trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A Proof of Occam's Razor
by Unknowns — 2010-08-10T14:20:35.410Z

Related to: Occam's Razor

If the Razor is defined as, “On average, a simpler hypothesis should be assigned a higher prior probability than a more complex hypothesis,” or stated in another way, "As the complexity of your hypotheses goes to infinity, their probability goes to zero," then it can be proven from a few assumptions.

1) The hypotheses are described by a language that has a finite number of different words, and each hypothesis is expressed by a finite number of these words. That this allows for natural languages such as English, but also for computer programming languages and so on. The proof in this post is valid for all cases.

2) A complexity measure is assigned to hypotheses in such a way that there are or may be some hypotheses which are as simple as possible, and these are assigned the complexity measure of 1, while hypotheses considered to be more complex are assigned higher integer values such as 2, 3, 4, and so on. Note that apart from this, we can define the complexity measure in any way we like, for example as the number of words used by the hypothesis, or in another way, as the shortest program which can output the hypothesis in a given programming language (e.g. the language of the hypotheses might be English but their simplicity measured according to a programming language; Eliezer Yudkowsky follows this way in the linked article.) Many other definitions would be possible. The proof is valid for all definitions that follow the conditions laid out.

3) The complexity measure should also be defined in such a way that there are a finite number of hypotheses given the measure of 1, a finite number given the measure of 2, a finite number given the measure of 3, and so on. Note that this condition is not difficult to satisfy; it would be satisfied by ei

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Against Cryonics & For Cost-Effective Charity
by multifoliaterose — 2010-08-10T03:59:28.119Z

Related To: You Only Live Twice, Normal Cryonics, Abnormal Cryonics, The Threat Of Cryonics, Doing your good deed for the day, Missed opportunities for doing well by doing good

Summary: Many Less Wrong posters are interested in advocating for cryonics. While signing up for cryonics is an understandable personal choice for some people, from a utilitarian point of view the money spent on cryonics would be much better spent by donating to a cost-effective charity. People who sign up for cryonics out of a generalized concern for others would do better not to sign up for cryonics and instead donating any money that they would have spent on cryonics to a cost-effective charity. People who are motivated by a generalized concern for others to advocate the practice of signing up for cryonics would do better to advocate that others donate to cost-effective charities.

Added 08/12: The comments to this post have prompted me to add the following disclaimers:

(1) Wedrifid understood me to be placing moral pressure on people to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. As I've said elsewhere, "I don't think that Americans should sacrifice their well-being for the sake of others. Even from a utilitarian point of view, I think that there are good reasons for thinking that it would be a bad idea to do this." My motivation for posting on this topic is the one described by rhollerith_dot_com in his comment.

(2) In line with the above comment, when I say "selfish" I don't mean it with the negative moral connotations that the word carries, I mean it as a descriptive term. There are some things that we do for ourselves and there are some things that we do for others - this is as things should be. I'd welcome any suggestions for a substitute for the word "selfish" that has the same denotation but which is free of negative conotations.

(3) Wei_Dai thought that my post assumed a utilitarian ethical framework. I can see how my post may have come across that way. However, while writing the post I was not assuming that the reader ascribes to utilitarianism. When I say "we should" in my post I mean "to the extent that we ascribe to utilitarianism we should." I guess that while writing the post I thought that this would be clear from context, but turned out to have been mistaken on this point.

As an aside, I do think that t...
Five-minute rationality techniques
by sketerpot — 2010-08-10T02:24:48.246Z

Less Wrong tends toward long articles with a lot of background material. That's great, but the vast majority of people will never read them. What would be useful for raising the sanity waterline in the general population is a collection of simple-but-useful rationality techniques that you might be able to teach to a reasonably smart person in five minutes or less per technique.

Carl Sagan had a slogan: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." He would say this phrase and then explain how, when someone claims something extraordinary (i.e. something for which we have a very low probability estimate), they need correspondingly stronger evidence than if they'd made a higher-likelihood claim, like "I had a sandwich for lunch." We can talk about this very precisely, in terms of Bayesian updating and conditional probability, but Sagan was able to get a lot of this across to random laypeople in about a minute. Maybe two minutes.

What techniques for rationality can be explained to a normal person in under five minutes? I'm looking for small and simple memes that will make people more rational, on average. Here are some candidates, to get the discussion started:

Candidate 1 (suggested by DuncanS): Unlikely events happen all the time. Someone gets in a car-crash and barely misses being impaled by a metal pole, and people say it's a million-to-one miracle -- but events occur all the time that are just as unlikely. If you look at how many highly unlikely things could happen, and how many chances they have to happen, then it's obvious that we're going to see "miraculous" coincidences, purely by chance. Similarly, with millions of people dying of cancer each year, there are going to be lots of people making highly unlikely miracle recoveries. If they didn't, that would be surprising.

Candidate 2: Admitting that you were wrong is a way of winning an argument. (The other person wins, too.) There's a saying that "It takes a big man to admit he's wrong," and when people say this, they don't seem to realize that it's a huge problem! It shouldn't be hard to admit that you were wrong about something! It shouldn't feel like defeat; it should feel like success. When you lose an argument with someone, it should be time for high fives and mutual jubilation, not shame and anger. The hard part of retraining yourself to t...
Book Recommendations
by NancyLebovitz — 2010-08-09T20:05:49.894Z

This is a place to consolidate book recommendations.

I'm reading The Logic of Failure and enjoying it quite a bit. I wasn't sure whether I'd heard of it here, and I found a post here called Great Books of Failure, an article which hadn't crossed my path before.

There's a recent thread about books for a gifted young teen and a slightly less recent thread discussing books on cogsci which might or might not be found by someone looking for good books.

So, what books or lists of books do you recommend?
Book Recommendations
by NancyLebovitz — 2010-08-09T20:03:46.719Z

This is a place to consolidate book recommendations.

I'm reading The Logic of Failure and enjoying it quite a bit. I wasn't sure whether I'd heard of it here, and I found a post here called Great Books of Failure, an article which hadn't crossed my path before.
There's a recent thread about books for a gifted young teen and a slightly less recent discussion of books on cogsci thread which might or might not be found by someone looking for good books.

So, what books or lists of books do you recommend?
Two straw men fighting
by JanetK — 2010-08-09T08:53:24.636Z

For a very long time, philosophy has presented us with two straw men in combat with one another and we are expected to take sides. Both straw men appear to have been proved true and also proved false. The straw men are Determinism and Free Will. I believe that both, in any useful sense, are false. Let me tell a little story.

Mary's story

Mary is walking down the street, just for a walk, without a firm destination. She comes to a T where she must go left or right and she looks down each street finding them about the same. She decides to go left. She feels she has, like a free little birdie, exercised her will without constraint. As she crosses the next intersection she is struck by a car and suffers serious injury. Now she spends much time thinking about how she could have avoided being exactly where she was, when she was. She believes that things have causes and she tries to figure out where a different decision would have given a different outcome and how she could have known to make the alternative decision. 'If only..' ideas crowd into her thoughts. She believes simultaneously that her actions have causes and that there are valid alternatives to her actions. She is using both deterministic logic and free will logic, neither alone leads to 'If only..' scenarios – it takes both. If only she had noticed that the next intersection on the right had traffic lights but on the left didn't. If only she had not noticed the shoe store on the left. What is more she is doing this in order to change some aspect of her decision making so that it will be less likely to put her in hospital, again this is not in keeping with either logic. But really both forms of logic are deeply flawed. What Mary is actually attempting is to do maintenance on her decision making processes so that they can learn whatever is available to be learned from her unfortunate experience.

What is useless about determinism

There is a big difference between being 'in principle' determined and being determined in any useful way. If I accept that all is caused by the laws of physics (and we know these laws – a big if) this does not accomplish much. I still cannot predict events except trivially: in general but not in full detail, in simple not complex situations, extremely shortly into the future rather than longer term, etc. To predict anything rea...
Why is gender equality so rude?
by KatjaGrace — 2010-08-09T01:00:10.000Z

I don’t see much anti-female sexism in my immediate surrounds; I notice more that is anti-male. But one place I have been continually put off by anti-female sexism is in attempts to promote gender equality. It seems especially prominent in efforts to seduce me to traditionally non-feminine academic areas. If my ratio of care about interesting subjects vs. social situations were different I might have been put off by the seeming prospect of being treated like a defective sacrifice to political correctness.

Some examples from the advertising and equity policies of various academic places I’ve been:

‘Women can make valuable contributions to …’ implies that this is an issue of serious contention. If most people thought women were of zero value in some fields, this would be a positive statement about women, but they don’t. Worse, the author can’t make a stronger statement than that it is possible for women to create more than zero value.

Appeals to consider myself capable of e.g. engineering despite being female make the same error but this time suggesting that the viewer herself is likely in doubt. Such a statement can only be useful to women so ignorant of their own characteristics that they need to rely on their gender as deciding evidence in what career to devote their lives to, so it suggests the female audience are clueless. The smartest women have likely noticed that they are smart, and will not be encouraged by the prospect of joining a field where others expect them to be intellectually insecure special people to be reassured and included for human rights purposes.

Statements such as women are valuable because they can provide a different perspective on computer science, imply that women can’t understand a computer the usual way, but might help figure out how to make it more personable or something. If this is true, why not just say ‘women are not that valuable in computer science’?

Policies of employing a certain number of female staff to provide role models or leadership for female students imply that females would rather aspire to femalehood than to superior ability (presumably the decision criteria forgone).

Recommendations that courses like mathematics should be more focussed on women say that while existing mathematics is about completely gender neutral abstract concepts, not men, it is unsuitab...
Extraterrestrial paperclip maximizers
by multifoliaterose — 2010-08-08T20:35:39.547Z

According to The Sunday Times, a few months ago Stephen Hawking made a public pronouncement about aliens:

Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

Though Stephen Hawking is a great scientist, it's difficult to take this particular announcement at all seriously. As far as I know, Hawking has not published any detailed explanation for why he believes that contacting alien races is risky. The most plausible interpretation of his announcement is that it was made for the sake of getting attention and entertaining people rather than for the sake of reducing existential risk.

I was recently complaining to a friend about Stephen Hawking's remark as an example of a popular scientist misleading the public. My friend pointed out that a sophisticated version of the concern that Hawking expressed may be justified. This is probably not what Hawking had in mind in making his announcement, but is of independent interest.

Anthropomorphic Invaders vs. Paperclip Maximizer Invaders

From what Hawking says, it appears as though Hawking has an anthropomorphic notion of "alien" in mind. My feeling is that if human civilization advances to the point where we can explore outer space in earnest, it will be because humans have become much more c

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Christopher Hitchens and Cryonics
by James_Miller — 2010-08-08T20:32:51.515Z

Christopher Hitchens is probably dying of cancer. Hitchens is a well known author, journalist and militant atheist. Having read much of his work I believe he is also a very high IQ rationalist who enjoys being provocative. He has written "I am quietly resolved to resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice."

Hitchens should be extremely receptive to cryonics. Convincing him to signup would do much for the cryonics movement in part because he would immediately become our most articulate member.

I have written to him about cryonics, but I suspect he is getting tens of thousands of emails and probably won't ever even read mine. I propose that the Less Wrong community attempt to get Hitchens to at least seriously consider cryonics. We could do this by mass emailing him and by linking to this blogpost.

Here is an article in which he talks about his cancer. His email address is at the end of the article.
Purposefulness on Mars
by JamesAndrix — 2010-08-08T09:23:52.117Z

Three different Martians built the Three Sacred Stone Walls of Mars according to the Three Virtues of walls:Height, Strength, and Beauty.
An evil Martian named Ution was the first and stupidest of all wallbuilders. He was too stupid to truly understand even the most basic virtue of height, and too evil to care for any other virtue. None the less, something about tall walls caused Evil Ution to build more tall walls, sometimes one on top of the other.
At times his walls would fall as he was building them, he did not understand why, nor did he care. He simply copied the high walls he had already built, whichever were still standing. His wall did achieve some strength and beauty. Most consisted of thousands of similar archways stacked on top of each other. Thousands upon thousands of intricately interlocking stones. Each arch a distantly removed copy of some prototypical archway that was strong and light enough to support itself many times over.

To this day his walls are the highest in all of Mars.

Many Martian Millenia later came the next great wallbuilder: Sid.
Sid was far more intelligent than Ution, but he was just as single minded. We know from his archived odor sequence deposits that he understood the virtues of height and beauty, but celebrated his own willingness to sacrifice them entirely for the tiniest bit of added strength. When a critic asked why he did not simply place a one solid ugly stone on the ground, he replied simply "Fool! A single stone can yet be moved."
Indeed, Sid's walls are shown by modern computer modeling to be stronger than any solid stone available on Mars at the time. The intricate interlocking matrices of cut stone redistribute stress so well, and the wall are so tightly anchored to the bedrock, that an underlying fault line has been repaired. This causes tectonic stresses even in far distant parts of our planet.
Despite the fact that Sid clearly made every decision exclusively favoring strength, his walls also hold the virtue of beauty and height. While some of these virtues he knowingly permitted as they did not detract from strength, others were hidden and not discovered until after the wall was built. In one particularly delightful section of his wall hundreds of tall cylindrical pillars stretch out in a line. Tourists have learned that by slapping your tentacles together in nearby areas you can hear a delightful chirping...
Why do ‘respectable’ women want dead husbands?
by KatjaGrace — 2010-08-08T04:15:48.000Z

I find this hostile wife phenomenon pretty confusing for several reasons:

Wanting other people dead is generally considered an evil character trait. Most people either don’t have such wishes or don’t admit to them. This is especially the case when the person you prefer dead is someone you are meant to be loyal to. Often this applies even if they are permanently unconscious. The ‘analogy’ between wanting someone dead and insisting they don’t get cryonics is too clear to be missed by anyone.

People don’t usually seem to care much about abstract beliefs or what anybody is going to do in the distant future, except as far as these things imply character traits or group ties. If the fact your partner is likely to die at all in the distant future isn’t enough to scare you away, I can’t see how anything he might do after that can be disturbing.

People tend to care a lot about romantic partners, compared to other things. They are often willing to change religion or overlook homocidal tendencies to be with the one they love. Romance is infamous for making people not care about whether the sky falls, or they catch deadly venerial diseases.

The hostile wife phenomenon seems to be a mostly female thing, but doesn’t go with any especially strong female-specific characteristics I know of. Women overall don’t especially resist medical spending for instance, and are often criticized as a group for enjoying otherwise pointless expenditures too much.

My surprise is probably somewhat exacerbated by pre-existing surprise over many people wanting to die ever, but that is another issue.

Partial explanations of the hostile wife phenomenon offered by Darwin, de Wolf and de Wolf, Quentin, C (#44), Robin Hanson, and others:

Women are more often hostile just because most interested parties are heterosexual men (This is presumably some part of the explanation, but not much – in around ninety cases of significant others interfering in cryonics arrangements recorded between 1978-86 I count four males, while roughly one quarter of Alcor’s members are women. It wouldn’t explain the strong opposition anyway, nor the fact that men are more interested in cryonics to begin with).

Women really don’t like looking strange (according to Darwin and the de Wolfs, women often claim deep embarrassment. This just rai

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Agreeable ways to disable your children
by KatjaGrace — 2010-08-07T07:26:54.000Z

Should parents purposely have deaf children if they prefer them, by selecting deaf embryos?

Those in favor argue that the children need to be deaf to partake in the deaf culture which their parents are keen to share, and that deafness isn’t really a disability. Opponents point out that damaging existing children’s ears is considered pretty nasty and not much different, and that deafness really is a disability since deaf people miss various benefits for lack of an ability.

I think the children are almost certainly worse off if they are chosen to be deaf. The deaf community is unlikely to be better than any of the millions of other communities in the world which are based mainly on spoken language, so the children are worse off even culture-wise before you look at other costs. I don’t follow why the children can’t be brought up in the deaf community without actually being deaf either. However I don’t think choosing deaf children should be illegal, since parents are under no obligation to have children at all and deaf children are doing a whole lot better than non-existent children.

Should children be brought up using a rare language if a more common one is available?

This is a very similar question: should a person’s ability to receive information be severely impaired if it helps maintain a culture which they are compelled to join due to the now high cost of all other options? The similarity has been pointed out before, to argue that choosing deaf children is fine. The other possible inference is of course that encouraging the survival of unpopular languages is not fine.

There are a few minor differences: a person can learn another language later more easily than they can get their hearing later, though still at great cost. On the other hand, a deaf person can still read material from a much larger group of hearing people, while the person who speaks a rare language is restricted to what is produced by their language group. Nonetheless it looks like they are both overwhelmingly costs to the children involved. It may be understandable that parents want to bring up their children in their own tiny language that they love, but I’m appalled that governments, linguists, schools, organizations set up for the purpose, various other well meaning parties, and plenty of my friends, think rescuing small languages in general is a won...
Interested in a European lesswrong meetup
by MartinB — 2010-08-07T04:43:26.481Z

There are readers on this blog from all over the world - many of them spread out over Europe. How many of you would be interested in a European meetup of LW readers?

We do not have big clusters like Silicon Valley, but we have low cost airlines, and lots of interesting places.

If interested please comment.