trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Berlin Meetup
by blob — 2012-10-09T04:57:05.105Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin Meetup

WHEN:
16 October 2012 07:30:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Spreegold ALEX, Rosa Luxemburg-Straße 2, 10178 Berlin

NOTE: We switched venue to Spreegold ALEXANDERPLATZ, Rosa Luxemburg-Straße 2, 10178 Berlin.

It looks like we'll be at least eight people, so it'll likely be our biggest gathering yet! I'm looking forward to meeting everyone.

If you're attending for the first time: We have a mailing list where the planning happens. Feel free to sign up. I'll also bring a sign saying 'LessWrong' in big, friendly - although red - letters.

Here's the current plan and comments:

Michael: Discuss recent sequence http://lesswrong.com/tag/seq_epistemology/

Christian: Meta discussion limited to 30 minutes: How to improve the meetup? What do we want to achieve?

Christian: Share goals and projects. Let’s start with just sharing so the others know what interests us. No long discussion intended, so it shouldn’t consume too much time.

Jan: Calibration game using Gambit 7 questions

Christian: rejection therapy follow-up

Christian: evaluate commitments and make new ones

Christian: agree on meetup scheduling for next time: suggestion: use doodle again, clarify ifneedbe, use highest yes+ifneedbe. If >8 attendants again next time, switch to fixed-day schedule. (we'll make a new poll, but this one would suggest meeting every 2 weeks and alternating saturday and tuesday)

Alexander: 'Hypothetical Apostasies' game from booklet. Choosing a belief in advance would help. The current candidate is 'taking untested recreational drugs is good'. Note feedback comment below.

Semi-anonymous feedback:

Some kind of moderation during focused discussion would be nice - to end or defer tangents and keep discussion moving

Jan: Seconded. I volunteer to moderate.

Jan: And I looked at the ‘Hypothetical Apostasies’ game. The current belief seems not too well suited (too easy to argue against and not important enough). But I don’t think we need one in advance, since one of the purposes seems arguing against it on the spot. I have a few ideas we could use though.

Discussion article for the meetup : Berlin Meetup
Reasons for someone to "ignore" you
by Wei Dai — 2012-10-08T19:50:36.426Z

I often feel guilty for ignoring other people's comments or questions, and frustrated when other people seem to be ignoring me. If I can't indicate to someone exactly why I'm not answering, or can't receive such an indication myself, I can at least help my future selves and others obtain a better probability distribution over such reasons. To that end, I'm listing all of the reasons I can think of for someone to not respond to a comment/question, to save the effort of regenerating these hypotheses from scratch each time and prevent the possibility of failing to consider the actual reason. Note that these are not meant to be mutually exclusive.

They haven't checked their inbox yet.

They got too many responses in their inbox and didn't pay enough attention to yours.

They are temporarily too busy to respond.

They were planning to respond but then forgot to.

They don't understand the comment yet and are still trying.

They've stopped trying to understand the comment and don't expect further discussion to resolve the confusion.

They think it's obvious that they agree.

They think it's obvious that they disagree.

They disagree and are planning to write up the reasons later.

They don't know whether to agree or disagree and are still thinking about it.

They think all useful information has been exchanged and it's not worth another comment just to indicate final agreement/disagreement.

They think you just want to express your opinion and don't care what they think.

They are tired of the discussion and don't want to think about it any more.

The comment shows a level of intelligence and/or rationality and/or knowledge that makes it not worthwhile for them to engage you.

They already addressed your question or point before but you missed it or didn't get it.

They don't know how to answer your question and are too embarrassed to admit it.

They interpreted your question as being addressed to the public rather than to them personally.

They think most people already know the answer (or don't care to know) and don't want to bother answering just for you or a few other people.

They think you are mainly signaling/status-seeking instead of truth-seeking.

They are mainly signaling/status-seeking (perhaps subconsciously) and think not responding is optimal for that.

They can't see how to respond honestly without causing or prolonging a pe

...
Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2012-10-08T08:01:13.095Z

Followup to: Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms (minor post)

There's an old anecdote about Ayn Rand, which Michael Shermer recounts in his "The Unlikeliest Cult in History" (note: calling a fact unlikely is an insult to your prior model, not the fact itself), which went as follows:

Branden recalled an evening when a friend of Rand's remarked that he enjoyed the music of Richard Strauss. "When he left at the end of the evening, Ayn said, in a reaction becoming increasingly typical, 'Now I understand why he and I can never be real soulmates. The distance in our sense of life is too great.' Often she did not wait until a friend had left to make such remarks."

Many readers may already have appreciated this point, but one of the Go stones placed to block that failure mode is being careful what we bless with the great community-normative-keyword 'rational'. And one of the ways we do that is by trying to deflate the word 'rational' out of sentences, especially in post titles or critical comments, which can live without the word. As you hopefully recall from the previous post, we're only forced to use the word 'rational' when we talk about the cognitive algorithms which systematically promote goal achievement or map-territory correspondences. Otherwise the word can be deflated out of the sentence; e.g. "It's rational to believe in anthropogenic global warming" goes to "Human activities are causing global temperatures to rise"; or "It's rational to vote for Party X" deflates to "It's optimal to vote for Party X" or just "I think you should vote for Party X".

If you're writing a post comparing the experimental evidence for four different diets, that's not "Rational Dieting", that's "Optimal Dieting". A post about rational dieting is if you're writing about how the sunk cost fallacy causes people to eat food they've already purchased even if they're not hungry, or if you're writing about how the typical mind fallacy or law of small numbers leads people to overestimate how likely it is that a diet which worked for them will work for a friend. And even then, your title is 'Dieting and the Sunk Cost Fallacy', unless it's an overview of four different cognitive biases affecting dieting. In which case a better title would be 'Four Biases Screwing Up Your Diet', since 'Rational D...
Point-Based Value Iteration
by royf — 2012-10-08T06:19:34.355Z

Followup to: The Bayesian Agent

This post explains one interesting and influential algorithm for achieving high utility of the actions of a Bayesian agent, called Point-Based Value Iteration (original paper). Its main premise resembles some concept of internal availability.

A reinforcement-learning agent chooses its actions based on its internal memory state. The memory doesn't have to include an exact account of all past observations - it's sufficient for the agent to keep track of a belief of the current state of the world.

This mitigates the problem of having the size of the memory state grow indefinitely. The memory-state space is now the set of all distributions over the world state. Importantly, this space doesn't grow exponentially with time like the space of observable histories. Unfortunately, it still has volume exponential in the number of world states.

So we moved away from specifying the action to take after each observable history, in favor of specifying the action to take in each belief state. This was justified by the belief being a sufficient statistic for the world state, and motivated by the belief space being much smaller (for long processes) than the history space. But for the purpose of understanding this algorithm, we should go back to describing the action policy in terms of the action to take after each observable history, π(At|O1,...,Ot).

Now join us as we're watching the dynamics of the process unfold. We're at time t, and the agent has reached Bayesian belief Bt, the distribution of the world state to the best of the agent's knowledge. What prospects does the agent still have for future rewards? What is its value-to-go of being in this belief state?

If we know what action the agent will take after each observable history (if and when it comes to pass), it turns out that the expected total of future rewards is linear in Bt. To see why this is so, consider a specific future (and present):

wt, ot, at, wt+1, ot+1, at+1, ..., wn, on, an

The reward of this future is:

R(wt,at) + R(wt+1,at+1) + ... + R(wn,an)

The probability of this future, given that the agent already knows o1,...,ot, is:

Bt(wt)·π(at|o1,...,ot)·p(wt+1|wt,at)·σ(ot+1|wt+1)·π(at+1|o1,...,ot+1)···

···p(wn|wn-1,an-1)·σ(on|wn)·π(an|o1,...,on)

We arrive at this by starting wi...
Internal Availability
by royf — 2012-10-08T06:19:29.089Z

Edit: Following mixed reception, I decided to split this part out of the latest post in my sequence on reinforcement learning. It wasn't clear enough, and anyway didn't belong there.

I'm posting this hopefully better version to Discussion, and welcome further comments on content and style.

The availability heuristic seems to be a mechanism inside our brains which uses the ease with which images, events and concepts come to mind as evidence for their prevalence or probability of occurrence. For this heuristic to be worth the trouble it causes, there needs to be a counterpart, a second mechanism which actually makes things available to the first one in correlation with their likelihood. In this post I discuss why having such an internal availability mechanism can be a good idea, and outline some of the ways it can fail.

You're playing Texas Hold'em poker against another player, and she has just bet all her chips on the flop (the 2nd of 4 betting rounds, when there are 2 more shared cards to draw). You estimate that with high probability she has a low pair (say, under 9) with a high kicker (A or K, hoping to hit a second pair). You hold Q-J off-suit. Do you call?

One question this depends on is: what's the probability p that you will win this hand? An experienced player will know that your best hope is to hit a pair, without the other player hitting anything better than her low pair. This has probability of slightly less than 25%.

We could compute or remember a better estimate if we notice the probability of runner-runner outs, but is it worth it? It won't help us pin down p with amazing accuracy - we could be wrong about the opponent's hand to begin with. And anyway, the decision of whether to actually call depends on many other factors: the sizes of your stack, her stack, the blinds and so on. A 1% error in the estimate of the win probability is unlikely to change your decision.

So instead of pointlessly trying to predict the future to an impossible and useless degree of accuracy, what we did was tell ourselves a bunch of likely stories about what might happen, then combine these scenarios into a simple probabilistic prediction of the future, and plan as best we can given this prediction.

This may be the mechanism that makes the availability heuristic a smart choice. The main observed effect of this heur...
[SEQ RERUN] Measuring Optimization Power
by MinibearRex — 2012-10-08T05:19:15.949Z

Today's post, Measuring Optimization Power was originally published on 27 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

In order to measure the power of an optimization process, we can calculate how improbable it is that its goals would be fulfilled if that process were not present. The more unlikely they are, the more powerful the process is.

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 Aiming at the Target, 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.
Article sketch: When procrastination isn't akrasia
by  — 2012-10-08T04:27:54.461Z

I have a lot to say on this topic, but I haven't written an article about it, for two reasons... come to think of it, more like for one reason, twice. The first reason is that, while I've learned quite a bit about procrastination in the past few months, I haven't learned much about it, and as a result, the essay I could write now wouldn't be as good as the article I could write a couple of months from now, after I've learned even more. The second reason is that, while I've learned quite a bit about procrastination in the past few months, I still do procrastinate, and besides that, I have a backlog of stuff I consider more important than writing this essay, and as a result, I've decided to postpone it until I've gotten all that other stuff done.

I figure a sketch is better than nothing, so I'm just giving you this stream-of-consciousness business you're reading now.

Procrastination, as far as I can tell, has two major causes. The first of these causes is akrasia: you know you should be doing something else, and you know what you should be doing, but you aren't doing it. This essay is about the second cause: disorganization.

Now, it's likely that you can think of at least one thing right now—a major homework project, or cleaning the entire house, or something—that makes you think, Dang it. I haven't done that yet, and I wish I had. I've been procrastinating. Ask yourself this question: when should you have done it?

Perhaps the answer is along the lines of "Well, I should have done that Tuesday morning, when I looked on my to-do list and saw that it was the top item on there, but instead of doing it, I played Minecraft for three hours." In other words, perhaps you can think of a specific time you should have done it, and you remembered that you could have done it, but instead, you did something that was less important. If all three of those things are true, then your problem is akrasia.

If any of those parts is missing, then your problem is not akrasia; your problem is disorganization. Let me explain.

Suppose that instead of thinking of a specific time you should have done the task, you simply thought, "I should have done that at some point". Even if you have perfect willpower, knowing that you should be doing something "at some point" isn't enough, because at any given time, there are lots of things that you should...
Meetup : Montréal Meetup
by Paul_G — 2012-10-08T03:16:12.828Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Montréal Meetup

WHEN:
10 October 2012 05:30:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Caffe Art Java - 645, av. du Président-Kennedy, Montréal, QC H3A 1K1

Montréal LessWrong Meetup

The topic will be Bayesian vs Frequentist statistics, with a rundown of how Bayesian stats work in several contexts.

We'll have some sort of sign saying "LessWrong".

If the Caffe Art Java is full, we'll be nextdoor at the Broadway Cheesecake.

Message me for my phone number in case you need to contact me for whatever reason!

Discussion article for the meetup : Montréal Meetup
LessWrong help desk - free paper downloads and more
by jsalvatier — 2012-10-07T23:45:13.566Z

Over the last year, VincentYu, gwern, myself and others have provided 132 academic papers for the LessWrong community (out of 152 requests, a 87% success rate) through the Free research, editing and articles thread. We originally intended to provide editing, research and general troubleshooting help, but article downloads are by far the most requested service.

If you're doing a LessWrong relevant project we want to help you. If you need help accessing a journal article or academic book chapter, we can get it for you. If you need some research or writing help, we can help there too.

Turnaround times for articles published in the last 20 years or so is usually less than a day. Older articles often take a couple days.

Please make new article requests in the comment section of this thread.

If you would like to help out with finding papers, please monitor this thread for requests. If you want to monitor via RSS like I do, Google Reader will give you the comment feed if you give it the URL for this thread (or use this link directly).

If you have some special skills you want to volunteer, mention them in the comment section.
Meetup : Winter Solstice Megameetup - NYC
by Raemon — 2012-10-07T20:26:15.247Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Winter Solstice Megameetup - NYC

WHEN: 15 December 2012 05:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: 316 W 138th Street New York, NY 10030

Nearly a year ago, in NYC we held the first Less Wrong Winter Solstice - a celebration of the past, present and future of winter, and the progress humankind has made over the years, and the progress we will continue to make.

We'll be doing it again this year, on the weekend of December 15th and 16th. Our exact plans are still in motion, but people who want to come from out of state may want to start thinking about travel plans.

It is likely that the communal music celebration will be on Saturday evening, and that Sunday afternoon will be freeform discussion with refreshments. Due to limited seating, my recommendation is that people who primarily want to meet a lot of Less Wrong folk should come to the Sunday party, and people who specifically want to participate in ritual should come on Saturday.

(Don't shy away from coming to the evening celebration if you want to, we can make room. I just know that there are people who like big LW community events but don't care much for ritual/tribalism, and figure it's better not to try to cater to everyone all at once)

The event will be held at Winterfell House, a three story apartment building that 5 of us recently acquired in Manhattan. It would be useful if we knew, sooner rather than later, how many people to expect, so we can plan the scale of the event accordingly.

Discussion article for the meetup : Winter Solstice Megameetup - NYC
Meetup : Brussels meetup
by Axel — 2012-10-07T20:14:16.359Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup

WHEN:
13 October 2012 01:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles

We are once again meeting at 'la fleur en papier doré' close to the Brussels Central station. If you feel like an intelligent discussion and are in the neighborhood, consider dropping by. As always, I'll have a sign.

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels meetup
Raising the waterline
by Morendil — 2012-10-07T16:23:05.247Z

Among the goals of Less Wrong is to "raise the sanity waterline" of humanity. We've also talked about "raising the rationality waterline": the phrase is somewhat popular around these parts, which suggests that the metaphor is catchy. But is that all there is to it, a catchy metaphor? Or can the phrase be more usefully cashed out?

While reading Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, I came across a discussion of "raising the waterline" which fleshes out the metaphor with a more substantial model. This model preserves some of the salient aspects of the metaphor as discussed on LW, for instance the perception that the current waterline (as regards sanity and rationality) is "ridiculously low". More interestingly, it fleshes out some of the specific ways that a "waterline" belief should constrain our future sensory experiences, maybe even to the point of quantifying what should result from low (or rising) waterlines.

This is intended as a short series:

"Raising the waterline", this introductory post, will summarize Nate Silver's "waterline" model, within its original context of playing Poker, which Silver frames as a game of prediction under uncertainty. Poker therefore serves as a "toy model" for a much more general class of problems.

"Raising the forecasting waterline" will extend the discussion to the kind of forecasts studied by Philip Tetlock's Good Judgement Project, a prediction game somewhat similar to PredictionBook and related to prediction markets; I will leverage the waterline model to extract useful insights from my participation in GJP.

"Raising the discussion waterline", a shamelessly speculative coda, will relate the previous two posts to the question of "how do Internet discussions reliably lead to correct inferences from true beliefs, or fail to do so"; I will argue that the waterline model brings some hope that a few basic tactics could nevertheless provide large wins, and raise the more general question of what other low waterlines we could aim to exploit.

The Model

The waterline model is introduced in Chaper 10, "The Poker Bubble", to explain how for a period of time in the 2000's Silver found it fairly easy to make a living from playing online poker, but this source of revenue later dried up altogether.

I was one of those people. I lived the poker dream for a while, and then it died. I learned that poker sits at the muddy confluence of th

...
[Book Review] "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t.", by Nate Silver
by Douglas_Reay — 2012-10-07T07:29:43.869Z

Here's a link to a review, by The Economist, of a book about prediction, some of the common ways in which people make mistakes and some of the methods by which they could improve:

Looking ahead : How to look ahead—and get it right

One paragraph from that review:

A guiding light for Mr Silver is Thomas Bayes, an 18th-century English churchman and pioneer of probability theory. Uncertainty and subjectivity are inevitable, says Mr Silver. People should not get hung up on this, and instead think about the future the way gamblers do: “as speckles of probability”. In one surprising chapter, poker, a game from which Mr Silver once earned a living, emerges as a powerful teacher of the virtues of humility and patience.
[SEQ RERUN] Aiming at the Target
by MinibearRex — 2012-10-07T03:44:03.557Z

Today's post, Aiming at the Target was originally published on 26 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

When you make plans, you are trying to steer the future into regions higher in your preference ordering.

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 Belief in Intelligence, 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.