trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
"Politics is the mind-killer" is the mind-killer
by thomblake — 2012-01-26T15:55:22.746Z

Summary: I propose we somewhat relax our stance on political speech on Less Wrong.

Related: The mind-killer, Mind-killer

A recent series of posts by a well-meaning troll (example) has caused me to re-examine our "no-politics" norm. I believe there has been some unintentional creep from the original intent of Politics is the Mind-Killer. In that article, Eliezer is arguing that discussions here (actually on Overcoming Bias) should not use examples from politics in discussions that are not about politics, since they distract from the lesson. Note the final paragraph:

I'm not saying that I think Overcoming Bias should be apolitical, or even that we should adopt Wikipedia's ideal of the Neutral Point of View. But try to resist getting in those good, solid digs if you can possibly avoid it. If your topic legitimately relates to attempts to ban evolution in school curricula, then go ahead and talk about it - but don't blame it explicitly on the whole Republican Party; some of your readers may be Republicans, and they may feel that the problem is a few rogues, not the entire party. As with Wikipedia's NPOV, it doesn't matter whether (you think) the Republican Party really is at fault. It's just better for the spiritual growth of the community to discuss the issue without invoking color politics.

So, the original intent was not to ban political speech altogether, but to encourage us to come up with less-charged examples where possible. If the subject you're really talking about is politics, and it relates directly to rationality, then you should be able to post about it without getting downvotes strictly because "politics is the mind-killer".

It could be that this drift is less of a community norm than I perceive, and there are just a few folks (myself included) that have taken the original message too far. If so, consider this a message just to those folks such as myself.

Of course, politics would still be off-topic in the comment threads of most posts. There should probably be a special open thread (or another forum) to which drive-by political activists can be directed, instead of simply saying "We don't talk about politics here".

David_Gerard makes a similar point here (though FWIW, I came up with this title independently).
Meetup : Cambridge UK
by rebellionkid — 2012-01-25T23:47:49.070Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge UK

WHEN:
28 January 2012 06:00:00PM (+0000)

WHERE:
Trinity College JCR, Cambridge, CB2 1TQ, UK

Meet at the Great Gate if you dont know where the JCR is. {Edit: Great Gate is the gate on St. John's Street that is pretty much opposite the bookshop "Heffers".} There were a good number of people at the last Cambridge UK meet. This could become a regular event if enough people are interested.

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge UK
Shit Rationalists Say?
by Eneasz — 2012-01-25T21:51:52.960Z

I assume everyone has run across at least one of the "Shit X's Say" format of videos? Such as Shit Skeptics Say. When done right it totally triggers the in-group warm-fuzzies. (Not to be confused with the nearly-identically formatted "Shit X's Say to Y's" which is mainly a way for Y's to complain about X's).

What sort of things do Rationalists often say that triggers this sort of in-group recognition which could be popped into a short video? A few I can think of...

You should sign up for cryonics. I want to see you in the future.

…intelligence explosion…

What’s your confidence interval?

You know what they say: one man’s Modus Ponens is another man’s Modus Tollens

This may sound a bit crazy right now, but hear me out…

What are your priors?

When the singularity comes that won’t be a problem anymore.

I like to think I’d do that, but I don’t fully trust myself. I am running on corrupted hardware after all.

I want to be with you, and I don’t foresee that changing in the near future.

…Bayesian statistics…

So Omega appears in front of you…

What would you say the probability of that event is, if your beliefs are true?

Others?
I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions
by Multiheaded — 2012-01-25T17:43:40.601Z

You folks probably know how some posters around here, specifically Vladimir_M, often make statements to the effect of:

"There's an opinion on such-and-such topic that's so against the memeplex of Western culture, we can't even discuss it in open-minded, pseudonymous forums like Less Wrong as society would instantly slam the lid on it with either moral panic or ridicule and give the speaker a black mark.

Meanwhile the thought patterns instilled in us by our upbringing would lead us to quickly lose all interest in the censored opinion"

Going by their definition, us blissfully ignorant masses can't even know what exactly those opinions might be, as they would look like basic human decency, the underpinnings of our ethics or some other such sacred cow to us. I might have a few guesses, though, all of them as horrible and sickening as my imagination could produce without overshooting and landing in the realm of comic-book evil:

- Dictatorial rule involving active terror and brutal suppression of deviants having great utility for a society in the long term, by providing security against some great risk or whatever.

- A need for every society to "cull the weak" every once in a while, e.g. exterminating the ~0.5% of its members that rank as weakest against some scale.

- Strict hierarchy in everyday life based on facts from the ansectral environment (men dominating women, fathers having the right of life and death over their children, etc) - Mencius argued in favor of such ruthless practices, e.g. selling children into slavery, in his post on "Pronomianism" and "Antinomianism", stating that all contracts between humans should rather be strict than moral or fair, to make the system stable and predictable; he's quite obsessed with stability and conformity.

- Some public good being created when the higher classes wilfully oppress and humiliate the lower ones in a ceremonial manner

- The bloodshed and lawlessness of periodic large-scale war as a vital "pressure valve" for releasing pent-up unacceptable emotional states and instinctive drives

- Plain ol' unfair discrimination of some group in many cruel, life-ruining ways, likewise as a pressure valve

+: some Luddite crap about dropping to a near-subsistence level in every aspect of civilization and making life a daily struggle for survival

Of course my methodology for coming up with such guesses was flawed and primitive...
Occam alternatives
by selylindi — 2012-01-25T07:50:07.841Z

One of the most delightful things I learned while on LessWrong was the Solomonoff/Kolmogorov formalization of Occam's Razor. Added to what had previously been only an aesthetic heuristic to me were mathematical rigor, proofs of optimality of certain kinds, and demonstrations of utility. For several months I was quite taken with it in what now appears to me to be a rather uncritical way. In doing some personal research (comparing and contrasting Marian apparitions with UFO sightings), I encountered for the first time people who explicity rejected Occam's Razor. They didn't have anything to replace it with, but it set off a search for me to find some justification for Occam's Razor beyond aesthetics. What I found wasn't particularly convincing, and in discussion with a friend, we concluded that Occam's Razor feels conceptually wrong to us.

First, some alternatives for perspective:

Occam's Razor: Avoid needlessly multiplying entities.

All else being equal, the simplest explanation is usually correct.

(Solomonoff prior) The likelihood of a hypothesis that explains the data is proportional to 2^(-L) for L, the length of the shortest code that produces a description of at least that hypothesis.
(speed prior) The likelihood of a hypothesis that explains the data is proportional to 2^(-L-N) for L, the length of the shortest code that produces a description of at least that hypothesis, and N, the number of calculations to get from the code to the description.

Lovejoy's Cornucopia: Expect everything.

If you consider it creatively enough, all else is always equal.

(ignorance prior) Equally weight all hypotheses that explain the data.

Crabapple's Bludgeon: Don't demand it makes sense.

No set of mutually inconsistent observations can exist for which some human intellect cannot conceive a coherent explanation, however complicated. The world may be not only stranger than you know, but stranger than you can know.

(skeptics' prior) The likelihood of a hypothesis is inversely proportional to the number of observations it purports to explain.

Pascal's Goldpan: Make your beliefs pay rent.

All else being equal, the most useful explanation is usually correct.

(utilitarian prior) The likelihood of a hypothesis is proportional to the expected net utility of the agent believing it.

Burke's...
Meetup : Pittsburgh Meetup: Big Gaming Fun 3!
by Kenoubi — 2012-01-25T04:05:09.906Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh Meetup: Big Gaming Fun 3!

WHEN: 29 January 2012 01:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE: 1324 Wightman St., Pittsburgh, PA 15217

You can see my game collection here; please bring anything else you'd like to play. We can order food and go as late as 19:00. If I get paged I may have to deal with an emergency (from home, using my laptop), but if that doesn't bother you, it doesn't bother me. I have a cat. Please let me know if you're allergic and need me to put her upstairs. RSVP here or by sending me a private message (but don't not show up because you didn't RSVP, I just want a rough idea of the number of attendees). Ring the bell, knock, or call or text (412) 657-1395 to get in when you get there. I intend to hold these every 2-3 weeks, so watch this space!

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh Meetup: Big Gaming Fun 3!
Urges vs. Goals: The analogy to anticipation and belief
by AnnaSalamon — 2012-01-24T23:57:04.122Z

Partially in response to: The curse of identity

Related to: Humans are not automatically strategic, That other kind of status, Approving reinforces low-effort behaviors.

Joe studies long hours, and often prides himself on how driven he is to make something of himself. But in the actual moments of his studying, Joe often looks out the window, doodles, or drags his eyes over the text while his mind wanders. Someone sent him a link to which college majors lead to the greatest lifetime earnings, and he didn't get around to reading that either. Shall we say that Joe doesn't really care about making something of himself?

The Inuit may not have 47 words for snow, but Less Wrongers do have at least two words for belief. We find it necessary to distinguish between:

Anticipations, what we actually expect to see happen;

Professed beliefs, the set of things we tell ourselves we “believe”, based partly on deliberate/verbal thought.

This distinction helps explain how an atheistic rationalist can still get spooked in a haunted house; how someone can “believe” they’re good at chess while avoiding games that might threaten that belief [1]; and why Eliezer had to actually crash a car before he viscerally understood what his physics books tried to tell him about stopping distance going up with the square of driving speed. (I helped Anna revise this - EY.)

A lot of our community technique goes into either (1) dealing with "beliefs" being an evolutionarily recent system, such that our "beliefs" often end up far screwier than our actual anticipations; or (2) trying to get our anticipations to align with more evidence-informed beliefs.

And analogously - this analogy is arguably obvious, but it's deep, useful, and easy to overlook in its implications - there seem to be two major kinds of wanting:

Urges: concrete emotional pulls, produced in System 1's perceptual / autonomic processes
(my urge to drink the steaming hot cocoa in front of me; my urge to avoid embarrassment by having something to add to my accomplishments log)

Goals: things we tell ourselves we’re aiming at, within deliberate/verbal thought and planning
(I have a goal to exercise three times a week; I have a goal to reduce existential risk)

Implication 1: You can import a lot of technique for "checking for screwy beliefs" into "checking...
Sunk Costs Fallacy Fallacy
by  — 2012-01-24T21:09:37.689Z

I have a problem with never finishing things that I want to work on. I get enthusiastic about them for a while, but then find something else to work on. This problem seems to be powered partially by my sunk costs fallacy hooks.

When faced with the choice of finishing my current project or starting this shiny new project, my sunk costs hook activates and says "evaluate future expected utility and ignore sunk costs". The new project looks very shiny compared to the old project, enough that it looks like a better thing to work on than the rest of the current project. The trouble is that this always seems to be the case. It seems weird that the awesomeness of my project ideas would have exponential growth over time, so there must be something else here.

The "evaluate future expected utility and ignore sunk costs" heuristic works well for life-planning where people get status quo bias and financial-utility things where utility is easy to calculate consistently. In fact it seems like generally good decision theory, except that I'm running on corrupted hardware. My corrupted hardware seems to decay the perceived value of a project over the time that I know of it, or inflate it when it seems new and exciting, which of course throws off the sunk costs hook's assumption that I can evaluate utility *consistently*.

So my sunk costs hook has a bad assumption. I don't want to go modifying the hook in a way that would break its applicability to economic and life-planning situations or its theoretical correctness, so I'll just add "this assumes consistent utility function". This of course doesn't actually help me on the project planning case, I need to put a hook on evaluating the utility of a project that makes the utility function consistent.

Some things that might de-skew my evaluation of exciting new projects:

If the project is new, it probably looks shinier than it is. I should wait a while or try to correct for this before evaluating.

I should take into account my record of defecting halfway thru a project to discount the utility of the new project.

The latter half of a project is relatively untouched territory, full of valuable new experiences. I will have to work thru the first half of the new project to get to this, but I am already at the threshold on the current project.

Maybe there's more?

So I'll see how this works out.

I think this situation is probably not uniqu...
Drawing Workshop in NYC: Gauging Interest
by Raemon — 2012-01-24T20:49:56.780Z

Short version:
I want to hold a three day (Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday afternoon) drawing workshop in NYC sometime in the next month. Would anyone be interested?
Longer version:
Several weeks ago, I put my Drawing Less Wrong sequence on hiatus while I worked on the Solstice project. I’m continuing with rational-culture development work, (there’s a mailing list for people interested in participating) but I want to return to the drawing sequence soon.
In the beginning, I didn’t spell out my intentions very well - Drawing Less Wrong wasn’t intended to be a set of comprehensive exercises, but rather an attempt to bridge a lot of inferential distance between how most people think of drawing and how you actually need to think in order to draw. I’d then discuss my previous workshops - what exercises I tried and how they worked out. I was also looking for existing drawing tutorials while I was writing the articles, and by the end I planned to have narrowed things down to some good recommendations.
But many people were (rightly) expecting drawing exercises to be a part of the series. It’s hard to learn abstract concepts without a concrete example to work with. This is even more true when the abstract concepts are explicitly about difficult-to-describe kinesthetic processes.
I know of a few drawing exercises that are well tested, and are definitely important to any artist who’s undertaking a 10,000 hour journey. But I don’t know which are best if you’re trying to show someone how to draw in 20 hours. There are certain rules of thumb that can help you improve quickly (like learning human proportion) but which can trap you into a drawing what you *think* you know, rather than what’s actually there.
Different exercises also work better for different people, and I just don’t have enough data to say confidently “you should do X.”
Previous workshops had also been rather spaced out (2-3 weeks apart). I was actually surprised that people seemed to retain the improvements from the previous workshops.
So before I return to the series, I’d like to a more intensive workshop, with more people. Three days in a row, with somewhere between 12-20 hours of work (I’ll be available the full 20 hours, but it may be a lot of time to commit for some people). Systematically try out different exercises...
Thinking Bayesianically, with Lojban
by DataPacRat — 2012-01-24T18:47:52.840Z

"Do not walk to the truth, but dance. On each and every step of that dance your foot comes down in exactly the right spot. Each piece of evidence shifts your beliefs by exactly the right amount, neither more nor less. What is exactly the right amount? To calculate this you must study probability theory. Even if you cannot do the math, knowing that the math exists tells you that the dance step is precise and has no room in it for your whims." -- from "Twelve Virtues of Rationality", by Eliezer Yudkowsky
One of the more useful mental tools I've found is the language Lojban ( http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Learning ), which makes explicit many of the implicit assumptions in languages. (There's also a sub-language based on Lojban, called Cniglic ( http://www.datapacrat.com/cniglic/ ), which can be added to most existing languages to offer some additional functionality.)
One of the things Lojban (and Cniglic) has are 'evidentials', words which can be used to tag other words and sentences to explain how the speaker knows them: "ja'o", meaning "I conclude", "za'a" meaning "I observe", "pe'i" meaning "It's my opinion", and more. However, there hasn't been any easy and explicit way to use this system to express Bayesian reasoning...
... until today.
Lojban not only allows for, but encourages, "experimental" words of certain sorts; and using that system, I have now created the word "bei'e" (pronounced BAY-heh), which allows a speaker to tag a word or sentence with how confident they are, in the Bayesian sense, of its truth. Taking an idea from the foundational text by E.T. Jaynes, "bei'e" is measured in decibels of logarithmic probability. This sounds complicated, but in many cases, is actually much easier to use than simple odds or probability; adding 10 decibels multiplies the odds by a factor of 10.
The current reftext for "bei'e" is at http://www.lojban.org/tiki/bei%27e , which basically amounts to adding Lojbannic digits to the front of the word:

ni'uci'ibei'e
-oo
0%
1:oo
complete disbelief, paradox

ni'upabei'e
-1
44.3%
4:5

ni'ubei'e
<0
<50%
<1:1
less than even odds, less likely than so

nobei'e
0
50%
1:1
neither belief nor disbelief, agnosticism

ma'ubei'e
>0
>50%
>1:1
greater than even odds, more likely than not

pabei'e
1
55.7%
5:4
preponderance of the evidence

rebei'e
2
61.3%
3:2

cibei'e
3
66.6%
2:1
clear and convincing evidence

vo

...
Raising awareness of existential risks - perhaps explaining at "personally stocking canned food" level?
by Dmytry — 2012-01-24T16:17:41.751Z

Many articles have been written on the topic of existential risks, and the need of greater public awareness. Here's my take - the existential risks are perhaps easier to explain with a simple example that does not yet trigger the 'too scary to be true' reflex. Example which one can easily explain to the people one knows and meets with regularly, and have them explain it to others. Example not involving any controversial predictions such as strong AI.

So, let's suppose that there's 1 in 500 years lethal flu-like pandemic risk, that kills 1/5 of the population. That's likely to be a gross underestimate, especially in the light of recent news. You can talk about that risk with mostly anyone for a while without any protest, building up some tolerance to the scariness of this scenario and letting them become accustomed with the notion, perhaps letting them suggest that real risk may be higher, perhaps 1 in 100 years.

Then you can compare it to personal everyday risks - specific to the audience. Homicide rates, car accidents, what ever everyday risks that we take counter measures against.

That's where this risk gets scary, and if you do comparisons right away some people just withdraw into a fantasy world where such pandemic is impossible or much less probable.

A lot of people, majority perhaps, are very sensitive about risks at this level. It is higher than risk of death by a car wreck, by homicide, and by many types of accidents, in about any developed country. We have seat belts and airbags, the cars are engineered for safety at non-insignificant expense, etc. We vaccinate against rare but severe diseases.

So here's the thing. Stocking up on food for two months could conceivably be as effective in the event of outbreak as seat belts, airbags, and road safety measures are for prevention of car crash fatalities; and there are many more scenarios than virus outbreak where those cans can improve your safety. Note: viruses normally don't survive for a long time in the environment, highly lethal viruses burn out the susceptible population, and after month or two a vaccine could become available. Non-interaction for months is doubly important as the sick can stay at home and avoid infecting others.

Thus it follows that one should a: stock up on preserved food and other necessities if possible (assuming western income levels and fairly low cost of the preserved food which ca...
Meetup : Sydney Rationality meet-up No.2
by Oklord — 2012-01-24T14:07:38.857Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality meet-up No.2

WHEN:
15 February 2012 06:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
22 The Promenade, Sydney NSW 2000

As usual at the king street brew house until someone comes up with something better.

Well, if people want regular, they'll get regular. In addition to capping off the talk about procrastination we had last time with some personal stories, I'm open to suggestions for topics. If nothing is viable in the week leading up to this I'll come up with something.

As a follow up to the meeting last time, the link to the page for Akrasia case studies is available here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/8ug/building_casestudies_of_akrasia/

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality meet-up No.2