trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
High School Lectures
by Xece — 2012-09-15T06:05:44.870Z

Just recently at my high school, a group of classmates and I started a science club. A major component of this is listening and giving peer lectures on topics of physics, math, computer science, etc. I picked a topic a bit off to the side: philosophy and decision making. Naturally, this includes rationality. My plan is to start with something based off the sequences, specifically "How to Actually Change Your Mind" and "A Human's Guide to Words".

I was hoping the Less Wrong community could give me some suggestions, tips, or even alternative ways to approach this. There is no end goal, we just want to learn more and think better. All our members are among the top 5% academically of their own grade. Most of us are seniors and have finished high school math, taking AP Calculus this year. We have covered basic statistics and Bayes' Theorem, but only applied it to the Disease Problem.

Any help or ideas are appreciated.

Update: Thank you for all these suggestions! They are incredibly helpful for me. I will attempt to make a recording of the lecture period if possible. I will make another discussion post sometime next weekend (the first lecture is next Friday) to report how it went.

Update 2: Report here.
Video (11 min): fallacies in nutrition and cancer research.
by RomeoStevens — 2012-09-15T04:07:35.623Z

Mentions include selection bias, lack of reproduction of results, naturalistic fallacy, status signalling, habituation, science as attire, and maybe some I didn't catch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g1denSoAbc&feature=player_embedded
Introducing Simplexity
by ArisKatsaris — 2012-09-15T03:34:02.717Z

"When Charona was trying to explain it to me, she asked me what the most important thing there was. [...]"
"Very good. Anyone who can give a nonrelative answer to that question is simplex."

- Empire Star, Samuel R. Delany

Here's a small riddle: What do the following three images have in common?

The last picture, which ought be recognizable by readers of the sequences, serves as a clue; so does the quote at the top of the page. But these may be insufficient, so I'll just put into plain words what ideas these images represent, which by itself reveals part of the answer:

"Human values are so natural that one could very well achieve friendliness in artificial intelligence pretty much by accident, or at least by letting the machines educate themselves, reaching a human (or superior-to-human) respect for life by themselves."

"The electrons of an atom can be visualized as little tiny billiard balls that go around the nucleus in orbits much like planets go around the sun."

"Characteristics like attractiveness and beauty are inherent to the object possessing them, so that even alien minds would have the good sense of recognizing the beauty of a woman according to criteria possessed by 20th century Hollywood advertisers."

All three images, therefore, represent different types of fatally flawed thinking that have been directly addressed in past sequences. But this isn't quite precise, so let me reveal the remainder of the answer as well: These three fallacies can all be said to consist of a very similar pattern of narrow thinking, false fundamental assumptions, and privileged hypotheses.

And this pattern seems so pervasive (in a large multitude of other fallacies as well) that it probably deserves a name of its own.

In Samuel R. Delany's novella Empire Star, three terms (simplex, complex, and multiplex) are used throughout the novel to label different minds and different ways of thought. Although never explicitly defined, the reader understands their gist to be roughly as follows:

simplex: Able to look at things only from a single, limited perspective.

complex: Able to perceive and comprehend multiple ways of examining things and situations.

multiplex: Able to integrate these multiple perspectives into a new and fuller understanding of the whole.

I will now appropriate the first of these terms to name the above mentioned pattern of biases. It might not be exactly how t...
Eliezer's Sequences and Mainstream Academia
by lukeprog — 2012-09-15T00:32:03.383Z

Due in part to Eliezer's writing style (e.g. not many citations), and in part to Eliezer's scholarship preferences (e.g. his preference to figure out much of philosophy on his own), Eliezer's Sequences don't accurately reflect the close agreement between the content of The Sequences and work previously done in mainstream academia.

I predict several effects from this:

Some readers will mistakenly think that common Less Wrong views are more parochial than they really are.

Some readers will mistakenly think Eliezer's Sequences are more original than they really are.

If readers want to know more about the topic of a given article, it will be more difficult for them to find the related works in academia than if those works had been cited in Eliezer's article.

I'd like to counteract these effects by connecting the Sequences to the professional literature. (Note: I sort of doubt it would have been a good idea for Eliezer to spend his time tracking down more references and so on, but I realized a few weeks ago that it wouldn't take me much effort to list some of those references.)

I don't mean to minimize the awesomeness of the Sequences. There is much original content in them (edit: probably most of their content is original), they are engagingly written, and they often have a more transformative effect on readers than the corresponding academic literature.

I'll break my list of references into sections based on how likely I think it is that a reader will have missed the agreement between Eliezer's articles and mainstream academic work.

(This is only a preliminary list of connections.)

Obviously connected to mainstream academic work

Eliezer's posts on evolution mostly cover material you can find in any good evolutionary biology textbook, e.g. Freeman & Herron (2007).

Likewise, much of the Quantum Physics sequence can be found in quantum physics textbooks, e.g. Sakurai & Napolitano (2010).

An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem, How Much Evidence Does it Take, Probability is in the Mind, Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence, Conservation of Expected Evidence, Trust in Bayes: see any textbook on Bayesian probability theory, e.g. Jaynes (2003) or Friedman & Koller (2009).

What's a Bias, again?, Hindsight Bias, Correspondence Bias; Positive Bias: Look into the Dark, Doublethink: Choosing to be Biased, Rationalization, Motivated St

...
The Rosenhan Experiment
by chaosmosis — 2012-09-14T22:31:05.307Z

I haven't seen any links to this on Lesswrong yet, and I just discovered it myself. It's extremely interesting, and has a lot of implications for how the way that people perceive and think of others are largely determined by their environmental context. It's also a fairly good indict of presumably common psychiatric practices, although it's also presumably outdated by now. Maybe some of you are already familiar with it, but I thought I'd mention it and post a link for those of you who aren't.
There's probably newer research on this, but I don't have time to investigate it at the moment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
Meetup : Vancouver!
by  — 2012-09-14T20:42:31.944Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver!

WHEN:
20 September 2012 06:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2150 macdonald street, vancouver

TL;DR: We are awesome, come hang out on Thursday at 18:00 in a big brown house. I will present "Letting Go (sequence)". Check out our mailing list.

I think I'm going to start posting our reports and meetups on here again.

What we've been doing:

We've been meeting reliably every Thursday at 18:00, tho our venue has moved around a bit. Every week, one or two people come in with presentations/discussion topics and lead the discussion on that for an hour or so.

Recently, we had a really good presentation from one of our member of how to make a lot of money, with a bunch of case studies of really rich and successful people that he knows, and what got them rich. That was a lot of fun, and has caused me to start trying to level up my hustle.

A week ago, I presented the practical basics of decision theory and probability theory, including intuitive formulations of Bayes Theorem and EU maximization, and the important implications and things to remember for going out into the world and being a rational agent. That was received quite well, and cleared up some confusion for some of us.

When we lack other stuff to talk about someone (usually me) reads a sequence and summarizes it to the group. That's usually pretty fun, but not as fun as the big original content talks.

Another thing is that we've been making weekly specific commitments to our goals, and getting support and social pressure from the group to help complete them. That's been useful, tho we are currently thinking of other ways to do that without taking up valuable meetup time (talking about each person's goals takes a while).

There are about 10 of us, depending how you count. We're all becoming good friends and it's a lot of fun.

So What?

So you should come out and hang out with us because we are cool and productive and do lots of high-value rationality stuff. This week is our monthly super meetup where we try to get as many people out as possible. That means you, yes even you, should come out see what we're about. If you are looking for an excuse to come out, this is it. If you think you have an excuse to not come out, it's just your imagination.

This week we don't yet have any big talks that anyone has put togeth

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Meetup : Pittsburgh: Mind Hack Show and Tell
by KatjaGrace — 2012-09-14T20:10:43.834Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh: Mind Hack Show and Tell

WHEN:
18 September 2012 06:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
EatUnique, Craig St, Pittsburgh

How have you made your brain work better? Bring your stories and/or statistics. Failed experiments also welcome.

Eatunique serves salads, wraps, sandwiches, drinks, and that kind of thing. Call 412-304-6258 if you can't find us.

Our mailing list is at https://groups.google.com/group/lw-pgh?pli=1

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh: Mind Hack Show and Tell
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Ohio
by FrankAdamek — 2012-09-14T15:57:38.881Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on September 7th. The most recent summary can be found here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Brussels meetup: 15 September 2012 12:00PM
Less Wrong Sydney: 17th September: MInd Games: 17 September 2012 06:30PM

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 08 September 2018 01:30PM
Meetup: Southwestern Ohio: 09 September 2012 04:00PM
Predictions Chi September 15 (September 8 -- cancelled): 15 September 2012 01:05PM
SLC, UT: Free Will and Rationality Checklists: 15 September 2012 03:00PM
Cambridge (MA) third-Sundays meetup: 16 September 2012 02:00PM
Cambridge (MA) first-Sundays meetup: 07 October 2012 02:00PM
Cambridge (MA) third-Sundays Meetup: 21 October 2012 02:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Chicago, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Washington, DC.

If your meetup has ...
How about testing our ideas? 
by  — 2012-09-14T10:28:32.242Z

Related to: Science: Do It Yourself, How To Fix Science, Rationality and Science posts from this sequence, Cargo Cult Science, "citizen science"

You think you have a good map, what you really have is a working hypothesis

You did some thought on human rationality, perhaps spurred by intuition or personal experience. Building it up you did your homework and stood on the shoulders of other people's work giving proper weight to expert opinion. You write an article on LessWrong, it gets up voted, debated and perhaps accepted and promoted as part of a "sequence". But now you'd like to do that thing that's been nagging you since the start, you don't want to be one of those insight junkies consuming fun plausible ideas forgetting to ever get around to testing them. Lets see how the predictions made by your model hold up! You dive into the literature in search of experiments that have conveniently already tested your idea.

It is possible there simply isn't any such experimental material or that it is unavailable. Don't get me wrong, if I had to bet on it I would say it is more likely there is at least something similar to what you need than not. I would also bet that some things we wish where done haven't been so far and are unlikely to be for a long time. In the past I've wondered if we can in the future expect CFAR or LessWrong to do experimental work to test many of the hypotheses we've come up with based on fresh but unreliable insight, anecdotal evidence and long fragile chains of reasoning. This will not happen on its own.

With mention of CFAR, the mind jumps to them doing expensive experiments or posing long questionnaires with small samples of students and then publishing papers, like everyone else does. It is the respectable thing to do and it is something that may or may not be worth their effort. It seems doable. The idea of LWers getting into the habit of testing their ideas on human rationality beyond the anecdotal seems utterly impractical. Or is it?

That ordinary people can band together to rapidly produce new knowledge is anything but a trifle

How useful would it be if we had a site visited by thousands or tens of thousands solving forms or participating in experiments submitted by LessWrong posters or CFAR researchers? Something like this site. How useful would it be if we made such a data set publicly available? What if we could in addition to

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[SEQ RERUN] Beyond the Reach of God
by MinibearRex — 2012-09-14T05:54:09.516Z

Today's post, Beyond the Reach of God was originally published on 04 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Compare the world in which there is a God, who will intervene at some threshold, against a world in which everything happens as a result of physical laws. Which universe looks more like our own?

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 Use the Try Harder, Luke, 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.
Experimental psychology on word confusion
by lukeprog — 2012-09-14T05:44:27.525Z

There's plenty of experimental work about how humans make poor judgments and decisions, but I haven't yet found much about how humans make poor judgments and decisions because of confusions about words. And yet, I expect such errors are common — I, at least, encounter them frequently.

It would be nice to have some scientific studies which illustrate the ways in which confusions about words affect everyday decision making, but instead all I can do is make philosophical arguments and point people to things like Yudkowsky's 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong or Chalmers' Verbal Disputes and Philosophical Progress.

Which keywords do I need to find experimental work on this topic? I tried Google scholar searches like "fuzzy concepts" "decision making" and effect of connotations on choices but I didn't find much in my first hour of looking into this.
Question on decoherence and virtual particles
by DataPacRat — 2012-09-14T04:33:37.385Z

Doing some insomniac reading of the Quantum Sequence, I think that I've gotten a reasonable grasp of the principles of decoherence, non-interacting bundles of amplitude, etc. I then tried to put that knowledge to work by comparing it with my understanding of virtual particles (whose rate of creation in any area is essentially equivalent to the electromagnetic field), and I had a thought I can't seem to find mentioned elsewhere.

If I understand decoherence right, then quantum events which can't be differentiated from each other get summed together into the same blob of amplitude. Most virtual particles which appear and rapidly disappear do so in ways that can't be detected, let alone distinguished. This seems as if it could potentially imply that the extreme evenness of a vacuum might have to do more with the overall blob of amplitude of the vacuum being smeared out among all the equally-likely vacuum fluctuations, than it does directly with the evenness of the rate of vacuum fluctuations themselves. It also seems possible that there could be some clever way to test for an overall background smear of amplitude, though I'm not awake enough to figure one out just now. (My imagination has thrown out the phrase 'collapse of the vacuum state', but I'm betting that that's just unrelated quantum buzzword bingo.)

Does anything similar to what I've just described have any correlation with actual quantum theory, or will I awaken to discover all my points have been voted away due to this being complete and utter nonsense?
Fallacies of reification - the placebo effect
by Morendil — 2012-09-13T07:03:54.167Z

TL;DR: I align with the minority position that "there is a lot less to the so-called placebo effect than people tend to think there is (and the name is horribly misleading)", a strong opinion weakly held.

The following post is an off-the cuff reply to a G+ post of gwern's, but I've been thinking about this on and off for quite a while. Were I to expand this for posting to Main, I would: a) go into more detail about the published research, b) introduce a second fallacy of reification for comparison, the so-called "10X variance in programmer productivity".

My agenda is to have this join my short series of articles on "software engineering as a diseased discipline", which I view as my modest attempt at "using Less Wrong ideas in your secret identity" and is covered at greater length in my book-in-progress.

I would therefore appreciate your feedback and probing at weak points.

Most of the time, talk of placebo effects (or worse of "the" placebo effect) falls victim to the reification fallacy.

My position is roughly "there is a lot less to the so-called placebo effect than people think there is (and the name is horribly misleading)".

More precisely: the term "placebo" in the context of "placebo controlled trial" has some usefulness, when used to mean a particular way of distinguishing between the null and test hypotheses in a trial: namely, that the test and control group receive exactly the same treatment, except that you substitute, in the control group, an inert substance (or inoperative procedure) for the putatively active substance being tested.

Whatever outcome measures are used, they will generally improve somewhat even in the control group: this can be due to many things, including regression to the mean, the disease running its course, increased compliance with medical instructions due to being in a study, expectancy effects leading to biased verbal self-reports.

None of these is properly speaking an "effect" causally linked to the inert substance (the "placebo pill"). The reification fallacy consists of thinking that because we give something a name ("the placebo effect") then there must be a corresponding reality. The false inference is "the people who improved in the control group were healed by the power of the placebo effect".

The further false inference is "there are ailments of which I could be cured by ingesting small sugar pills appropriately...
[SEQ RERUN] Use the Try Harder, Luke
by MinibearRex — 2012-09-13T05:27:37.889Z

Today's post, Use the Try Harder, Luke was originally published on 02 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A fictional exchange between Mark Hamil and George Lucas over the scene in Empire Strikes Back where Luke Skywalker attempts to lift his X-wing with the force.

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 Trying to Try, 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.
[LINK] Meteorologists are Epistemically Rational
by NoSignalNoNoise — 2012-09-13T04:59:41.716Z

Nate Silver of the New York Times's political prediction blog fivethirtyeight has posted an excerpt of his upcoming book on predictions in various disciplines, The Signal and the Noise. The excerpt describes how meteorologists, in contrast to prognosticators in other domains, have substantially improved the accuracy of their predictions by understanding the limitations of both intuition and computer models, enabling them to combine them intelligently rather than relying excessively on one or the other.

The excerpt is available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/magazine/the-weatherman-is-not-a-moron.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all, and a summary is available at http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/why-weather-forecasters-are-role-models/

Side note: if you are running up against NYT's 10 article per month limit, opening the links in Incognito Mode will get around it.
Meetup : Dc Zendo meetup
by rocurley — 2012-09-13T00:20:18.443Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Dc Zendo meetup

WHEN:
16 September 2012 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Portrait Gallery Courtyard

We will be playing Zendo (aka "science the game"). We can have it in Chinatown at the portrait gallery courtyard, but if someone can host, that would be ideal. If you want to, just email the list. Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Dc Zendo meetup