trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Is Santa Real?
by thomblake — 2009-03-13T20:45:41.691Z

Related on OB: Lying to Kids The Third Alternative

My wife and I are planning to have kids, so of course we've been going through the usual sorts of debates regarding upbringing. We wondered briefly, will we raise our children as atheists? It's kindof a cruel experiment, as folks tend to use their own experiences to guide raising children, and both of us were raised Catholic. Nonetheless, it was fairly well settled after about 5 minutes of dialogue that atheist was the way to go.

Then we had the related discussion of whether to teach our children about Santa Claus. After hours of debate, we decided we'd both have to think on the question some more. It's still been an open question for years now.

Should we teach kids that Santa Claus exists? This isn't a new question, by any means. But it's now motivated by this thread about rationalist origin stories. Note that many of the posters mark the 'rationalist awakening' as the time they realized God doesn't exist. The shock that everybody, including their parents, were wrong and/or lying to them was enough to motivate them to pursue rationality and truth.

If those same children were never taught about God, Santa Claus, and other falsehoods, would they have become rationalists, or would they have contented themselves with playing better video games? If the child never realized there's no Santa Claus, would we have a reason to say, "You're growing up and I'm proud of you"?
Dialectical Bootstrapping
by Johnicholas — 2009-03-13T17:10:20.436Z

"Dialectical Bootstrapping" is a simple procedure that may improve your estimates. This is how it works:

Estimate the number in whatever manner you usually would estimate. Write that down.

Assume your first estimate is off the mark.

Think about a few reasons why that could be. Which assumptions and considerations could have been wrong?

What do these new considerations imply? Was the first estimate rather too high or too low?

Based on this new perspective, make a second, alternative estimate.

Herzog and Hertwig find that average of the two estimates (in a historical-date estimating task) is more accurate than the first estimate, (Edit: or the average of two estimates without the "assume you're wrong" manipulation). To put the finding in a OB/LW-centric manner, this procedure (sometimes, partially) avoids Cached Thoughts.
Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale
by Scott Alexander — 2009-03-13T01:41:28.925Z

I particularly remember one scene from Bill Maher's "Religulous". I can't find the exact quote, but I will try to sum up his argument as best I remember.

Christians believe that sin is caused by a talking snake. They may have billions of believers, thousands of years of tradition behind them, and a vast literature of apologetics justifying their faith - but when all is said and done, they're adults who believe in a talking snake.

I have read of the absurdity heuristic. I know that it is not carte blanche to go around rejecting beliefs that seem silly. But I was still sympathetic to the talking snake argument. After all...a talking snake?

I changed my mind in a Cairo cafe, talking to a young Muslim woman. I let it slip during the conversation that I was an atheist, and she seemed genuinely curious why. You've all probably been in such a situation, and you probably know how hard it is to choose just one reason, but I'd been reading about Biblical contradictions at the time and I mentioned the myriad errors and atrocities and contradictions in all the Holy Books.
Her response? "Oh, thank goodness it's that. I was afraid you were one of those crazies who believed that monkeys transformed into humans."
I admitted that um, well, maybe I sorta kinda might in fact believe that.
It is hard for me to describe exactly the look of shock on her face, but I have no doubt that her horror was genuine. I may have been the first flesh-and-blood evolutionist she ever met. "But..." she looked at me as if I was an idiot. "Monkeys don't change into humans. What on Earth makes you think monkeys can change into humans?"
I admitted that the whole process was rather complicated. I suggested that it wasn't exactly a Optimus Prime-style transformation so much as a gradual change over eons and eons. I recommended a few books on evolution that might explain it better than I could.
She said that she respected me as a person but that quite frankly I could save my breath because there was no way any book could possibly convince her that monkeys have human babies or whatever sort of balderdash I was preaching. She accused me and other evolution believers of being too willing to accept absurdities, motivated by our atheism and our fear of the self-esteem hit we'd take by accepting Allah was greater than ourselves.
It is not clear to me that this woman did anything differently than Bill Maher. Both...
A Sense That More Is Possible
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-13T01:15:30.208Z

To teach people about a topic you've labeled "rationality", it helps for them to be interested in "rationality". (There are less direct ways to teach people how to attain the map that reflects the territory, or optimize reality according to their values; but the explicit method is the course I tend to take.)

And when people explain why they're not interested in rationality, one of the most commonly proffered reasons tends to be like: "Oh, I've known a couple of rational people and they didn't seem any happier."

Who are they thinking of? Probably an Objectivist or some such. Maybe someone they know who's an ordinary scientist. Or an ordinary atheist.

That's really not a whole lot of rationality, as I have previously said.

Even if you limit yourself to people who can derive Bayes's Theorem—which is going to eliminate, what, 98% of the above personnel?—that's still not a whole lot of rationality. I mean, it's a pretty basic theorem.

Since the beginning I've had a sense that there ought to be some discipline of cognition, some art of thinking, the studying of which would make its students visibly more competent, more formidable: the equivalent of Taking a Level in Awesome.

But when I look around me in the real world, I don't see that. Sometimes I see a hint, an echo, of what I think should be possible, when I read the writings of folks like Robyn Dawes, Daniel Gilbert, Tooby & Cosmides. A few very rare and very senior researchers in psychological sciences, who visibly care a lot about rationality—to the point, I suspect, of making their colleagues feel uncomfortable, because it's not cool to care that much. I can see that they've found a rhythm, a unity that begins to pervade their arguments—

Yet even that... isn't really a whole lot of rationality either.

Even among those whose few who impress me with a hint of dawning formidability—I don't think that their mastery of rationality could compare to, say, John Conway's mastery of math. The base knowledge that we drew upon to build our understanding—if you extracted only the parts we used, and not everything we had to study to find it—it's probably not comparable to what a professional nuclear engineer knows about nuclear engineering. It may not even be comparable to what a construction engineer knows about bridg...
Rational Defense of Irrational Beliefs
by cleonid — 2009-03-12T18:48:28.967Z

“Everyone complains of his memory, but nobody of his judgment." This maxim of La Rochefoucauld rings as true today as it did back in the XVIIth century. People tend overestimate their reasoning abilities even when this overconfidence has a direct monetary cost. For instance, multiple studies have shown that investors who are more confident of their ability to beat the market receive lower returns on their investments. This overconfidence penalty applies even to the supposed experts, such as fund managers.

So what an expert rationalist should do to avoid this overconfidence trap? The seeming answer is that we should rely less on our own reasoning and more on the “wisdom of the crowds”. To a certain extent this is already achieved by the society pressure to conform, which acts as an internal policeman in our minds. Yet those of us who deem themselves not very susceptible to such pressures (overconfidence, here we go again) might need to shift their views even further.

I invite you now to experiment on how this will work in practice. Quite a few of the recent posts and comments were speaking with derision about religion and the supernatural phenomena in general. Did the authors of these comments fully consider the fact that the existence of God is firmly believed by the majority? Or that this belief is not restricted to the uneducated but shared by many famous scientists, including Newton and Einstein? Would they be willing to shift their views to accommodate the chance that their own reasoning powers are insufficient to get the right answer?

Let the stone throwing begin.
The origins of virtue
by KatjaGrace — 2009-03-12T12:30:00.000Z

I read Matt Ridley’s ‘The origins of virtue’ just now. It was full of engaging anecdotes and irrelevant details, which I don’t find that useful for understanding, so I wrote down the interesting points. On the off chance anyone else would like a summary, I publish it here. I recommend reading it properly. Things written in [here] are my comments.

***

Prologue

The aim of this book: How did all this cooperation and niceness, especially amongst humans, come about evolutionarily?

Chapter 1

There are benefits to cooperation: can do many things at once, [can avoid costs of conflict, can enjoy other prisoners’ dilemmas, can be safer in groups]

Cooperation occurs on many levels: allegiances, social groups, organisms, cells, organelles, chromosomes, genomes, genes.

Selfish genes explain everything.

Which means it’s possible for humans to be unselfish.

There are ubiquitous conflicts of interest to be controlled in coalitions at every level.

2

Relatedness explains most groupishness ( = like selfishness, but pro-group). e.g. ants, naked mole rats.

Humans distribute reproduction, so aren’t closely related to their societies. They try to suppress nepotism even. So why all the cooperation?

Division of labour has huge benefits (trade isn’t zero sum)

[cells are cool because they have the same genes, so don’t mutiny, but different characters so benefit from division of labour]

Division of labor is greater in larger groups, and with better transport.

There is a trade-off between division of labour and benefits of competition.

By specialising at individual level a group can generalise at group level: efficiently exploit many niches.

Division of labour between males and females is huge and old.

3

Prisoners’ dilemmas are ubiquitous.

Evolutionarily stable strategies = nash equilibria found by evolution.

Tit-for-tat and related strategies are good in iterated prisoners’ dilemmas.

This is because they are nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear.

If a combination of strategies play against one other repeatedly, increasing in number according to payoffs, the always-defectors thrive as they beat the always-cooperators, then the tit-for-taters take over as the defectors kill each other.

Reciprocity is ubiquitous in our society.

Hypothesis: it’s an evolutionarily stable strategy. It allowed us to benefit from c

...
Raising the Sanity Waterline
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-12T04:28:49.168Z

To paraphrase the Black Belt Bayesian: Behind every exciting, dramatic failure, there is a more important story about a larger and less dramatic failure that made the first failure possible.

If every trace of religion was magically eliminated from the world tomorrow, then—however much improved the lives of many people would be—we would not even have come close to solving the larger failures of sanity that made religion possible in the first place.

We have good cause to spend some of our efforts on trying to eliminate religion directly, because it is a direct problem. But religion also serves the function of an asphyxiated canary in a coal mine—religion is a sign, a symptom, of larger problems that don't go away just because someone loses their religion.

Consider this thought experiment—what could you teach people that is not directly about religion, which is true and useful as a general method of rationality, which would cause them to lose their religions? In fact—imagine that we're going to go and survey all your students five years later, and see how many of them have lost their religions compared to a control group; if you make the slightest move at fighting religion directly, you will invalidate the experiment. You may not make a single mention of religion or any religious belief in your classroom, you may not even hint at it in any obvious way. All your examples must center about real-world cases that have nothing to do with religion.

If you can't fight religion directly, what do you teach that raises the general waterline of sanity to the point that religion goes underwater?

Here are some such topics I've already covered—not avoiding all mention of religion, but it could be done:

Affective Death Spirals—plenty of non-supernaturalist examples.

How to avoid cached thoughts and fake wisdom; the pressure of conformity.

Evidence and Occam's Razor—the rules of probability.

The Bottom Line / Engines of Cognition—the causal reasons why Reason works.

Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions—and the whole associated sequence, like making beliefs pay rent and curiosity-stoppers—have excellent historical examples in vitalism and phlogiston.

Non-existence of ontologically fundamental mental things—apply the Mind Projection Fallacy to probability, move on to reductionism versus holism, then brains and cognitive science.

The many sub-arts

...
The Apologist and the Revolutionary
by Scott Alexander — 2009-03-11T21:39:47.614Z

Rationalists complain that most people are too willing to make excuses for their positions, and too unwilling to abandon those positions for ones that better fit the evidence. And most people really are pretty bad at this. But certain stroke victims called anosognosiacs are much, much worse.
Anosognosia is the condition of not being aware of your own disabilities. To be clear, we're not talking minor disabilities here, the sort that only show up during a comprehensive clinical exam. We're talking paralysis or even blindness1. Things that should be pretty hard to miss.
Take the example of the woman discussed in Lishman's Organic Psychiatry. After a right-hemisphere stroke, she lost movement in her left arm but continuously denied it. When the doctor asked her to move her arm, and she observed it not moving, she claimed that it wasn't actually her arm, it was her daughter's. Why was her daughter's arm attached to her shoulder? The patient claimed her daughter had been there in the bed with her all week. Why was her wedding ring on her daughter's hand? The patient said her daughter had borrowed it. Where was the patient's arm? The patient "turned her head and searched in a bemused way over her left shoulder".
Why won't these patients admit they're paralyzed, and what are the implications for neurotypical humans? Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran, leading neuroscientist and current holder of the world land-speed record for hypothesis generation, has a theory.

One immediately plausible hypothesis: the patient is unable to cope psychologically with the possibility of being paralyzed, so he responds with denial. Plausible, but according to Dr. Ramachandran, wrong. He notes that patients with left-side strokes almost never suffer anosognosia, even though the left side controls the right half of the body in about the same way the right side controls the left half. There must be something special about the right hemisphere.
Another plausible hypothesis: the part of the brain responsible for thinking about the affected area was damaged in the stroke. Therefore, the patient has lost access to the area, so to speak. Dr. Ramachandran doesn't like this idea either. The lack of right-sided anosognosia in left-hemisphere stroke victims argues against it as well. But how can we disconfirm it?
Dr. Ramachandran performed an experiment2 where he "paralyzed" an anosognosiac's good right arm. ...
Beginning at the Beginning
by Annoyance — 2009-03-11T19:23:23.651Z

I can't help but notice that some people are utilizing some very peculiar and idiosyncratic meanings for the word 'rational' in their posts and comments. In many instances, the correctness of rationality is taken for granted; in others, the process of being rational is not only ignored, but dispensed with alltogether, and rational is defined as 'that which makes you win'.

That's not a very useful definition. If I went to someone looking for helping selecting between options, and was told to choose "the best one", or "the right one", or "the one that gives you the greatest chance of winning", what help would I have received? If I had clear ideas about how to determine the best, the right, or the one that would win, I wouldn't have come looking for help in the first place. The responses provide no operational assistance.

There is a definite lack of understanding here of what rationality is, much less why it is correct, and this general incomprehension can only cripple attempts to discuss its nature or how to apply it. We might think that this site would try to dispel the fog surrounding the concept. Remarkably, a blog established to help "refining the art of human rationality" neither explains nor defines rationality.

Those are absolutely critical goals if lesswrong is to accomplish what it advertises itself as attempting. So let's try to reach them.

The human mind is at the same time both extremely sophisticated and shockingly primitive. Most of its operations take place beneath the level of explicit awareness; we don't know how we reach conclusions and make decisions, we're merely presented with the results along with an emotional sense of rightness or confidence.

Despite these emotional assurances, we sometimes suspect that such feelings are unfounded. Careful examination shows that to be precisely the case. We can and do develop confidence in results, not because they are reliable, but for a host of other reasons.

Our approval or disapproval of some properties can cross over into our evaluation of others. We can fall prey to shortcuts while believing that we've been thorough. We tend to interpret evidence in terms of our preferences, perceiving what we want to perceive and screening out evidence we find inconvenient or uncomfortable. Sometimes, we even construct evidence out of whole...
Adversarial System Hats
by Johnicholas — 2009-03-11T16:56:05.745Z

In Reply to: Rationalization, Epistemic Handwashing, Selective Processes

Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about scientists defending pet hypotheses, and prosecutors and defenders as examples of clever rationalization. His primary focus was advice to the well-intentioned individual rationalist, which is excellent as far as it goes. But Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawk ask how a social system should be structured for group rationality.

The adversarial system is widely used in criminal justice. In the legal world, roles such as Prosecution, Defense, and Judge are all guaranteed to be filled, with roughly the same amount of human effort applied to each side. Suppose individuals chose their own roles. It is possible that one role turns out more popular. Because different effort is applied to different sides, selecting for the positions with the strongest arguments will no longer much select for positions that are true.

One role might be more popular because of an information cascade: individuals read the extant arguments and then choose a role, striving to align themselves with the truth, and create arguments for that position. Alternately, a role may be popular due to status-based affiliation, or striving to be on the "winning" side.

I'm well aware that there are vastly more than two sides to most questions. Imagine a list of rationalist roles something like IDEO's "Ten Faces".

Example rationalist roles, leaving the obvious ones for last:

The Mediator, who strives for common understanding and combining evidence.

The Wise, who may not take a stand, but only criticize internal consistency of arguments.

The Perpendicularist, who strives to break up polarization by "pulling the rope sideways".

The Advocate, who champions a controversial claim or proposed action.

The Detractor, who points out flaws in the controversial claim or proposed action.

Due to natural group phenomena (cascades, affiliation), in order to achieve group rationality, there need to be social structures that strive to prevent those natural phenomena. Roles might help.
Selective processes bring tag-alongs (but not always!)
by AnnaSalamon — 2009-03-11T08:17:12.726Z

by Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawk (joint authorship)

Related to: Conjuring An Evolution To Serve You, Disguised Queries

Let’s say you have a bucket full of “instances” (e.g., genes, hypotheses, students, foods), and you want to choose a good one. You fish around in the bucket, draw out the first 10 instances you find, and pick the instance that scores highest on some selection criterion.

For example, perhaps your selection criterion is “number of polka dots”, and you reach into the bucket pictured below, and you draw out 10 instances. What do you get? Assuming some instances have more polka dots than others, you get hypotheses with an above average number of expected polka dots. The point I want to dwell on, though -- which is obvious when you think about it, but which sheds significant light on everyday phenomena -- is that you don’t get instances that are just high in polka dots. You get instances are also high in every trait that correlates with having the most polka dots.

For example, in the bucket above, selecting for instances that have many polka dots implies inadvertently selecting for instances that are red. Selective processes bring tag-alongs, and the specific tag-alongs that you get (redness, in this case) depend on both the trait you’re selecting for, and the bucket from which you’re selecting.

Nearly all cases of useful selection (e.g., evolution, science) would be unable to produce the cool properties they produce (complex order in organisms, truth in theories) if they didn’t have particular, selection-friendly types of buckets, in addition to good selection criteria. Zoom in carefully enough, and nearly all of the traits one gets by selection can be considered tag-alongs. Conversely, if you are consciously selecting entities from buckets with a particular aim in view, you may want to consciously safeguard the “selection-friendliness” of the buckets you are using.

Some examples:

Algebra test:

Let’s say you’re trying to select for students who know algebra. So you write out an algebra exam, E, find ten students at random from your pool, and see which one does best on exam E. For many sorts of buckets of students, this procedure should work: selecting for the criterion “does well on algebra exam E”...