trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
July 2010 Southern California Meetup 
by JenniferRM — 2010-07-07T19:54:25.535Z

There will be a meetup for people from lesswrong in Los Angeles, on Friday July 9th, 2010 at 3PM. Roundtrip carpooling from San Diego is definitely available and other carpooling options may develop. The time and location are designed to make it possible for people from lesswrong to get together and talk. Later, anyone interested should be able to walk to the first meeting of the LA Chapter of the SENS Foundation where Aubrey de Grey will be attending. It should be a good time if you can make it! See below the cut for more details.

The exact location of the meetup is no longer in flux. We will meet at the same place as the SENS Meeting but two hours earlier. That will be Friday 3PM at:

Westwood Brewing Company

1097 Glendon Ave

Los Angeles, CA 90024

The format will be very free form - mostly talking, eating, and/or drinking. Topics are especially likely to include cryonics and life extension given the proximity of the SENS Meeting, but saving the world and "rationality itself" will probably be on the menu as well :-)

See you there!
A proposal for a cryogenic grave for cryonics
by Roko — 2010-07-06T19:01:36.898Z

Followup to: Cryonics wants to be big

We've all wondered about the wisdom of paying money to be cryopreserved, when the current social attitude to cryopreservation is relatively hostile (though improving, it seems). In particular, the probability that either or both of Alcor and CI go bankrupt in the next 100 years is nontrivial (perhaps 50% for "either"?). If this happened, cryopreserved patients may be left to die at room temperature. There is also the possibility that the organizations are closed down by hostile legal action.A

The ideal solution to this problem is a way of keeping bodies cold (colder than -170C, probably) in a grave. Our society already has strong inhibitions against disturbing the dead, which means that a cryonic grave that required no human intervention would be much less vulnerable. Furthermore, such graves could be put in unmarked locations in northern Canada, Scandinavia, Siberia and even Antarctica, where it is highly unlikely people will go, thereby providing further protection.

In the comments to "Cryonics wants to be big", it was suggested that a large enough volume of liquid nitrogen would simply take > 100 years to boil off. Therefore, a cryogenic grave of sufficient size would just be a big tank of LN2 (or some other cryogen) with massive amonuts of insulation.

So, I'll present what I think is the best possible engineering case, and invite LW commenters to correct my mistakes and add suggestions and improvements of their own.

If you have a spherical tank of radius r with insulation of thermal conductivity k and thickness r (so a total radius for insulation and tank of 2r) and a temperature difference of ΔT, the power getting from the outside to the inside is approximately

25 × k × r × ΔT

If the insulation is made much thicker, we get into sharply diminishing returns (asymptotically, we can achieve only another factor of 2). The volume of cryogen that can be stored is approximately 4.2 × r3, and the total amount of heat required to evaporate and heat all of that cryogen is

4.2 × r3 × (volumetric heat of vaporization + gas enthalpy)

The quantity is brackets for Nitrogen and a ΔT of 220 °C is approximately 346,000,000 J m-3. Dividing energy by power gives a boiloff...
Assuming Nails
by Psychohistorian — 2010-07-05T22:26:00.586Z

Tangential followup to Defeating Ugh Fields in Practice.
Somewhat related to Privileging the Hypothesis.

Edited to add:
I'm surprised by negative/neutral reviews. This means that either I'm simply wrong about what counts as interesting, or I haven't expressed my point very well. Based on commenter response, I think the problem is the latter. In the next week or so, expect a much more concise version of this post that expresses my point about epistemology without the detour through a criticism of economics.

At the beginning of my last post, I was rather uncharitable to neoclassical economics:

If I had to choose a single piece of evidence off of which to argue that the rationality assumption of neoclassical economics is totally, irretrievably incorrect, it's this article about financial incentives and medication compliance.... [to maintain that this theory is correct] is to crush reality into a theory that cannot hold it.

Some mistook this to mean that I believe neoclassical economists honestly, explicitly believe that all people are always totally rational. But, to quote Rick Moranis, "It's not what you think. It's far, far worse." The problem is that they often take the complex framework of neoclassical economics and believe that a valid deduction within this framework is a valid deduction about the real world. However, deductions within any given framework are entirely uninformative unless the framework corresponds to reality. But, because such deductions are internally valid, we often give them far more weight than they are due. Testing the fit of a theoretical framework to reality is hard, but a valid deduction within a framework feels so very satisfying. But even if you have a fantastically engineered hammer, you cannot go around assuming everything you want to use it on is a nail. It is all too common for experts to assume that their framework applies cleanly to the real world simply because it works so well in its own world.

If this concept doesn't make perfect sense, that's what the rest of this post is about: spelling out exactly how we go wrong when we misuse the essentially circular models of many sciences, and how this matters. We will begin with the one discipline in which this problem does not occur. The one discipline which appears immune to this type of problem is mathematics,&n...
Cryonics Wants To Be Big
by lsparrish — 2010-07-05T07:50:29.496Z

Cryonics scales very well. People who argue from the perspective that cryonics is costly are probably not aware of this fact. Even assuming you needed to come up with the lump sum all at once rather than steadily pay into life insurance, the fact is that most people would be able to afford it if most people wanted it. There are some basic physical reasons why this is the case.

So long as you keep the shape constant, for any given container the surface area is based on a square law while the volume is calculated as a cube law. For example with a simple cube shaped object, one side squared times 6 is the surface area; one side cubed is the volume. Spheres, domes, and cylinders are just more efficient variants on this theme. For any constant shape, if volume is multiplied by 1000, surface area only goes up by 100 times.

Surface area is where heat gains entry. Thus if you have a huge container holding cryogenic goods (humans in this case) it costs less per unit volume (human) than is the case with a smaller container that is equally well insulated. A way to understand why this works is to realize that you only have to insulate and cool the outside edge -- the inside does not collect any new heat. In short, by multiplying by a thousand patients, you can have a tenth of the thermal transfer to overcome per patient with no change in r-value.

But you aren't limited to using equal thickness of insulation. You can use thicker insulation, but get a much smaller proportional effect on total surface area when you use bigger container volumes. Imagine the difference between a marble sized freezer and a house-sized freezer. What happens when you add an extra foot of insulation to the surface of each? Surface area is impacted much as diameter is -- i.e. more significantly in the case of the smaller freezer than the larger one. The outer edge of the insulation is where it begins collecting heat. With a truly gigantic freezer, you could add an entire meter (or more) of insulation without it having a significant proportional impact on surface area, compared to how much surface area it already has. (This is one reason cheaper materials can be used to construct large tanks -- they can be applied in thicker layers.)

Another factor to take into account is that liquid nitrogen, the super-cheap coolant used by cryonics facilities around the world, is vastly cheaper (more than a factor o...
A Taxonomy of Bias: The Cognitive Miser
by Kaj_Sotala — 2010-07-02T18:38:08.995Z

This is the second part in a mini-sequence presenting content from Keith E. Stanovich's excellent book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The psychology of rational thought. It will culminate in a review of the book itself.

Noting that there are many different kinds of bias, Keith Stanovich proposes a classification scheme for bias that has two primary categories: the Cognitive Miser, and Mindware Problems. Today, I will discuss the Cognitive Miser category, which has the subcategories of Default to the Autonomous Mind, Serial Associative Cognition with a Focal Bias, and Override Failure.

The Cognitive Miser

Cognitive science suggests that our brains use two different kinds of systems for reasoning: Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 is quick, dirty and parallel, and requires little energy. Type 2 is energy-consuming, slow and serial. Because Type 2 processing is expensive and can only work on one or at most a couple of things at a time, humans have evolved to default to Type 1 processing whenever possible. We are "cognitive misers" - we avoid unnecessarily spending Type 2 cognitive resources and prefer to use Type 1 heuristics, even though this might be harmful in a modern-day environment.

Stanovich further subdivides Type 2 processing into what he calls the algorithmic mind and the reflective mind. He argues that the reason why high-IQ people can fall prey to bias almost as easily as low-IQ people is that intelligence tests measure the effectiveness of the algorithmic mind, whereas many reasons for bias can be found in the reflective mind. An important function of the algorithmic mind is to carry out cognitive decoupling - to create copies of our mental representations about things, so that the copies can be used in simulations without affecting the original representations. For instance, a person wondering how to get a fruit down from a high tree will imagine various ways of getting to the fruit, and by doing so he operates on a mental concept that has been copied and decoupled from the concept of the actual fruit. Even when he imagines the things he might do to the fruit, he never confuses the fruit he has imagined in his mind with the fruit that's still hanging in the tree (the two concepts are decoupled). If he did, he might end up believing that he could get the fruit down by simply imagining himself taking it down. High performance on IQ tests indi...
Rationality Quotes: July 2010
by komponisto — 2010-07-01T21:24:12.091Z

This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
What Cost for Irrationality?
by Kaj_Sotala — 2010-07-01T18:25:06.938Z

This is the first part in a mini-sequence presenting content from Keith E. Stanovich's excellent book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The psychology of rational thought. It will culminate in a review of the book itself.

People who care a lot about rationality may frequently be asked why they do so. There are various answers, but I think that many of ones discussed here won't be very persuasive to people who don't already have an interest in the issue. But in real life, most people don't try to stay healthy because of various far-mode arguments for the virtue of health: instead, they try to stay healthy in order to avoid various forms of illness. In the same spirit, I present you with a list of real-world events that have been caused by failures of rationality.

What happens if you, or the people around you, are not rational? Well, in order from least serious to worst, you may...

Have a worse quality of living. Status Quo bias is a general human tendency to prefer the default state, regardless of whether the default is actually good or not. In the 1980's, Pacific Gas and Electric conducted a survey of their customers. Because the company was serving a lot of people in a variety of regions, some of their customers suffered from more outages than others. Pacific Gas asked customers with unreliable service whether they'd be willing to pay extra for more reliable service, and customers with reliable service whether they'd be willing to accept a less reliable service in exchange for a discount. The customers were presented with increases and decreases of various percentages, and asked which ones they'd be willing to accept. The percentages were same for both groups, only with the other having increases instead of decreases. Even though both groups had the same income, customers of both groups overwhelmingly wanted to stay with their status quo. Yet the service difference between the groups was large: the unreliable service group suffered 15 outages per year of 4 hours' average duration and the reliable service group suffered 3 outages per year of 2 hours' average duration! (Though note caveats.)

A study by Philips Electronics found that one half of their products had nothing wrong in them, but the consumers couldn't figure out how to use the devices. This can be partially explained by egocentric bias on behalf of the...
Applied Bayes' Theorem: Reading People
by Kaj_Sotala — 2010-06-30T17:21:53.836Z

Or, how to recognize Bayes' theorem when you meet one making small talk at a cocktail party.

Knowing the theory of rationality is good, but it is of little use unless we know how to apply it. Unfortunately, humans tend to be poor at applying raw theory, instead needing several examples before it becomes instinctive. I found some very useful examples in the book Reading People: How to Understand People and Predict Their Behavior - Anytime, Anyplace. While I didn't think that it communicated the skill of actually reading people very well, I did notice that it did have one chapter (titled "Discovering Patterns: Learning to See the Forest, Not Just the Trees") that could almost have been a collection of Less Wrong posts. It also serves as an excellent example of applying Bayes' theorem in every-day life.
In "What is Bayesianism?" I said that the first core tenet of Bayesianism is "Any given observation has many different possible causes". Reading People says:

If this book could deliver but one message, it would be that to read people effectively you must gather enough information about them to establish a consistent pattern. Without that pattern, your conclusions will be about as reliable as a tarot card reading.

In fact, the author is saying that Bayes' theorem applies when you're trying to read people (if this is not immediately obvious, just keep reading). Any particular piece of evidence about a person could have various causes. For example, in a later chapter we are offered a list of possible reasons for why someone may have dressed inappropriately for an occasion. They might (1) be seeking attention, (2) lack common sense, (3) be self-centered and insensitive to others, (4) be trying to show that they are spontaneous, rebellious, or noncomformists and don't care what other people think, (5) not have been taught how to dress and act appropriately, (6) be trying to imitate someone they admire, (7) value comfort and convenience over all else, or (8) simply not have the right attire for the occasion.
Similarly, very short hair on a man might indicate that he (1) is in the military, or was at some point in his life, (2) works for an organization that demands very short hair, such as a police force or fire department, (3) is trendy, artistic or rebellious, (4) is conservative, (5) is undergoing or recovering from a medical treatment, (6) thinks he looks better wi...
A Challenge for LessWrong
by simplicio — 2010-06-29T23:47:39.284Z

The user divia, in her most excellent post on spaced repetition software, quotes Paul Buchheit as saying

"Good enough" is the enemy of "At all"!

This is an important truth which bears repetition, and to which I shall return.

"Rationalists should win"

Many hands have been wrung hereabouts on the subject of rationality's instrumental value (or lack thereof) in the everyday lives of LWers. Are we winning? Some consider this doubtful.1

Now, I have a couple of issues with the question being framed in such a way.

Benefits of rationality are often negative benefits - in the sense that they will involve not being stupid as opposed to being especially smart. But "Why I didn't take on that crippling mortgage" doesn't make a very good post.

Weapons-grade rationality à la LessWrong is a refinement to the reactor-grade rationality practiced by self-described skeptics - for most cases, it is not a quantum leap forward. The general skeptic community is already winning in certain senses (e.g., a non-religious outlook correlates strongly with income and level of education), although causal direction is hard to determine.

Truth-seeking is ethical for its own sake.

I, for one, am having a hell of a good time! I count that as a win.

However, these relatively minor considerations aside, surely we can do better. In order to win, rationalists should play.

Nonrandom acts of rationality

The LessWrong community finds itself in the fairly privileged position of being (1) mostly financially well-off; (2) well-educated and articulate; (3) connected; (4) of non-trivial size. Therefore, I would like to suggest a project for any & all users who might be interested.

Let us become a solution in search of problems.

Perform one or more manageable & modest rationally & ethically motivated actions between now and July 31, 2010 (indicate intent to participate, and brainstorm, below). These actions must have a reasonable chance of being an unequivocal net positive for the shared values of this community. Finally, post what you have done to this thread's comments, in as much detail as possible.

Some examples:

Write a letter on behalf of Amnesty International in support of their anti-torture campaigns.

Make an appointment to give blood.

Contact and harangue one of your elected representatives. For example, I may write to m

...
Book Club Update, Chapter 2 of Probability Theory
by Morendil — 2010-06-29T00:46:12.048Z

Previously: Book Club introductory post - First update and Chapter 1 summary

Discussion on chapter 1 has wound down, we move on to Chapter 2 (I have updated the previous post with a summary of chapter 1 with links to the discussion as appropriate). But first, a few announcements.

How to participate

This is both for people who have previously registered interest, as well as newcomers. This spreadsheet is our best attempt at coordinating 80+ Less Wrong readers interested in participating in "earnest study of the great literature in our area of interest".

If you are still participating, please let the group know - all you have to do is fill in the "Active (Chapter)" column. Write in an "X" if you are checked out, or the number of the chapter you are currently reading. This will let us measure attrition, as well as adapt the pace if necessary. If you would like to join, please add yourself to the spreadsheet. If you would like to participate in live chat about the material, please indicate your time zone and preferred meeting time. As always, your feedback on the process itself is more than welcome.

Refer to the previous post for more details on how to participate and meeting schedules.

Chapter 2: The Quantitative Rules

In this chapter Jaynes carefully introduces and justifies the elementary laws of plausibility, from which all later results are derived.

(Disclosure: I wasn't able to follow all the math in this chapter but I didn't let it deter me; the applications in later chapters are more accessible. We'll take things slow, and draw on such expertise as has been offered by more advanced members of the group. At worst this chapter can be enjoyed on a purely literary basis.)

Sections: The Product Rule - The Sum Rule. Exercises: 2.1 and 2.2

Chapter 2 works out the consequences of the qualitative desiderata introduced at the end of Chapter 1.

The first step is to consider the evaluation of the plausibility (AB|C), from the possibly relevant inputs: (B|C), (A|C), (A|BC) and (B|AC). Considerations of symmetry and the desideratum of consistency lead to a functional equation known as the "associativity equation": F(F(x,z),z)=F(x,F(y,z)), characterizing the the function F such that (AB|C)=F[(B|C),(A|BC)]. The derivation that follows requires some calculus, and shows by differentiating then integrating back the form of the product rule:

w(AB|C)=w(A|BC)w(B|C)=w(B|AC)w(A|C)

Havin...
Unknown knowns: Why did you choose to be monogamous?
by WrongBot — 2010-06-26T02:50:22.302Z

Many of us are familiar with Donald Rumsfeld's famous (and surprisingly useful) taxonomy of knowledge:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.

But this taxonomy (as originally described) omits an important fourth category: unknown knowns, the things we don't know that we know. This category encompasses the knowledge of many of our own personal beliefs, what I call unquestioned defaults. For example, most modern Americans possess the unquestioned default belief that they have some moral responsibility for their own freely-chosen actions. In the twelfth century, most Europeans possessed the unquestioned default belief that the Christian god existed. And so on. These unknown knowns are largely the products of a particular culture; they require homogeneity of belief to remain unknown.

By definition, we are each completely ignorant of our own unknown knowns. So even when our culture gives us a fairly accurate map of the territory, we'll never notice the Mercator projection's effect. Unless it's pointed out to us or we find contradictory evidence, that is. A single observation can be all it takes, if you're paying attention and asking questions. The answers might not change your mind, but you'll still come out of the process with more knowledge than you went in with.

When I was eighteen I went on a date with a girl I'll call Emma, who conscientiously informed me that she already had two boyfriends: she was, she said, polyamorous. I had previously had some vague awareness that there had been a free love movement in the sixties that encouraged "alternative lifestyles", but that awareness was not a sufficient motivation for me to challenge my default belief that romantic relationships could only be conducted one at a time. Acknowledging default settings is not easy.

The chance to date a pretty girl, though, can be sufficient motivation for a great many things (as is also the case with pretty boys). It was certainly a good enough reason to ask myself, "Self, what's so great about this monogamy thing?"

I couldn't come up with any particularly compelling answers, so I called Emma up and we planned a second date.

Since that fateful day, I've been involved in both poly...