trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The authorial construct
by NancyLebovitz — 2011-01-28T23:44:03.863Z

Elizabeth Bear writes about the extent to which people invent versions of celebrities to react to:

I'm just in these last couple of years coming to realize that, to a lot of people (like, more people than I know in real life), I'm no longer a real person they don't know, or maybe know by reputation. Instead, I've become an auctorial construct, and it's very bizarre.

Essentially, I'm a fictional person to them.

And they feel like they have ownership of that construct/fictional person, and sometimes they get very angry when I persist in being me and not the person they imagined. Which, I mean--okay, yeah. It happens to actors and musicians and sports figures a thousand-fold more, and politicians build their careers on capitalizing on this effect, but boy it takes some getting used to.

Sometimes, it's a little like dealing with 5,000 high school crushes. Sometimes it's like dealing with 5,000 high school enemies. Sometimes, I learn things about myself I did not know from my Wikipedia page.

Part of the price of being a public person is not having a lot of control over what people say about you--or, more precisely, what they say about the auctorial construct they have created, that they think is you. It's the cost of celebrity. Even teeny tiny celebrity. Celebrity this big: ---><---

Everybody experiences through their own perceptual filters, you see, and everybody projects their deepest, most heartfelt hopes and dreads into what they read and watch and live. To narrow it down a little, it's how this flawed technological telepathy we call prose communication works. It's why a book can get under your skin and change you; because a book is a mirror. A funhouse mirror. (My former Viable Paradise roomie Cory Doctorow, who isn't very much like a lot of people seem to think he is, and who I like a lot, has a hypothesis that a lot of how we experience fiction comes from the workings of our mirror neurons. Which is to say, the same things that both give us empathy (if you believe that particular research), allow us to model the behaviors of others in advanceof experience ("Mom's gonna kill me!"), and also tend to lead us to project our own motivations onto others ("I know you're thinking about breaking up with me!").

I'm posting this because it's an example of rationality in the face of emotional pressure, and might be useful to anyone who's acquired some fame...
Punishing future crimes
by Bongo — 2011-01-28T21:00:27.198Z

Here's an edited version of a puzzle from the book "Chuck Klosterman four" by Chuck Klosterman.

It is 1933. Somehow you find yourself in a position where you can effortlessly steal Adolf Hitler's wallet. The theft will not effect his rise to power, the nature of WW2, or the Holocaust. There is no important identification in the wallet, but the act will cost Hitler forty dollars and completely ruin his evening. You don't need the money. The odds that you will be caught committing the crime are negligible. Do you do it?

When should you punish someone for a crime they will commit in the future? Discuss.
A poem for LessWrong
by RolfAndreassen — 2011-01-28T20:40:54.215Z

PZ Myers posted this on his blog; it is very beautiful, and I think expresses the purpose (at any rate, one purpose) of LessWrong. It even offers a battle cry: "I am not resigned".

Dirge without music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned

With lilies and laurel they go: but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains - but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love -

They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled

Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind:

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
META: Which posts are appropriate for the articles section vs. the discussion section?
by lukeprog — 2011-01-28T20:27:21.974Z

Should my post be sent to the discussion section or the articles section of Less Wrong? The published guidelines are slim.

Clearly, the following should be sent to discussion:

Links

Posts lacking the clarity, importance, and writing quality expected of front-page articles

Quick, informal comments or questions

The articles section is intended for major announcements, meetup announcements, and posts about "refining the art of human rationality" (or AI, probably) that exhibit "substantive new content, clear argument, good writing, popularity, and importance."

Yet, some have requested clearer guidelines than this. For example, my article Back to the Basics of Rationality was somewhat of a "meta" post, and AnnaSalomon suggested it be moved to the discussion section, but shortly thereafter it was promoted to the front page and up-voted to 69 points.

Eliezer requested that meta posts on the front page be kept to a minimum, but not to zero. Maybe that's close enough to a guideline. But consider these issues:

I'm writing a CliffsNotes summary of David Chalmers article "The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis." The subject matter is appropriate, the paper is important and recent, and the post will be well-written and well-sourced. But there's nothing in the post that is original. Is this appropriate for the articles section?

What's the policy on publishing sequences? Those require a large investment from the author, and may not always end up being completed unless they are fully written in advance of publishing the first post in the sequence.

Besides rationality, AI, and the Less Wrong community, what topics are appropriate for the articles section? My recent overview of scientific self-help is one of the most up-voted posts in the history of LW, and has a strong link to instrumental rationality, but is otherwise somewhat outside the usual subject matter of LW. Political posts are discouraged, but what subjects should be allowed?

Thoughts?
A Possible Solution to Parfit's Hitchiker
by Dorikka — 2011-01-28T19:21:15.400Z

I had what appeared to me to be a bit of insight regarding trade between selfish agents. I disclose that I have not read TDT or any books on decision theory, so what I say may be blatantly incorrect. However, I judged that posting this here was of higher utility rather than waiting until I had read up on decision theory -- I have no intention of reading up on decision theory any time soon because I have more important (to me) things to do. This is not meant to deter criticism of the post itself -- please tell me why I'm wrong if I am. The following paragraph is primarily an introduction.

When a rational agent predicts that he is interacting with another rational agent and that the other agent has motive for deceiving him, (and both have a large amount of computing power), he will not use any emotional basis for ‘trust.’ Instead, he will see the other agent’s commitments as truth claims which may be true or false depending what action will optimize the other agent’s utility function at the time which the commitment is to be fulfilled. Agents which know something of the each other’s utility function may bargain directly on such terms, even when each of their utility functions are largely (or completely) dominated by selfishness.

This leads to a solution to Parfit’s hitchhiker, allowing selfish agents to precommit to future trade. Give Ekman all of your clothes and state that you will buy them back from him when you arrive with an amount higher than the worth of your clothes to him but lower than the worth of your clothes to yourself. Furthermore, tell him that because you don’t have anything more on you, he can’t get any more money off of you than an amount infinitesimally smaller than your clothes are worth to you, and accurately tell him how much your clothes are worth to yourself (you must tell the truth here due to his microexpression-reading capability.) He should judge your words as truth, considering that you have told the truth. Of course, you lose regardless if the value of your clothes to yourself is less than the utility he loses by taking you to town.

Assumptions made regarding Pa

...
This Sunday: Oxford Rationality Meetup
by Alex Flint — 2011-01-28T15:06:52.670Z

This Sunday there will be a rationality meetup in Oxford.

Where: Entrance to Exeter College, Turl Street (map here)
When: 5-7pm, Sunday January 30th
We'll be discussing artificial intelligence and existential risks. We plan to split into two groups to ensure we have something for everything. This looks like it'll be a really interesting discussion.
Also, Anna Salamon from the Singularity Institute will be joining us! She's leaving the UK soon, so this is a great chance to discuss some ideas with her.
We also have a new game to play at the beginning ;)
My number is 07595983672. See you there!
$295 bounty for new Singularity Institute logo design (crowd-sourced competition)
by Louie — 2011-01-28T06:01:46.672Z

If you have graphic design experience, check out the on-going logo design competition at 99designs for the Singularity Institute. There are still 6 days left to enter and be eligible to win the $295 prize if your design is selected. Tell your friends with graphic design experience too. There are very few submissions currently.

Note: This is a blind contest. Designers can only see their own entries. All designs will be revealed when the contest ends.

If you're interested at getting a peek at the designs, they will be online after the competition is over. This is standard practice in 99designs contests to prevent designers from contaminating each other and having all the designs drift in a certain direction.
A sealed prediction
by Quirinus_Quirrell — 2011-01-28T04:10:04.482Z

I would like to make a prediction, but I'm not ready to raise the subject of the prediction just yet. So to show that it was not just obvious in hindsight, and to strengthen my precommitment to write an article about it later, here is the sha1sum of my prediction: 9805a0c7bf3690db25e5753e128085c4191f0114.
"Add to Friends" does something or not?
by mwengler — 2011-01-28T00:45:09.443Z

If I click on a users name it brings me to a page like lukeprog's. In the upper right of that page I see lukeprog's karma score, and I also see a button "add to friends."

Early in my use of this site there were some authors I wanted to follow, I thought perhaps "add to friends" would help me do that.

But since then as near as I can tell, "add to friends" has absolutely no functionality. Does anyone out there know any differently?
Evidence of a link between what type of fat one eats and depression
by playtherapist — 2011-01-27T22:32:16.963Z

I came across this article study and thought it might be of interest:It is a study to evaluate the association between fatty acid intake or the use of culinary fats and depression incidence in a Mediterranean population.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0016268
Link: Monetizing anti-akrasia mechanisms
by TheOtherDave — 2011-01-27T17:02:07.172Z

Related to the recurring topic of akrasia and anticipated near-mode losses, here's an article about "Gym-Pact," an arrangement whereby people precommit to pay penalty fees if they don't stick to their planned workout schedules.
In other words, they aren't charging customers money in exchange for a service, nor for violating an agreement associated with a service... rather, they are charging money as a service.
Had I encountered this in fiction, I would have considered it satire.
(I'm being somewhat glib here, admittedly: in this "experimental" phase, they are giving people free gym memberships as part of the deal, and using the penalty fees to pay for the memberships. But that doesn't sound like the ultimate business model.)
Proposal: all Amazon hyperlinks get Less Wrong's Amazon Associates referral code
by lukeprog — 2011-01-26T16:17:42.322Z

My site, which gets slightly less traffic than Less Wrong, makes me $50-$200 per month with Amazon referral links and no advertising at all. I don't profit this way, but I recoup some of my costs.

I think the Less Wrong audience is much more likely to purchase books - including expensive textbooks - than my audience is. And it would be easy to automatically transform all Amazon links on Less Wrong so that they include a Less Wrong Amazon Associates referral code, which would make Less Wrong some money on every purchase made through one of those links.

Below is the pseudocode, assuming Less Wrong's Amazon Associates referral code is "lesswrong". Note that every Amazon page for an item contains at least the following string: "/dp/XXXXXXXXXX/" where XXXXXXXXXX is alphanumeric.

if hyperlink contains "*amazon.com*/dp/??????????/" then change hyperlink to "http://www.amazon.com/dp/??????????/ref=nosim?tag=lesswrong-20"

That's it! For example, let's say somebody wrote a post and pasted in the following Amazon hyperlink from their browser's address bar:

http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-Approach-3rd/dp/0136042597/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1296058194&sr=8-1

This would be transformed into:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0136042597/ref=nosim?tag=lesswrong-20

This is precisely what I do on my own site. Works like a charm. If somebody clicks my book link but ends up buying a $1000 DSLR instead, I get about $65 for that one purchase.

Somebody who didn't give up programming in 8th grade could do this fairly easily I imagine, and it would help cover Less Wrong's expenses.
Omega can be replaced by amnesia
by Bongo — 2011-01-26T12:31:04.595Z

Let's play a game. Two times, I will give you an amnesia drug and let you enter a room with two boxes inside. Because of the drug, you won't know whether this is the first time you've entered the room. On the first time, both boxes will be empty. On the second time, box A contains $1000, and Box B contains $1,000,000 iff this is the second time and you took only box B the first time. You're in the room, do take both boxes or only box B?

This is equivalent to Newcomb's Problem in the sense that any strategy does equally well on both, where by "strategy" I mean a mapping from info to (probability distributions over) actions.

I suspect that any problem with Omega can be transformed into an equivalent problem with amnesia instead of Omega.

Does CDT return the winning answer in such transformed problems?

Discuss.
Meta: Test
by XiXiDu — 2011-01-26T11:35:25.736Z

If I click "Save and continue" -- should it publish the post?

ETA

Yes it published it. And only afterwards the drop-down list with an option "Drafts for XiXiDu" appeared.

ETA #2

This is a bug, don't punish people with downvotes for publishing their unfinished drafts.

People don't expect their draft to be published when they click "Save and continue" if there is a "Submit" button.
Three easy anthropic models, and two hard ones
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2011-01-26T10:41:57.722Z

For illustrative purposes, imagine simple agents - AI's, or standard utility maximisers - who have to make decisions under anthropic uncertainty.

Specifically, let there be two worlds, W1 and W2, equally likely to exist. W1 contains one copy of the agent, W2 contains two copies. The agent has one single action available: the opportunity to create, once, either a box or a cross. The utility of doing so varies depending on which world the agent is in, as follows:

In W1: Utility(cross) = 2, Utility(box) = 5

In W2: Utility(cross) = 2, Utility(box) = 0

The agent has no extra way of telling which world they are in.

First model (aggregationist, non-indexical):

Each box or cross created will generate the utility defined above, and the utility is simply additive. Then if the agent decides to generate crosses, the expected utility is 0.5(2+(2+2))=3, while that of generating boxes is 0.5(5+(0+0))=2.5. Generating crosses is the way to go.

Second model (non-aggregationist, non-indexical):

The existence of a single box or cross will generate the utility defined above, but extra copies won't change anything. Then if the agent decides to generate crosses, the expected utility is 0.5(2+2)=2, while that of generating boxes is 0.5(5+0)=2.5. Generating boxes is the way to go.

Third model (unlikely existence, non-aggregationist, non-indexical):

Here a simple change is made: the worlds do not contain agents, but proto-agents, each of which has an (independent) one chance in a million of becoming an agent. Hence the probability of the agent existing in the first universe is 1/M, while the probability of an agent existing in the second universe is approximately 2/M. The expected utility of crosses is approximately 1/M*0.5(2+2*2)=3/M while that of boxes is approximately 1/M*0.5(5+2*0)=2.5/M. Generating crosses is the way to go.

Fourth model (indexical):

This is the first "hard" model from the title. Here the agent only derives utility from the box or cross it generated itself. And here, things get interesting.

There is no immediately obvious way of solving this situation, so I tried replacing it with a model that seems equivalent. Instead of having indexical preferences for its own shapes, I'll give the agent non-indexical aggregationist preferences (just as in the first model), and halve the utility of any shape in W2. This should give the same utility to all agents in all possi...
A Bayesian Argument for Theistic Fine-Tuning
by lukeprog — 2011-01-26T05:38:48.713Z

Earlier, I linked to a Bayesian argument for the resurrection of Jesus - not because I think it succeeds, obviously, but because I thought Less Wrongers might be interested to know that at least since Swinburne, some Christian apologists have taken to defending their religious dogma with the language of Bayesian confirmation theory.

Another example of this is Robin Collins' version of the argument from fine-tuning for the existence of God. One of the major published objections to this kind of fine-tuning argument comes from the authors of that Bayesian argument for the Resurrection, Tim and Lydia McGrew. Another objection comes from Ikeda & Jefferys. Palonen also offers some observations.

I offer this merely for your curiosity.
The Orange Head Joke
by Anatoly_Vorobey — 2011-01-25T20:33:20.351Z

Speaking of things that are funny to some and not others, an instructive example is the Orange Head joke. Usually when it's told, the audience is sharply divided into those who think it's hilarious and those who struggle to see what's funny.

Here's the Orange Head joke:

It's business as usual for a bartender, and one day as he is cleaning his bar when an unusual customer walks in. The man is dressed in an expensive suit, has a beautiful supermodel hanging off each arm, and has a limo parked outside. Furthermore, the man has an orange for a head.

The customer sits down at the bar and orders everyone a drink. He pays for it from a roll of hundreds and manages to get the attention of every woman in the joint, despite having an orange for a head.

The bartender is not a man to pry, but he feels compelled to ask about this man's life.

"Excuse me," says the bartender, "I can't help but notice that you're obviously fabulously wealthy and irresistable to women, but you have an orange for a head. How did that happen?"

So the man told his story.

"A while back, when I was penniless, I was walking along the beach and saw an old lamp, half buried in the sand. I picked it up and gave it a clean, and POOF! out popped a genie. The genie explained that he had been trapped in that lamp for two hundred years, and that he was so grateful to me for freeing him that he would give me three wishes.

"For my first wish I asked for an unlimited fortune. The genie said 'It is done!' and from then on, whenever I needed money, it was there.

"For my second wish I asked for the attention of all the most beautiful women in the world. The genie said it was done, and since then I have been able to get any woman I wanted.

"For my third wish -- and, this is the bit where I kinda fucked up -- I asked for an orange for a head."

Do you think it's funny?

If you search for this joke's key words, you'll see many pages where, after it's told, people react incredulously and ask where the joke was. Others at the same time are laughing their heads off. Here's a blog post that attempts to analyze this, though it doesn't get far.

(I personally think it's hilarious, and easily the best joke I heard last year. When I retold it at my blog, I got many concurring comments, but also comments from people who didn't see anything funny, even after those who did tried to explain what th...
Resolving the unexpected hanging paradox
by AlexMennen — 2011-01-25T19:32:50.111Z

The unexpected hanging paradox: The warden tells a prisoner on death row that he will be executed on some day in the following week (last possible day is Friday) at noon, and that he will be surprised when he gets hanged. The prisoner realizes that he will not be hanged on Friday, because that being the last possible day, he would see it coming. It follows that Thursday is effectively the last day that he can be hanged, but by the same reasoning, he would then be unsurprised to be hanged on Thursday, and Wednesday is the last day he can be hanged. He follows this reasoning all the way back and realizes that he cannot be hanged any day that week at noon without him knowing it in advance. The hangman comes for him on Wednesday, and he is surprised.

Supposedly, even though the warden's statement to the prisoner was paradoxical, it ended up being true anyway. However, if the prisoner is no better at making inferences than he is in the problem, the warden's statement is true and not paradoxical; the prisoner was executed at noon within the week, and was surprised. This just shows that you can mess with the minds of people who can't make inferences properly. Nothing new there.

If the prisoner can evaluate the warden's statement properly, then the prisoner follows the same logic, realizes that he will not be hanged at noon within the week, remembers that the warden told him that he would be, and concludes that the warden's statements must be unreliable, and does not use them to predict actual events with confidence. If the hangman comes for him at noon any day that week, he will be unsurprised, even though he is not confident that he will be executed that week at all either. The warden's statement is then false and unparadoxical. This is similar to the one-day analogue, where the warden says "You will be executed tomorrow at noon, and will be surprised" and the prisoner says "wtf?".

Now let's assume that the prisoner can make these inferences, the warden always tells the truth, and the prisoner knows this. Well then, yes, that's a paradox. But assigning 100% probability to each of two propositions that contradict each other completely destroys any pr

...