trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Madison Monday Meetup
by fiddlemath — 2011-11-19T22:24:36.269Z

WHEN: 21 November 2011 06:30:00PM (-0600)

WHERE: 1831 Monroe St. Madison, WI 53711

This will be largely a social meetup - we'll get together at the Barriques on Monroe and chat. We'll probably play a game or two, and have an argument or two.

We'll also chat about the upcoming Sequences reading group. If you have a strong opinion about what to read through, you should show up. ;)

And, again, if you're in the area, you should sign up for the Madison mailing list.
Political impasse as result of different odds ratios
by calcsam — 2011-11-19T20:01:36.818Z

Related to: Politics is the Mind-Killer

Both sides seem to have a stake in the current budget supercommittee failing. Why?

The NYTimes reports:

Intrade, the political futures market, currently puts the odds at just under three to one in favor of both a Republican takeover of the Senate and retention of the House — 74.4 to 21.5 for the Senate, 72.2 to 28 for the House.

According to an ABC poll, a majority of Americans, by a margin of 55 to 37, believe that the Republican nominee will be victorious. Republican voters are overwhelmingly optimistic about their chances for the White House, 83-13. Democrats, by the far smaller margin of 58-33 percent, think President Obama will win re-election. Independents, by a 54-36 margin, believe that the Republicans will take the presidency.

The chance of all three contests going the Republicans’ way is less than 50-50, but if they do, the payoff would be huge.*

As a top Republican Congressional aide put it in a interview about the supercommittee’s deliberations, “Winning the trifecta — House, Senate and White House — in 2012 is a game changer. We would be in the driver’s seat.”

In this scenario, Republicans in the 113th Congress would swiftly enact a version of the budget proposal put forward by Paul Ryan....

Capitalizing on collapse is not the exclusive terrain of the right. There are some on the left who believe that simply taking no action whatsoever before this year’s November 23 and December 23 deadlines will force the expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2012. The expiration of these cuts will produce an estimated $3.8 trillion in new revenue between 2013 and 2022 – enough to maintain many of the key safety net programs with relatively minor tinkering.

Of course, this strategy depends either on a Democratic chief executive to veto Republican legislation extending the Bush cuts or on the less likely event of Democratic retention of the Senate or a takeover of the House.

In other words, the Republicans believe they can achieve complete victory so that they can enact their whole agenda, while Democrats believe they can block this victory.

On a key component — Obama's re-election — Republicans believe they will defeat Obama with 1:6 odds, while Democrats believe this event has only 3:2 odds.**

With a 9-fold difference in this key perception, it seem...
Don’t Apply the Principle of Charity to Yourself
by UnclGhost — 2011-11-19T19:26:25.777Z

In philosophy, the Principle of Charity is a technique in which you evaluate your opponent’s position as if it made the most amount of sense possible given the wording of the argument. That is, if you could interpret your opponent's argument in multiple ways, you would go for the most reasonable version. This is a good idea for several reasons. It counteracts the illusion of transparency and correspondence bias, it makes you look gracious, if your opponent really does believe a bad version of the argument sometimes he’ll say so, and, most importantly, it helps you focus on getting to the truth, rather than just trying to win a debate.

Recently I was in a discussion online, and someone argued against a position I'd taken. Rather than evaluating his argument, I looked back at the posts I'd made. I realized that my previous posts would be just as coherent if I'd written them while believing a position that was slightly different from my real one, so I replied to my opponent as if I had always believed the new position. There was no textual evidence that showed that I hadn't. In essence, I got to accuse my opponent of using a strawman regardless of whether or not he actually was. It wasn't until much later that I realized I'd applied the Principle of Charity to myself.

Now, this is bad for basically every reason it's good to apply it to other people. You get undeserved status points for being good at arguing. You exploit the non-existence of transparency. It helps you win a debate rather than trying to maintain consistent and true beliefs. And maybe worst of all, if you're good enough at getting away with it, no one knows you're doing it but you... and sometimes not even you.

Like most bad argument techniques, I wasn't aware I was doing this at a conscious level. I've probably been doing it for a long time but just didn't recognize it. I'd heard about not giving yourself too much credit, and not just trying to "win" arguments, but I had no idea I was doing both of those in this particular way. I think it's likely that this habit started from realizing that posting your opinion doesn't give people a tempora

...
[Link] Cognitive bias modification as a treatment for depression
by RolfAndreassen — 2011-11-19T05:11:20.102Z

This seems relevant to LessWrong, both as an extreme example of how biases can hurt people and as a possible rationality technique. Depression is presumably at the outer end of some spectrum; to the extent that it's caused by cognitive mistakes, people in the middle of the spectrum should be able to benefit from undoing the same mistakes.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111117202935.htm
Drawing Less Wrong: Overview of Skills, and Relevance to Rationality
by Raemon — 2011-11-19T05:05:41.399Z

So, you've considered your past experiences and your motivations, and you've got a decent idea of the effort required of you: Six to eight hours of solid work before you start showing improvement, and about twenty hours total before you start to exhaust the low hanging fruit. You want to learn to draw. What exactly does that entail?

A lot of things, really. There's probably hundreds of subskills, techniques and bits of knowledge that go into creating a quality drawing. But I think they cluster into three main categories:

Observation
Technical Skill
"Instilling Energy and Weight"

Each of these skills is developed with different exercises, requiring different mindsets. Switching between those exercises can be difficult. Studying any of them can produce something that is interesting to look at, but ultimately you want to integrate them into a single, fluid mental process. You'll need to develop some competence in each of them first. As you begin, the most important thing to remember is that *learning* to draw is not the same as actually drawing. To improve as quickly as possible you may have to set aside the reasons you wanted to draw in the first place. Don't worry - you'll achieve those terminal goals in time.

In this article I'll briefly discuss each of those skill clusters, and how I believe they relate to rationality.

Observation

The ability to see reality, as it truly is. "Reality" refers both to the physical objects and light that you're looking at, as well as to your perception of your own mental processes and how they should be interpreting those physical objects. If you have previous rationality training, this is where I expect it to benefit you the most. Your model of reality will be flawed, and you'll need to fix it. Existing ability to notice biases and counter them should give you an advantage.

The advantage *may* come in reduced study time (I'd need a lot of data to confirm this) but mostly of the advantage will come from willingness to actually study effectively in the first place (this is a genuinely big deal). With minimal instruction, you could probably figure out where your biases lie and how to fix them. Some knowledge of cognitive science might even give you insight as to where and why they might be flawed. I'd be interested if someone without much drawing experience attemp...
[SEQ RERUN] When None Dare Urge Restraint
by MinibearRex — 2011-11-19T03:39:40.850Z

Today's post, When None Dare Urge Restraint was originally published on 08 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The dark mirror to the happy death spiral is the spiral of hate. When everyone looks good for attacking someone, and anyone who disagrees with any attack must be a sympathizer to the enemy, the results are usually awful. It is too dangerous for there to be anyone in the world that we would prefer to say negative things about, over saying accurate things about.

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 Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs, 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.
Which is the the article that describes drawing the map of the city?
by Raemon — 2011-11-19T02:28:42.888Z

I've searched a few related terms in Less Wrong, and I can't seem to find the article I'm looking for. It's an Eliezer post that describes a process of drawing a map of a city, and how you can't do it with the blinds closed, you have to actually go out and look at the city.

I've found the wiki definition page, and I've found articles that look like they refer to the original in the way Eliezer often refers to his earlier metaphors, but I could have sworn there was a shortish article that specifically introduced it.

(Is it possible that my map is simply wrong and the original parable was only a small portion of a larger post?)
[Link] TED- Cynthia Kenyon: Experiments that Hint at Longer Lives
by daenerys — 2011-11-19T02:20:33.325Z

TEDGlobal 2011- Cynthia Kenyon: Experiments that Hint at Longer Lives

Video Link: http://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_kenyon_experiments_that_hint_of_longer_lives.html

Speaker's Bio (from TED):

Cynthia Kenyon is revolutionizing our understanding of aging. As an expert in biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California at San Francisco, she is particularly interested in the influence that genetics have on age-related diseases (from cancer to heart failure) in living things.

Her biggest breakthrough was figuring out that there’s a “universal hormonal control for aging”: carbohydrate intake, which can have a dramatic effect on how two critical genes behave, reducing insulin production and boosting repair and renovation activities. So far, her theory has proved true for worms, mice, rats, and monkeys — and she suspects it applies to humans, too.

By studying aging, Kenyon believes that she and other scientists (many of whom have successfully duplicated her experiments) will be able to pinpoint the molecules responsible for the onset of age-related diseases in people and prevent them. She’s co-founded a drug-development company called Elixir Pharmaceuticals to do just that.

She says: "The link between aging and age-related disease suggests an entirely new way to combat many diseases all at once; namely, by going after their greatest risk factor: aging itself."

"Ten years ago, we thought aging was probably the result of a slow decay, a sort of rusting. But Professor Kenyon has shown that it’s ... controlled by genes. That opens the possibility of slowing it down with drugs."

Jeff Holly, Bristol University

Summary:

Different animals have different lifespans (i.e. mice- 2years, v. bat- 50 years) There must be something in the genes for aging, so you should be able to change the aging gene to expand life span.

They did experiments on a roundworm and found that mutations that damage a gene called daf-2 could double the worm’s lifespan. The daf-2 gene encodes a hormone receptor which promotes aging. (similar to the ones that promote food uptake and growth.)

They did the same mutation in flies and mice, and it worked on them.

People who lived to 90-100 in a population of Ashkenazi Jews were more likely to have mutations to daf-2 which would make it work less well. They are also less susceptible to things like...
[Link] Raytheon given $10.5 to develop 'serious games' for bias reduction
by curiousepic — 2011-11-19T00:09:48.800Z

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/raytheon-gets-105m-develop-serious-games

Under a contract from the government's cutting edge research group, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), Raytheon BBN will develop game-based training programs featuring an international detective theme developed by game designers, cognitive psychologists and experts in intelligence analysis and in measuring game-player engagement.

The gaming system will focus on certain types of bias that frequently hurt effective decision-making:

Confirmation bias -- the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms preconceptions.

Blind spot bias -- being less aware of one's own cognitive biases than those of others.

Fundamental attribution error -- over-emphasizing personality-based or character-based effects on behavior.

Anchoring bias -- relying too heavily on one trait or one piece of information.

Representative bias -- judging the likelihood of a hypothesis by its resemblance to immediately available data.

Projection bias -- assuming others share one's current feelings, values or thinking
Where do selfish values come from?
by Wei Dai — 2011-11-18T23:52:41.358Z

Human values seem to be at least partly selfish. While it would probably be a bad idea to build AIs that are selfish, ideas from AI design can perhaps shed some light on the nature of selfishness, which we need to understand if we are to understand human values. (How does selfishness work in a decision theoretic sense? Do humans actually have selfish values?) Current theory suggest 3 possible ways to design a selfish agent:

have a perception-determined utility function (like AIXI)

have a static (unchanging) world-determined utility function (like UDT) with a sufficiently detailed description of the agent embedded in the specification of its utility function at the time of the agent's creation

have a world-determined utility function that changes ("learns") as the agent makes observations (for concreteness, let's assume a variant of UDT where you start out caring about everyone, and each time you make an observation, your utility function changes to no longer care about anyone who hasn't made that same observation)

Note that 1 and 3 are not reflectively consistent (they both refuse to pay the Counterfactual Mugger), and 2 is not applicable to humans (since we are not born with detailed descriptions of ourselves embedded in our brains). Still, it seems plausible that humans do have selfish values, either because we are type 1 or type 3 agents, or because we were type 1 or type 3 agents at some time in the past, but have since self-modified into type 2 agents.

But things aren't quite that simple. According to our current theories, an AI would judge its decision theory using that decision theory itself, and self-modify if it was found wanting under its own judgement. But humans do not actually work that way. Instead, we judge ourselves using something mysterious called "normativity" or "philosophy". For example, a type 3 AI would just decide that its current values can be maximized by changing into a type 2 agent with a static copy of those values, but a human could perhaps think that changing values in response to observations is a mistake, and they ought to fix that mistake by rewinding their values back to before they were changed. Note that if you rewind your values all the way back to before you made the first observation, you're no longer selfish.

So, should we freeze our selfish values, or rewind our values, or maybe even keep our "irrational" decisi...
The punishment dilemma
by PuyaSharif — 2011-11-18T22:34:21.633Z

Here is a thought experiment for you. There will be some bold assumptions here, and they may be regarded unrealistic. I am aware of that and the purpose of this query is not to propose some truths about society in general, but to isolate certain characteristics of preferences regarding the societal institutions of law enforcement and punishment.

Assume that there existed a highly trustworthy model that showed beyond reasonable doubt that crime rates anti-correlated with harshness of punishments imposed on criminals. So basically, if policies changed towards shorter sentences, lower fines and lighter penalties, the number of criminal acts decreased (in every category).

Further assume that this was empirically tested and each time penalties went down, fewer and fewer crimes was committed. But the dependence was not linear so if we would get rid of punishments all together - there would still be murders, rapes, robberies etc. But, the crime rates would be minimized in that case. To summarize: We knew that crime rates would be at minimum if there was no consequences at all.

With no penalties, somebody could simply kill or rape your mother, sister or child and move in next door and live a nice and happy life in front of your very eyes, without society doing anything about it! Bare in mind now that this is the situation where the probability of your mother, sister or child being abused, robbed or killed is minimized!

Would it be reasonable to go trough with this demobilization that would spare lots of innocent people all the pain of getting robbed and abused, given that those criminals still out there can do anything they want and go free?
Meetup : Austin, TX NEW LOCATION!
by Vaniver — 2011-11-18T21:55:35.720Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX NEW LOCATION!

WHEN:
19 November 2011 01:30:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
2100 Speedway, Austin, Texas

The Austin LW meetup has moved (possibly temporarily, possibly permanently. Stay tuned)!

We'll be meeting at 1:30, as normal, but in CBA 4.338. It's a seminar room with a projector, where we will be watching (and trying to make sense of) Primer.

We hope to see you there!

(Parking: You can either park wherever you parked for Caffe Medici and walk ~three blocks to the east, or you can part in the Brazos street garage (at Brazos and MLK) and walk west then north to CBA.)

Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX NEW LOCATION!
Meetup : Skepticon IV meetup: Saturday night
by komponisto — 2011-11-18T20:56:28.425Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Skepticon IV meetup: Saturday night

WHEN:
19 November 2011 09:30:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
University Plaza Hotel, 333 S John Q. Hammons Parkway, Springfield, Missouri 65806

Following the last talk on Saturday, we'll meet up in the lobby of the University Plaza Hotel (where most conference participants are staying), and decide what to do and where (if anywhere) to go from there! Time is listed as 9:30 pm, to allow time to get from the conference location to the hotel. I will provide a "Less Wrong" sign.

Discussion article for the meetup : Skepticon IV meetup: Saturday night
[Link] New paper: "The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically"
by  — 2011-11-18T18:13:08.645Z

From a recent paper that is getting non-trivial attention...

"Quantum states are the key mathematical objects in quantum theory. It is therefore surprising that physicists have been unable to agree on what a quantum state represents. There are at least two opposing schools of thought, each almost as old as quantum theory itself. One is that a pure state is a physical property of system, much like position and momentum in classical mechanics. Another is that even a pure state has only a statistical significance, akin to a probability distribution in statistical mechanics. Here we show that, given only very mild assumptions, the statistical interpretation of the quantum state is inconsistent with the predictions of quantum theory. This result holds even in the presence of small amounts of experimental noise, and is therefore amenable to experimental test using present or near-future technology. If the predictions of quantum theory are confirmed, such a test would show that distinct quantum states must correspond to physically distinct states of reality."

From my understanding, the result works by showing how, if a quantum state is determined only statistically by some true physical state of the universe, then it is possible for us to construct clever quantum measurements that put statistical probability on outcomes for which there is literally zero quantum amplitude, which is a contradiction of Born's rule. The assumptions required are very mild, and if this is confirmed in experiment it would give a lot of justification for a phyicalist / realist interpretation of the Many Worlds point of view.

More from the paper:

"We conclude by outlining some consequences of the result. First, one motivation for the statistical view is the obvious parallel between the quantum process of instantaneous wave function collapse, and the (entirely non-mysterious) classical procedure of updating a probability distribution when new information is acquired. If the quantum state is a physical property of a system -- as it must be if one accepts the assumptions above -- then the quantum collapse must correspond to a real physical process. This is especially mysterious when two entangled systems are at separate locations, and measurement of one leads to an instantaneous collapse of the quantum state of the other.

In some versions of quantum theory, on the other hand, there is no coll

...