trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Advice Request: Baconmas Website
by orthonormal — 2012-01-01T19:25:40.308Z

The Gist: I started this blog to get people excited about a science-themed holiday. I want your suggestions before I advertise it to everyone I know!

Two years ago, I came up with the idea of celebrating Sir Francis Bacon's birthday (Jan. 22) as a festive science-themed holiday called Baconmas. (The name has the additional bonus that it's easy to convince people to come to a party if there will be bacon there.) I had a good Baconmas party in 2010 and a better one in 2011, and now I want to let other people in on the fun.

So I made a website.

It's currently "in beta"; I wrote a couple of preparatory things, but haven't yet shown it to the vast majority of my friends. I want to maximize the chance that it goes a bit viral when I do, because a science-themed holiday really needs to exist. So I'd like any suggestions you have, before I go "alpha" with it. So as to not cause anchoring, I'll put down in the first comment the things I already plan to do- if you could make all your original suggestions first, then read those plans and others' comments, then add more suggestions, that should maximize the good ideas. Thanks!

(Oh, and it goes without saying that you should celebrate Baconmas if at all possible. It's been a lot of fun for me.)
January 2012 Media Thread
by daenerys — 2012-01-01T17:24:18.070Z

There was a recent discussion considering the idea of a monthly Book (later expanded to movies, links, etc) thread. The poll was pretty unanimous that this was A Good Idea (tm), so let's give it a try!
Post what you're reading or watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing!

I encourage minimal down-voting in the comments here, because this is a thread for sharing subjective experiences, and I would like people to feel comfortable posting their personal opinion without fearing a karma backlash. If you disagree with a person's recommendation, respond with a comment instead.

I think this is a post that lends itself to comment trees, so I will start one with the categories: Books, Movies, Other, and Meta.

I am interested in hearing if you all think it's a good idea to separate out fiction and non-fiction. (So that the Book thread doesn't have Discworld next to Influence, for example. Or so the movie thread doesn't have documentaries interspersed with rom-coms or what-not)

Poster's Note: Wheee! I made my first working link on the discussion post writing interface! I can learn stuffs!
How confident should we be?
by  — 2012-01-01T15:57:19.602Z

What should a rationalist do about confidence? Should he lean harder towards

relentlessly psyching himself up to feel like he can do anything, or

having true beliefs about his abilities in all areas, coldly predicting his likelihood of success in a given domain?

I don't want to falsely construe these as dichotomous. The real answer will probably dissolve 'confidence' into smaller parts and indicate which parts go where. So which parts of 'confidence' correctly belong in our models of the world (which must never be corrupted) or our motivational systems (which we may cut apart and put together however helps us achieve our goals)? Note that this follows the distinction between epistemic and instrumental rationality.

Eliezer offers a decision criterion in The Sin of Underconfidence:

Does this way of thinking make me stronger, or weaker? Really truly?

It makes us stronger to know when to lose hope already, and it makes us stronger to have the mental fortitude to kick our asses into shape so we can do the impossible. Lukeprog prescribes boosting optimism "by watching inspirational movies, reading inspirational biographies, and listening to motivational speakers." That probably makes you stronger too.

But I don't know what to do about saying 'I can do it' when the odds are against me. What do you do when you probably won't succeed, but believing that Heaven's army is at your back would increase your chances?

My default answer has always been to maximize confidence, but I acted this way long before I discovered rationality, and I've probably generated confidence for bad reasons as often as I have for good reasons. I'd like to have an answer that prescribes the right action, all of the time. I want know when confidence steers me wrong, and know when to stop increasing my confidence. I want the real answer, not the historically-generated heuristic.

I can't help but feeling like I'm missing something basic here. What do you think?
Newcomb's problem - one boxer's introspection.
by Dmytry — 2012-01-01T15:16:40.793Z

So, just a small observation about Newcomb's problem:

It does matter to me who the predictor is.

If it is a substantially magical Omega, that predicts without fail, I will onebox - gamble that my decision might in fact cause a million in that box somehow (via simulation, via timetravel, via some handwavy sciencefictiony quantum mechanical stuff where the box content is entangled with me, via quantum murder even (like quantum suicide), it does not matter). I don't need to change anything about myself - I will win, unless I was wrong about how predictions are done and Omega failed.

If it is a human psychologist, or equivalent - well in that case I should make up here some rationalization to one box which looks like I truly believe it. I'm not going to do that because I see utility of writing a better post here to be larger than utility of winning in a future Newcomb's game show that is exceedingly unlikely to happen.

The situation with a fairly accurate human psychologist is drastically different.

The psychologist may have to put nothing into box B because you did well on particular subset of a test you did decades ago, or nothing because you did poorly. He can do it based on your relative grades for particular problems back in elementary school. One thing he isn't doing, is replicating non-trivial, complicated computation that you do in your head (assuming those aren't a mere rationalization fitted to arrive at otherwise preset conclusion). He may have been correct with previous 100 subjects via combination of sheer luck with unwillingness of previous 100 participants to actually think about it on spot, rather than solve it via cached thoughts and memes, requiring mere lookup of their personal history (they might have complex after the fact rationalizations of that decision but those are irrelevant). You can't in advance make yourself 'win' this by adjusting your Newcomb paradox specific strategy. You would have to adjust your normal life. E.g. I may have to change content of this post to win future Newcomb's paradox. Even that may not work if the prediction is based to events that happened to you and which shaped the way you think.
Rationality quotes January 2012
by Thomas — 2012-01-01T10:28:45.564Z

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.
New Year's Prediction Thread (2012)
by gwern — 2012-01-01T09:35:32.899Z

Going through expiring predictions reminded me. Just as we did for 2010 and 2011, it's time for LessWrong to make its beliefs pay rent and give hostages to fortune in making predictions for events in 2012 and beyond.

Suggested topics include: Methods of Rationality updates (eg. "will there be any?"), economic benchmarks (price of gold has been an educational one for me this past year), medical advances (but be careful not to be too optimistic!), personal precommitments (signing up for cryonics?), being curmudgeonly about self-improvement, making daring predictions about the future of AGI, and so on.

As before, please be fairly specific. I intend to put most predictions on PredictionBook.com and it'd be nice if they weren't too hard to judge in the future.

(If you want advice on making good predictions, I've tried to write up a few useful heuristics I've learned. So far in the judging process, I've done pretty well this year, although I'm a little annoyed I got a Yemen prediction right but for the wrong reasons.)
So You Want to Save the World
by lukeprog — 2012-01-01T07:39:53.314Z

This post is very out-of-date. See MIRI's research page for the current research agenda.

So you want to save the world. As it turns out, the world cannot be saved by caped crusaders with great strength and the power of flight. No, the world must be saved by mathematicians, computer scientists, and philosophers.

This is because the creation of machine superintelligence this century will determine the future of our planet, and in order for this "technological Singularity" to go well for us, we need to solve a particular set of technical problems in mathematics, computer science, and philosophy before the Singularity happens.

The best way for most people to save the world is to donate to an organization working to solve these problems, an organization like the Singularity Institute or the Future of Humanity Institute.

Don't underestimate the importance of donation. You can do more good as a philanthropic banker than as a charity worker or researcher.

But if you are a capable researcher, then you may also be able to contribute by working directly on one or more of the open problems humanity needs to solve. If so, read on...

Preliminaries

At this point, I'll need to assume some familiarity with the subject matter. If you haven't already, take a few hours to read these five articles, and then come back:

Yudkowsky (2008a)

Sandberg & Bostrom (2008)

Chalmers (2010)

Omohundro (2011)

Armstrong et al. (2011)

Or at the very least, read my shorter and more accessible summary of the main points in my online book-in-progress, Facing the Singularity.

Daniel Dewey's highly compressed summary of several key points is:

Hardware and software are improving, there are no signs that we will stop this, and human biology and biases indicate that we are far below the upper limit on intelligence. Economic arguments indicate that most AIs would act to become more intelligent. Therefore, intelligence explosion is very likely. The apparent diversity and irreducibility of information about "what is good" suggests that value is complex and fragile; therefore, an AI is unlikely to have any significant overlap with human values if that is not engineered in at significant cost. Therefore, a bad AI explosion is our default future.

The VNM utility theorem suggests that there is some formally stated goal that we most prefer. The CEV thought experiment suggests that we could program a metaethics

...
January 1-14, 2012 Open Thread
by daenerys — 2012-01-01T05:40:16.848Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
If continuing the discussion becomes impractical, that means you win at open threads; a celebratory top-level post on the topic is traditional.
Poster's Note: omg, it felt so weird typing "2012" up there.
[SEQ RERUN] Trust in Bayes
by MinibearRex — 2012-01-01T04:20:37.303Z

Today's post, Trust in Bayes was originally published on 29 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

There is a long history of people claiming to have found paradoxes in Bayesian Probability Theory. Typically, these proofs are fallacious, but correct seeming, just as apparent proofs that 2 = 1 are. But in probability theory, the illegal operation is usually not a hidden division by zero, but rather an infinity that is not arrived as a limit of a finite calculation. Once you are more careful with your math, these paradoxes typically go away.

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 The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism", 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.
Meta analysis of Writing Therapy
by jsalvatier — 2012-01-01T02:02:38.425Z

Robin Hanson recently mentioned "writing therapy" as potentially having surprisingly large benefits. In the example he gives, recently unemployed engineers who write about their experience find jobs more quickly than those that did not.

The meta-analysis paper he links to was pretty lame, but I found another meta-analysis, "Experimental disclosure and its moderators: A meta-analysis", on a somewhat broader topic of Experimental Disclosure that appears to be much better.

My judgment is non-expert, but it looks to me like a very high quality meta-analysis. The authors use a large number of studies (146) and include a large number of potential moderators, discuss their methodology in detail, and address publication bias intelligently.

The authors find small to moderate positive effects on measures of psychological health, physiological health and general life outcomes. They also find a number of interesting moderating factors.
Role-reversal education for math and science students (pilot project)
by EvelynM — 2012-01-01T00:09:33.815Z

tldr; Role-reversal education: by explaining to others, we learn, and improve in confidence.

http://solutionfocusedchange.blogspot.com/2011/12/betacoach-promising-project-to-improve.html

"The project Bètacoach seems to me to be a well thought-out and promising way to give improve math and science education in secondary education. Here is a pointwise explanation of the project:

What is Bètacoach? In September 2010 a pilot started in which third-graders with low self-confidence in math and science were asked to become coaches of four to five first-graders during math class. Once a week the bètacoaches joined the lesson which was prepared by the teacher, to help their group of first-graders.

Role-reversal education: an important principle which is used in the project is that of role-reversal education. Research has shown that by explaning things, people construct knowledge again which helps anchor this knowlegde better and which makes it easier to connect it to information.

Choosing bètacoaches: the following steps help to choose the bètacoaches: 1) choose students for whom there is room for improvement with respect to their grades and/or their self-confidence, 2) discuss their suitability for the bètacoach role with your colleagues, 3) aks the students for the role and make clear that the role is an important one, 4) express that you expect that the student will be able to fulfill the role well, 5) be demanding: make it clear that the role requires commitment and effort.

Preliminary findings: both the first-graders and the third-graders turn out to be enthusiast about the project. First-graders said the could concentrate better, felt more comfortable to ask questions and understood the material better. The bètacoaches themselves, the third-graders, said they learned from the experience and that they had become more active. "

http://moniquepijls.com/2011/08/16/betacoach-leren-in-een-nieuwe-rol/ (Dutch)
Evaporative cooling of group beliefs: current example
by calcsam — 2011-12-31T21:21:22.949Z

Background info: a splinter group, which broke off from the LDS ("Mormon") church ~100 years ago, refusing to give up polygamy, has been in the headlines over the last year; their leader was sentenced to life in prison for rape of teenage girls he took as plural wives.

Deseret News, Sex banned until Warren Jeffs' prison walls crumble, FLDS relatives say

"As the year comes to an end and the followers of Warren Jeffs await the apocalypse he has predicted, they're living under a challenging edict: they're forbidden to have sex until Jeffs is sprung from a Texas prison.

It's one of the strangest edicts in a season full of them. Jeffs has issued a stream of revelations, prophecies and orders to his congregation in the border community of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz.

The recent edicts from Jeffs' prison cell seem to be having two contradictory effects. Many are leaving the FLDS faith in disgust. Those who stay are reported to be increasingly devoted to a man who is serving a lifetime sentence for raping underage girls.

According to numerous critics and outside observers, the imprisoned FLDS leader has sometimes acted through his brother Lyle and other times has spoken directly to his congregation over the phone from prison. He recently banned many of the things his followers enjoy: bicycles, ATVs, trampolines, even children's toys. But the sex edict reaches into the bedrooms of all his devoted followers.

According to Holm, Jeffs declared all existing marriages to be void....."they have all been told that they are not to live as husband and wife"....Holm thinks about 100 members have left in recent weeks from the community of 10,000.

Eliezer, Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs

Why would a group belief become stronger after encountering crushing counterevidence?

In Festinger's classic "When Prophecy Fails", one of the cult members walked out the door immediately after the flying saucer failed to land. Who gets fed up and leaves first? An average cult member? Or a relatively more skeptical member, who previously might have been acting as a voice of moderation, a brake on the more fanatic members?

After the members with the highest kinetic energy escape, the remaining discussions will be between the extreme fanatics on one end and the slightly less extreme fanatics on the other end, with the group consensus so

...
[Link] Social dance and cognitive maintenance 
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-12-31T21:01:55.152Z

Frequent dancing causes a 76% reduction in the risk of dementia. The benefit seems to be from freestyle social dancing, though I don't think that part is as well-verified. The benefit seems to be from making large numbers of quick decisions.

I wonder if playing jazz has similar good effects.

For something a little geekier, Shiva Nata, a system of keeping the mind fresh by doing more and more complex movements. The author of the blog is a silly person, but the system seems to be for real.

Edited to correct html which was entered in the text field instead of the html field. It wouldn't surprise me if having to deal with electronics and computers tends to prevent dementia, considering the number of fiddly and changing details one has to deal with. Or is fun required?
[link] A attempt to reduce Epistemic Viciousness in the martial arts/ an empirical analysis of WSD training.
by beoShaffer — 2011-12-31T19:50:39.518Z

http://kojutsukan.blogspot.com/2011/12/womens-self-defence-courses-effective.html

http://kojutsukan.blogspot.com/2011/12/womens-self-defence-effective-or-not-pt.html

The linked articles' theoretical topic, the effectiveness of women's self defense(WDS) courses, is not of particular interest to LW. However, they are also a pushback against epistemic viciousness in the martial arts. The author analyzes WDS courses in the light of actual studies on sexual violence and the effectiveness of various methods of resistance. They also make several direct references to the problems with martial arts epistemology and some of the causes. Thus, I recommend them anyone interested in the martial arts and rationality. For that matter I recommend the entire blog, which is largely about the science of martial arts.
Intuition and Mathematics
by XiXiDu — 2011-12-31T18:58:20.004Z

While reading the answer to the question 'What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?' I became curious about the value of intuition in mathematics and why it might be useful.

It usually seems to be a bad idea to try to solve problems intuitively or use our intuition as evidence to judge issues that our evolutionary ancestors never encountered and therefore were never optimized to judge by natural selection.

And so it seems to be especially strange to suggest that intuition might be a good tool to make mathematical conjectures. Yet people like fields medalist Terence Tao seem to believe that intuition should not be disregarded when doing mathematics,

...“fuzzier” or “intuitive” thinking (such as heuristic reasoning, judicious extrapolation from examples, or analogies with other contexts such as physics) gets deprecated as “non-rigorous”. All too often, one ends up discarding one’s initial intuition and is only able to process mathematics at a formal level, thus getting stalled at the second stage of one’s mathematical education.

The point of rigour is not to destroy all intuition; instead, it should be used to destroy bad intuition while clarifying and elevating good intuition. It is only with a combination of both rigorous formalism and good intuition that one can tackle complex mathematical problems;

The author mentioned at the beginning also makes the case that intuition is an important tool,

You are often confident that something is true long before you have an airtight proof for it (this happens especially often in geometry). The main reason is that you have a large catalogue of connections between concepts, and you can quickly intuit that if X were to be false, that would create tensions with other things you know to be true, so you are inclined to believe X is probably true to maintain the harmony of the conceptual space. It's not so much that you can imagine the situation perfectly, but you can quickly imagine many other things that are logically connected to it.

But what do those people mean when they talk about 'intuition', what exactly is its advantage? The author hints at an answer,

You go up in abstraction, "higher and higher". The main object of study yesterday becomes just an example or a tiny part of what you are considering today. For example, in calculus classes yo

...