trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Rationality is Systematized Winning
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-04-03T14:41:25.255Z

Followup to: Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality

"Rationalists should win," I said, and I may have to stop saying it, for it seems to convey something other than what I meant by it.

Where did the phrase come from originally? From considering such cases as Newcomb's Problem: The superbeing Omega sets forth before you two boxes, a transparent box A containing $1000 (or the equivalent in material wealth), and an opaque box B that contains either $1,000,000 or nothing. Omega tells you that It has already put $1M in box B if and only if It predicts that you will take only box B, leaving box A behind. Omega has played this game many times before, and has been right 99 times out of 100. Do you take both boxes, or only box B?

A common position - in fact, the mainstream/dominant position in modern philosophy and decision theory - is that the only reasonable course is to take both boxes; Omega has already made Its decision and gone, and so your action cannot affect the contents of the box in any way (they argue). Now, it so happens that certain types of unreasonable individuals are rewarded by Omega - who moves even before they make their decisions - but this in no way changes the conclusion that the only reasonable course is to take both boxes, since taking both boxes makes you $1000 richer regardless of the unchanging and unchangeable contents of box B.

And this is the sort of thinking that I intended to reject by saying, "Rationalists should win!"

Said Miyamoto Musashi: "The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him."

Said I: "If you fail to achieve a correct answer, it is futile to protest that you acted with propriety."

This is the distinction I had hoped to convey by saying, "Rationalists should win!"

There is a meme which says that a certain ritual of cognition is the paragon of reasonableness and so defines what the reasonable people do. But alas, the reasonable people often get their butts handed to them by the unreasonable ones, because the universe isn't a...
Open Thread: April 2009
by gjm — 2009-04-03T13:57:49.099Z

Here is our monthly place to discuss Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts.

(Carl's open thread for March was only a week ago or thereabouts, but if we're having these monthly then I think it's better for them to appear near -- ideally at -- the start of each month, to make it that little bit easier to find something when you can remember roughly when it was posted. The fact that that open thread has had 69 comments in that time seems like good evidence that "almost anyone can post articles" is sufficient reason for not bothering with open threads.)

[EDIT, 2009-04-04: oops, I meant "is NOT sufficient reason" in that last sentence. D'oh.]
The Brooklyn Society For Ethical Culture
by MBlume — 2009-04-03T08:06:51.628Z

Dale McGowan writes:

In the past seven years or so, I’ve seen quite a few humanistic organizations from the inside — freethought groups, Ethical Societies, Congregations for Humanistic Judaism, UUs, etc. Met a lot of wonderful people working hard to make their groups succeed. All of the groups have different strengths, and all are struggling with One Big Problem: creating a genuine sense of community.

I’ve written before about community and the difficulty freethought groups generally have creating it. Some get closer than others, but it always seems to fall a bit short of the sense of community that churches so often create. And I don’t think it has a thing to do with God.

The question I hear more and more from freethought groups is, “How can we bring people in the door and keep them coming back?” The answer is to make our groups more humanistic — something churches, ironically, often do better than we do.

Now I’ve met an organization founded on freethought principles that seems to get humanistic community precisely right. It’s the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture [...], host of my seminar and talk last weekend, and the single most effective humanistic community I have ever seen.

So what do they have going for them? My top ten list:

Read on at Meming of Life
Where are we?
by Paul Crowley — 2009-04-02T21:51:24.646Z

I'm enjoying lesswrong.com a lot so far, and it sounds like the last LW/OB meetup was a lot of fun. MBlume asks:

So far there've only been LW/OB meetups in the Bay area -- is there any way we could plot the geographic distribution of LW members and determine whether there are other spots where we could get a good meetup going?

I don't think that there are so many of us that we need an automated system for this; the threading system should be enough.I'll post a few top-level comments for various parts of the world, and encourage you all to follow up and tell us where you are. Ideally, find a comment that has where you live in it already and add "me too".

I'll try to keep this post updated with useful things. I can't wait to play Paranoid Debating!

Edit: Please don't post where you live in a new top-level comment! Try to find a comment referring to the rough geographic region you live in and post under that; it'll make this post easier to navigate. I've divided the world into three (North America, Europe, everywhere else); posting under those comments will help. Thanks!
"Robot scientists can think for themselves"
by CronoDAS — 2009-04-02T21:16:22.682Z

I recently saw this Reuters article on Yahoo News. In typical science reporting fashion, the headline seems to be pure hyperbole - does anyone here know enough to clarify what the groups referenced have actually achieved?

This links represent what I could find:

Homepage of the "Robot Scientist" project:http://www.aber.ac.uk/compsci/Research/bio/robotsci/

Homepage of Hod Lipson: http://www.mae.cornell.edu/lipson/

Hod Lipson's 2007 paper "Automated reverse engineering of nonlinear dynamical systems" (pdf)
Aumann voting; or, How to vote when you're ignorant
by PhilGoetz — 2009-04-02T18:54:15.828Z

As Robin Hanson is fond of pointing out, people would often get better answers by taking other people's answers more into account. See Aumann's Agreement Theorem.

The application is obvious if you're computing an answer for your personal use. But how do you apply it when voting?

Political debates are tug-of-wars. Say a bill is being voted on to introduce a 7-day waiting period for handguns. You might think that you should vote on the merits of a 7-day waiting period. This isn't what we usually do. Instead, we've chosen our side on the larger issue (gun control: for or against) ahead of time; and we vote whichever way is pulling in our direction.

To use the tug-of-war analogy: There's a knot tied in the middle of the rope, and you have some line in the sand where you believe the knot should end up. But you don't stop pulling when the knot reaches that point; you keep pulling, because the other team is still pulling. So, if you're anti-gun-control, you vote against the 7-day waiting period, even if you think it would be a good idea; because passing it would move the knot back towards the other side of your line.

Tug-of-war voting makes intuitive sense if you believe that an irrational extremist is usually more politically effective than a reasonable person is. (It sounds plausible to me.) If you've watched a debate long enough to see that the "knot" does a bit of a random walk around some equilibrium that's on the other side of your line, it can make sense to vote this way.

How do you apply Aumann's theorem to tug-of-war voting?

I think the answer is that you try to identify which side has more idiots, and vote on the other side.

I was thinking of this because of the current online debate between Arthur Caplan and Craig Venter on DNA privacy. I don't have a strong opinion which way to vote, largely because it's nowhere stated clearly what it is that you're voting for or against.

So I can't tell what the right answer is myself. But I can identify idiots. Applying Aumann's theorem, I take it on faith that the non-idiot population can eventually work out a good solution to the problem. My job is to cancel out an idiot.

My impression is that there is a large class of irrational people who are generally "against" biotechnology because they're against evolution or science. (This d...
Selecting Rationalist Groups
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-04-02T16:21:11.355Z

Previously in series: Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately
Followup to: Conjuring an Evolution To Serve You

GreyThumb.blog offered an interesting comparison of poor animal breeding practices and the fall of Enron, which I previously posted on in some detail. The essential theme was that individual selection on chickens for the chicken in each generation who laid the most eggs, produced highly competitive chickens—the most dominant chickens that pecked their way to the top of the pecking order at the expense of other chickens. The chickens subjected to this individual selection for egg-laying prowess needed their beaks clipped, or housing in individual cages, or they would peck each other to death.

Which is to say: individual selection is selecting on the wrong criterion, because what the farmer actually wants is high egg production from groups of chickens.

While group selection is nearly impossible in ordinary biology, it is easy to impose in the laboratory: and breeding the best groups, rather than the best individuals, increased average days of hen survival from 160 to 348, and egg mass per bird from 5.3 to 13.3 kg.

The analogy being to the way that Enron evaluated its employees every year, fired the bottom 10%, and gave the top individual performers huge raises and bonuses. Jeff Skilling fancied himself as exploiting the wondrous power of evolution, it seems.

If you look over my accumulated essays, you will observe that the art contained therein is almost entirely individual in nature... for around the same reason that it all focuses on confronting impossibly tricky questions: That's what I was doing when I thought up all this stuff, and for the most part I worked in solitude. But this is not inherent in the Art, not reflective of what a true martial art of rationality would be like if many people had contributed to its development along many facets.

Case in point: At the recent LW / OB meetup, we played Paranoid Debating, a game that tests group rationality. As is only appropriate, this game was not the invention of any single person, but was collectively thought up in a series of suggestions by Nick Bostrom, Black Belt Bayesian, Tom McCabe, and steven0461.

In the game's final form, Robin Gane-McCalla asked us questions like "How many Rhode Islands would fit into Alaska?" and a group of (in this case...
Constrained talk on free speech
by KatjaGrace — 2009-04-02T13:57:00.000Z

I went to a public lecture last night on the question ‘How do we balance freedom of speech and religious sensitivity?’. It featured four distinguished academics ‘exploring legal, philosophical and cultural perspectives’. I was interested to go because I couldn’t think of any reason the ‘balance’ should be a jot away from free speech on this one, and I thought if smart people thought it worth discussing, there might be arguments I haven’t heard.

The most interesting thing I discovered in the evening was that something pretty mysterious to me is going on. The speakers implicitly assumed there was some middle of the road ‘balance’, without addressing why there should be at all. So they talked about how to assign literary merit to The Satanic Verses, how globalization might mean that we could offend more people by accident, whether it is consistent with other rights to give rights to groups, what the law can do about it now, etc. That these are the pertinent issues in answering the question wasn’t questioned. Jeremy Shearmur looked like he might at one point, but his argument was basically ‘I think I’d find Piss Christ pretty offensive if I were a Christian – it’s disgusting to me that anyone would make it anyway – and so ignorant of Christianity’. More interesting discussion of the question could be found in any bar (some of it was interesting, it just wasn’t about the question).

What am I missing here? Is it seriously the consensus (in Australia?) that censorship is in order for items especially offensive to religious people? Is there some argument for this I’m missing? What makes the situation special compared to other free speech issues? The offense? Then why not ban other things offensive to some observers? Ugly houses, swearing, public displays of homosexual affection.. The religion? Is there some reason especially unlikely beliefs are to be protected, or just any beliefs that claim their own sacredness? Are these academics afraid of something I don’t know about? Is it much more controversial than I thought to support free speech in general? Or is the question just a matter of balancing the political correctness of saying ‘yay free speech’ and of ‘yay religious tolerance’?
Romance is magical
by KatjaGrace — 2009-04-02T09:51:00.000Z

People seem to generally believe they have high romantic standards, and that they aren’t strongly influenced by things like looks, status and money. Research says our standards aren’t that high, that they drop if the standard available drops for a single evening, and that superficial factors make more of a difference than we think. Our beliefs about what we want are wrong. It’s not an obscure topic though; the evidence should be in front of us. How do we avoid noticing? We’re pretty good at not noticing things we don’t want to – we can probably do it unaided. Here there is a consistent pattern though.

Consider the hypothesis that there is approximately one man in the world for me. I meet someone who appears to be him within a month of looking. This is not uncommon, though it has a one in many million chance of happening under my hypothesis, if I look insanely hard. This should make me doubt my hypothesis in favor of one where there are several, or many million men in the world for me. What do I really do? Feel that since something so unlikely (under the usual laws of chance) occurred it must be a sign that we were really meant for each other, that the universe is looking out for us, that fate found us deserving, or whatever. Magic is a nice addition to the theory, as it was what we wanted in the relationship anyway. Romantic magic and there being a Mr Right are complimentary beliefs, so meeting someone nice confirms the idea that there was exactly one perfect man in the world rather than suggesting it’s absurd.

I can’t tell how serious anyone is about this, but ubiquitously when people happen to meet the girl of their dreams on a bus where they were the only English speaking people they put it down to fate, rather than radically lowered expectations. When they marry someone from the same small town they say they were put there for each other. When their partner, chosen on grounds of intellectual qualities, happens to also be rich and handsome their friends remark at how fortune has smiled on them. When people hook up with anyone at all they tell everyone around how unlikely it was that they should both have been at that bus stop on that day, and how since somehow they did they think it’s a sign.

We see huge evidence against our hypothesis, invoke magic/friendly-chance as an explanation, then see this as conf...
Wrong Tomorrow
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-04-02T08:18:07.000Z

Wrong Tomorrow by Maciej Cegłowski is a very simple site for listing pundit predictions and tracking them [FAQ]. It doesn't come with prices and active betting... but a simple registry of this kind can scale much faster than a market, and right now we're in a situation where no one is bothering to track pundit predictions or report on pundit track records. Predictions are produced as simple entertainment or as simple political theater, without the slightest fear of accountability.

This site is missing some features, but it looks to me like a starting attempt at what's needed - a Wikipedia-like, user-contributed, low-barrier-to-entry database of all pundit predictions, past and present.
Accuracy Versus Winning
by John_Maxwell — 2009-04-02T04:47:37.156Z

Consider the problem of an agent who is offered a chance to improve their epistemic rationality for a price. What is such an agent's optimal strategy?

A complete answer to this problem would involve a mathematical model to estimate the expected increase in utility associated with having more correct beliefs. I don't have a complete answer, but I'm pretty sure about one thing: From an instrumental rationalist's point of view, to always accept or always refuse such offers is downright irrational.

And now for the kicker: You might be such an agent.

One technique that humans can use to work towards epistemic rationality is to doubt themselves, since most people think they are above average in a wide variety of areas (and it's reasonable to assume that merit in at least some of these areas is normally distributed.) But having a negative explanatory style, which is one way to doubt yourself, has been linked with sickness and depression.

And the inverse is also true. Humans also seem to be rewarded for a certain set of beliefs: those that help them maintain a somewhat-good assessment of themselves. Having an optimistic explanatory style (in an nutshell, explaining good events in a way that makes you feel good, and explaining bad events in a way that doesn't make you feel bad) has been linked with success in sports, sales and school.

If you're unswayed by my empirical arguments, here's a theoretical one. If you're a human and you want to have correct beliefs, you must make a special effort to seek evidence that your beliefs are wrong. One of our known defects is our tendency to stick with our beliefs for too long. But if you do this successfully, you will become less certain and therefore less determined.

In some circumstances, it's good to be less determined. But in others, it's not. And to say that one should always look for disconfirming evidence, or that one should always avoid looking for disconfirming evidence, is idealogical according to the instrumental rationalist.

Who do you think is going to be more motivated to think about math: someone who feels it is their duty to become smarter, or a naive student who believes he or she has the answer to some mathematical problem and is only lacking a proof?

You rarely see a self-help book, entreprenuership guide, or personal development blog telling people how to be...
You don't need Kant
by  — 2009-04-01T18:09:02.148Z

Related to: Comments on Degrees of Radical Honesty, OB: Belief in Belief, Cached Thoughts.

"Nothing worse could happen to these labours than that anyone should make the unexpected discovery that there neither is, nor can be, any a priori knowledge at all.... This would be the same thing as if one sought to prove by reason that there is no reason" (Critique of Practical Reason, Introduction).

You don't need Kant to demonstrate the value of honesty. In fact, summoning his revenant can be a dangerous thing to do. You end up in the somewhat undesirable situation of having almost the right conclusion, but having it for the wrong reasons. Reasons you weren't even aware of, because they were all collapsed into the belief, "I believe in person X".

One of the annoying things about philosophy is that the dead simply don't die. Once a philosopher or philosophical doctrine gains some celebrity in the community, it's very difficult to convince anyone afterward that said philosopher or doctrine was flawed. In other words, the philosophical community tends to have problems with relinquishment. Therefore, there are still many philosophers that spend their careers studying, for example, Plato, apparently not with the intent to determine what parts of what Plato wrote are correct or still applicable, but rather with the intent to defend Plato from criticism. To prove Plato was right.

Since the community doesn't value relinquishment, the cost of writing a flawed criticism is very low. Therefore, journals are glutted with so-called "negative results": "Kant was wrong", "Hegel was wrong", etc. No one seriously believes otherwise, but writing positive philosophical results is hard, and not writing at all isn't a viable career option for a professional philosopher.

To its credit, MBlume refrains from bringing up Kant in his article on radical honesty, where he cites other, more feasible variants of radical honesty. However, in the comments, Kant rears his ugly head.

Demosthenes writes:

"Kant disagrees and seems to warn that the principle of truth telling is universal; you can't go around deciding who has a right to truth and who does not. Furthermore, he suggests that your lie could have terrible unforeseen consequences.

...

I am more utilitarian than Kant, but it is not hard to ignore "proximity" and come up with a cost/benefit calculation that agrees with him."

mdcaton writes:

"I

...
Proverbs and Cached Judgments: the Rolling Stone
by Annoyance — 2009-04-01T15:40:15.528Z

People have long noted that individuals diagnosed as schizophrenic usually manifest disturbances of language, communication, and abstract thought. One way to examine that disturbance is to ask patients to interpret various common proverbs, as psychiatrists have done since before the turn of the century. (Interested readers can find a layperson-suitable discussion of this method's utility in the modern day at the following link: AAPL newsletter.)

Originally, patients' responses were evaluated by their correctness. Now they're graded on their degree of abstraction. Responses that understand the sayings literally or in simplistically concrete terms are generally considered to be signs of a failure to abstract, although illiterate or mentally challenged individuals also tend to respond that way, and individuals encountering a proverb for the first time are less likely to recognize its symbolic meaning. It seems clear that cultural exposure to proverbial forms, to the idiomatic usage of phrases and scenarios, affects how we recognize such methods of communication.

But why was the 'correctness' criterion dropped? Because perfectly normal people, whom no one would consider schizophrenic, often gave interpretations that wildly conflicted with what the interviewer considered to be the correct one. Which interpretations were 'correct' depended heavily on the traditions and cultures that the listeners came from.

Let's consider a classic example of a proverb often given divergent interpretations:

The rolling stone gathers no moss.

People from societies where stability and slowly-developed connections are valued consider this saying to be a warning of the dangers of activity and change. Without staying still, beautiful moss won't grow. People from societies where activity and change are valued, however, consider it to be a prescription for how to avoid decay and degeneration. If you don't keep moving, you'll be covered by moss!

When asked to explain their interpretation, the value of moss growth is typically presented as desirable or undesirable, depending on the defended meaning. But if you start out by asking people whether moss is something to seek or avoid, there's no clear preference outside of specific contexts. People generally don't have aesthetic preferences either way; overall, people don't care.

So...