, we're meeting at Caffe Medici at 1:30 PM. I've looked into making a UT student organization and we only need 3 current UT students, and I believe we have at least four. I'll bring the paperwork for that and we should be able to get the ball rolling on that, and hopefully end up with a significantly swankier meeting space.

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX
Correspondence Bias Reversal?
by MinibearRex — 2011-09-01T21:48:53.792Z

I'm currently taking an introductory Russian class. I have been using Anki to memorize the vocabulary, and I do appear to know more vocabulary than anyone else in the class1 except for one other individual. This individual has far surpassed everyone else in the class, in every area (grammar, vocabulary, etc). Several other students have made comments along the lines of "Geez, do you spend all your time studying?", and it had occurred to me that I should ask him what sort of study techniques he's using, and possibly try them out myself.

At this point, it occurred to me that this may be a reversal of Correspondence Bias. The other students and I assumed that his superior abilities were due to his own particular methods of studying, and not to any sort of innate language ability. And yet, I think it is at least likely that there are more people in the world with a natural talent for languages, than there are people who have found some kind of spectacular studying technique.

This is just a brief anecdote of a single life experience. Are there any systematic effects that we know of that work counter to Correspondence Bias?

1 Data supporting this claim: in activities that we conduct inside the classroom, I have consistently remembered words that other members of the class do not, and it is very rare that a fellow student remembers a word from previous classes that I did not recall independently. Exceptions seem to have occurred mostly when a) it was not a word I put into Anki after class, or b) the other student is the individual I mentioned in the post.
Is Rationality Teachable?
by lukeprog — 2011-09-01T11:59:55.783Z

It is generally assumed around here that people can learn to be more rational. That's the purpose of The Sequences, after all. And veteran Less Wrongers do seem (to me) vastly more rational than the average person.

But maybe it's a selection effect: maybe Less Wrong doesn't make people more rational, it's just that the people who are already relatively rational are the ones most likely to be attracted Less Wrong.

Daniel Willingham (2008) thinks it's pretty hard to teach rationality / critical thinking,1 but what evidence do we have on the matter? Is rationality teachable?

Statistics and logic training

Statistics training appears to help. Schoemaker (1979) found that students who had taken a statistics course gave more consistent answers to questions about gambles than those who hadn't taken a statistics course. Students who had not taken the course were also more likely to bid more money than they could possibly win.

Fong et al. (1986) found that statistical training sometimes transfers to real-world decision making. Half the men in a statistics course were interviewed at the beginning of the course, and the other half were interviewed at its end. The interview was ostensibly about sports, but was intended to test for skills in applying statistics to everyday life. The men interviewed after the course did significantly better in giving statistics-informed answers than those answered at the beginning of the course.

For example, when asked why a Rookie of the Year in baseball usually does less well in his second year than in his first year, those interviewed at the beginning of the course tended to give answers like "he's resting on his laurels; he's not trying so hard his second year," while those interviewed at the end of the course tended to give answers which appreciated regression toward the mean.

What about logic? Nisbett et al. (1987) conducted several tests on the effects of different kinds of training on logical skills. Perhaps surprisingly, they found that logical skills (as measured by their tests) did not improve during courses on formal logic, informal fallacies, or two years of graduate courses in chemistry, but did improve as a result of two years of graduate courses in law, medicine, or psychology. Additionally, Lipman (1983) found that a Philosophy for Children course increased the logica...
Partial rewrite of the "Direct Instruction" thing
by Owen_Richardson — 2011-09-01T04:00:36.853Z

So yeah, "Scientifically optimizing education: Hard problem, or solved problem? Introducing the Theory of Direct Instruction". Probably not gonna go down in history as my best piece of writing ever, to say the least.

Clearly I need to fix that. As an initial measure, I added some notes addressing key points and problems to the beginning as a much shorter replacement to the original post, and recommended the new reader not attempt to slog through the original below that unless they're strangely compelled.

I felt that the most sensible context for this would be at the beginning of the original post, so I put it there and put up this post as a notification of that. (If this somehow breaks some sort of rule of etiquette or style, please just tell me and I'll rectify it most snappily.)

Thank you for your patience.
Meetup : DC Meetup: NoVa
by atucker — 2011-09-01T02:33:24.919Z

Discussion article for the meetup : DC Meetup: NoVa

WHEN:
07 September 2011 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Ballston Commons Mall

We're going to talk about Non-Violent Communication, come prepared with questions, and some willingness to practice.

Discussion article for the meetup : DC Meetup: NoVa
[SEQ RERUN] Conjunction Fallacy
by MinibearRex — 2011-09-01T02:19:44.837Z

Today's post, Conjunction Fallacy was originally published on 19 September 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Elementary probability theory tells us that the probability of one thing (we write P(A)) is necessarily greater than or equal to the conjunction of that thing and another thing (write P(A&B)). However, in the psychology lab, subjects' judgments do not conform to this rule. This is not an isolated artifact of a particular study design. Debiasing won't be as simple as practicing specific questions, it requires certain general habits of thought.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Kahneman's Planning Anecdote, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Meetup : Berkeley weekly meetup
by Nisan — 2011-08-31T19:56:02.948Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley weekly meetup

WHEN:
31 August 2011 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2128 Oxford Street, Berkeley, CA

We'll meet in the Oxford Street Starbucks at 7pm and then get dinner. Over dinner I'll solicit people for help brainstorming communication exercises.

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley weekly meetup
Are there better ways of identifying the most creative scientists?
by gwern — 2011-08-31T19:42:24.907Z

Marginal Revolution linked today an old 1963 essay by Isaac Asimov, who argues that a very cheap test for scientific capability in children & adolescents is to see whether they like science fiction and in particular, harder science fiction, "The Sword of Achilles".

I copied it out and made an HTML version of the essay: http://www.gwern.net/docs/1963-asimov-sword-of-achilles

I'd be interested if anyone knows of better tests for such scientific aptitude.

I think it'd also be interesting to see how well the SF test's predictive power has held up. Asimov's numbers seem reasonable for 1963, but may be very different these days: perhaps SF readers back then were <1% of the population and >50% of scientists, so it was a very informative, but these days? SF seems more popular, even discounting the comic books and Hollywood material as Asimov explicitly does, but the SF magazines are mostly dead and my understanding is that scientists are a vastly larger group in 2011 than 1963, both in absolute numbers and per capita.
Meetup : Ottawa Weekly Monday LessWrong Meetup
by XFrequentist — 2011-08-31T15:39:47.981Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa Weekly Monday LessWrong Meetup

WHEN:
05 September 2011 07:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Pub Italia: 434 Preston St, Ottawa, ON

Type: Social

Date: Monday September 5, 7:30pm until at least 9:00pm.

Venue: Pub Italia (likely in a booth in the abbey - back of the pub)

(We've settled on Monday evenings as the best time for most people, so we'll try this as the standard time and place for a while. Proposal for a more cost-effective or convenient location are eagerly solicited.)

Discussion post: Build small skills in the right order

Planning: I'd like to discuss plans for a short boot camp on Linear Algebra in preparation for the Stanford AI course.

Discussion article for the meetup : Ottawa Weekly Monday LessWrong Meetup
Scientifically optimizing education: Hard problem, or solved problem? Introducing the Theory of Direct Instruction
by Owen_Richardson — 2011-08-31T05:28:43.473Z

Re-edited to remove/integrate much of the added notes - Sep 5th:

This is a long post, and it was a first attempt to simply start trying to explain the whole topic, and see what kind of mistakes I made in the communication.

I did indeed make many mistakes, and started to feel that I should ask people not to read this original attempt at first, and so posted added notes to the beginning to say so and try to clear up the worst confusions.

But now that my audience is starting to close the inferential gap themselves thanks to amazingly wonderful people like Misha with “What Direct Instruction Is”, I think important points that I tried to express in this original foray might start to become more transparent to that audience.

It's still a very long post, with lots of new terminology, and, as Alicorn said, “sales-y enthusiasm'.

If you do read it, I must ask that you please don't skim, giving me the benefit of a doubt that anything confusing or nonsensical seeming might actually be something that's important and meaningful in some non-obvious way that you do not yet understand, and that some of the 'sales-y enthusiasm' and “applause lights” may be have been intended to serve some useful purpose.

Again, please don't skim (although it is completely my fault if you feel like skimming!), because I just don't know how to do any better until I get more feedback on how the complete whole of what I wrote is understood.

If you do start skimming, and give up, just tell me where you did so.

[The “added notes” from the first edit I've removed, and will go through at a later time to extract anything that was original and useful and integrate it into the post itself or whatever.]

Thank you.

Begin original:

In this post, I'm going to introduce Direct Instruction, or DI (pronounced Dee-Eye, capital D, capital I, accept no imitations). DI is essentially the theory of how to find the best way to teach anything to anyone. And I mean a theory in the true scientific sense: parsimonious, rigorously pinned down by experiment, and with an impressive history of predictive successes.

Furthermore, it bestows upon the skillful wielder astonishing powers of engineering, allowing them accomplish educational feats that are nothing short of spectacular compared to what's traditionally accepted as, well, acceptable. If DI were universally impleme

...