trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Are You a Solar Deity?
by Scott Alexander — 2009-03-15T19:30:09.265Z

Max Muller was one of the greatest religious scholars of the 19th century. Born in Germany, he became fascinated with Eastern religion, and moved to England to be closer to the center of Indian scholarship in Europe. There he mastered English and Sanskrit alike to come out with the first English translation of the Rig Veda, the holiest book of Hinduism.
One of Muller's most controversial projects was his attempt to interpret all pagan mythologies as linked to one another, deriving from a common ur-mythology and ultimately from the celestial cycle. His tools were exhaustive knowledge of the myths of all European cultures combined with a belief in the interpretive power of linguistics.
What the significance of Orpheus' descent into the underworld to reclaim his wife's soul? The sun sets beneath the Earth each evening, and returns with renewed brightness. Why does Apollo love Daphne? Daphne is cognate with Sanskrit Dahana, the maiden of the dawn. The death of Hercules? It occurs after he's completed twelve labors (cf. twelve signs of zodiac) when he's travelling west (like the sun), he is killed by Deianeira (compare Sanskrit dasya-nari, a demon of darkness) and his body is cremated (fire = the sun). His followers extended the method to Jesus - who was clearly based on a lunar deity, since he spent three days dead and then returned to life, just as the new moon goes dark for three days and then reappears.
Muller's work was massively influential during his time, and many 19th century mythographers tried to critique his paradigm and poke holes in it. Some accused him of trying to destroy the mystery of religion, and others accused him of shoddy scholarship.
R.F. Littledale, an Anglican apologist, took a completely different route. He claimed that there was, in fact, no such person as Professor Max Muller, holder of the Taylorian Chair in Modern European Languages. All these stories about "Max Muller" were nothing but a thinly disguised solar myth.

Littledale begins his argument by noting Muller's heritage. He was supposedly born in Germany, only to travel to England when he came of age. This looks suspiciously like the classic Journey of the Sun, which is born in the east but travels to the west. Muller's origin in Germany is a clear reference to Germanus Apollo, one of the old appelations of the Greek sun god.
His Christian name must be related to Latin "maxim...
The Tragedy of the Anticommons
by Kaj_Sotala — 2009-03-15T17:32:43.186Z

I assume that most of you are familiar with the concept of the Tragedy of the Commons. If you aren't, well, that was a Wikipedia link right there.
However, fewer are familiar with the Tragedy of the Anticommons, a term coined by Michael Heller. Where the Tragedy of the Commons is created by too little ownership, the Tragedy of the Anticommons is created by too much.

For instance, the classical solution to the TotC is to divide up the commons between the herders using it, giving each of them ownership for a particular part. This gives each owner an incentive to enforce its sustainability. But what would happen if the commons were divided up to thousands of miniature pieces, say one square inch each? In order to herd your cattle, you'd have to acquire permission from hundreds of different owners. Not only would this be a massive undertaking by itself, any one of them could say no, potentially ruining your entire attempt.
This isn't just a theoretical issue. In his book, Heller offers numerous examples, such as this one:

...gridlock prevents a promising treatment for Alzheimer's diseases being tested. The head of research at a "Big Pharma" drugmaker told me that his lab scientists developed the potential cure (call it Compound X) years ago, but biotech competitors blocked its development. ... the company developing Compound X needed to pay every owner of a patent relevant to its testing. Ignoring even one would invite an expensive and crippling lawsuit. Each patent holder viewed its own discovery as the crucial one and demanded a corresponding fee, until the demands exceeded the drug's expected profits. None of the patent owners would yield first. ...
This story does not have a happy ending. No valiant patent bundler came along. Because the head of research could not figure out how to pay off all the patent owners and still have a good chance of earning a profit, he shifted his priorities to less ambitious options. Funding went to spin-offs of existing drugs for which his firm already controlled the underlying patents. His lab reluctantly shelved Compound X even though he was certain the science was solid, the market huge, and the potential for easing human suffering beyond measure.

Patents aren't the only field affected by this tragedy. America's airports are unnecessarily congested because land owners block all attempts to build new airports. 90% of the U...
3 Levels of Rationality Verification
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-15T17:19:14.736Z

I strongly suspect that there is a possible art of rationality (attaining the map that reflects the territory, choosing so as to direct reality into regions high in your preference ordering) which goes beyond the skills that are standard, and beyond what any single practitioner singly knows. I have a sense that more is possible.

The degree to which a group of people can do anything useful about this, will depend overwhelmingly on what methods we can devise to verify our many amazing good ideas.

I suggest stratifying verification methods into 3 levels of usefulness:

Reputational

Experimental

Organizational

If your martial arts master occasionally fights realistic duels (ideally, real duels) against the masters of other schools, and wins or at least doesn't lose too often, then you know that the master's reputation is grounded in reality; you know that your master is not a complete poseur. The same would go if your school regularly competed against other schools. You'd be keepin' it real.

Some martial arts fail to compete realistically enough, and their students go down in seconds against real streetfighters. Other martial arts schools fail to compete at all—except based on charisma and good stories—and their masters decide they have chi powers. In this latter class we can also place the splintered schools of psychoanalysis.

So even just the basic step of trying to ground reputations in some realistic trial other than charisma and good stories, has tremendous positive effects on a whole field of endeavor.

But that doesn't yet get you a science. A science requires that you be able to test 100 applications of method A against 100 applications of method B and run statistics on the results. Experiments have to be replicable and replicated. This requires standard measurements that can be run on students who've been taught using randomly-assigned alternative methods, not just realistic duels fought between masters using all of their accumulated techniques and strength.

The field of happiness studies was created, more or less, by realizing that asking people "On a scale of 1 to 10, how good do you feel right now?" was a measure that statistically validated well against other ideas for measuring happiness. And this, despite all skepticism, looks like it's actually a pretty useful measure of some things, if ...
Really Extreme Altruism
by CronoDAS — 2009-03-15T06:51:34.773Z

In secret, an unemployed man with poor job prospects uses his savings to buy a large term life insurance policy, and designates a charity as the beneficiary. Two years after the policy is purchased, it will pay out in the event of suicide. The man waits the required two years, and then kills himself, much to the dismay of his surviving relatives. The charity receives the money and saves the lives of many people who would otherwise have died.

Are the actions of this man admirable or shameful?
Schools Proliferating Without Evidence
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-15T06:43:28.509Z

Robyn Dawes, author of one of the original papers from Judgment Under Uncertainty and of the book Rational Choice in an Uncertain World—one of the few who tries really hard to import the results to real life—is also the author of House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth.

From House of Cards, chapter 1:

The ability of these professionals has been subjected to empirical scrutiny—for example, their effectiveness as therapists (Chapter 2), their insight about people (Chapter 3), and the relationship between how well they function and the amount of experience they have had in their field (Chapter 4). Virtually all the research—and this book will reference more than three hundred empirical investigations and summaries of investigations—has found that these professionals' claims to superior intuitive insight, understanding, and skill as therapists are simply invalid...

Remember Rorschach ink-blot tests? It's such an appealing argument: the patient looks at the ink-blot and says what he sees, the psychotherapist interprets their psychological state based on this. There've been hundreds of experiments looking for some evidence that it actually works. Since you're reading this, you can guess the answer is simply "No." Yet the Rorschach is still in use. It's just such a good story that psychotherapists just can't bring themselves to believe the vast mounds of experimental evidence saying it doesn't work—

—which tells you what sort of field we're dealing with here.

And the experimental results on the field as a whole are commensurate. Yes, patients who see psychotherapists have been known to get better faster than patients who simply do nothing. But there is no statistically discernible difference between the many schools of psychotherapy. There is no discernible gain from years of expertise.

And there's also no discernible difference between seeing a psychotherapist and spending the same amount of time talking to a randomly selected college professor from another field. It's just talking to anyone that helps you get better, apparently.

In the entire absence of the slightest experimental evidence for their effectiveness, psychotherapists became licensed by states, their testimony accepted in court, their teaching schools accredited, and their bills paid b...
The Skeptic's Trilemma
by Scott Alexander — 2009-03-15T00:12:23.184Z

Followup to: Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale

Related to: Explain, Worship, Ignore

Skepticism is like sex and pizza: when it's good, it's very very good, and when it's bad, it's still pretty good.
It really is hard to dislike skeptics. Whether or not their rational justifications are perfect, they are doing society a service by raising the social cost of holding false beliefs. But there is a failure mode for skepticism. It's the same as the failure mode for so many other things: it becomes a blue vs. green style tribe, demands support of all 'friendly' arguments, enters an affective death spiral, and collapses into a cult.
What does it look like when skepticism becomes a cult? Skeptics become more interested in supporting their "team" and insulting the "enemy" than in finding the truth or convincing others. They begin to think "If a assigning .001% probability to Atlantis and not accepting its existence without extraordinarily compelling evidence is good, then assigning 0% probability to Atlantis and refusing to even consider any evidence for its existence must be great!" They begin to deny any evidence that seems pro-Atlantis, and cast aspersions on the character of anyone who produces it. They become anti-Atlantis fanatics.

Wait a second. There is no lost continent of Atlantis. How do I know what a skeptic would do when confronted with evidence for it? For that matter, why do I care?

Way back in 2007, Eliezer described the rationalist equivalent of Abort, Retry, Fail: the trilemma of Explain, Worship, Ignore. Don't understand where rain comes from? You can try to explain it as part of the water cycle, although it might take a while. You can worship it as the sacred mystery of the rain god. Or you can ignore it and go on with your everyday life.
So someone tells you that Plato, normally a pretty smart guy, wrote a long account of a lost continent called Atlantis complete with a bunch of really specific geographic details that seem a bit excessive for a meaningless allegory. Plato claims to have gotten most of the details from a guy called Solon, legendary for his honesty, who got them from the Egyptians, who are known for their obsessive record-keeping. This seems interesting. But there's no evidence for a lost continent anywhere near the Atlantic Ocean, and geology tells us continents can't just go missing.
One option is to hit Worship. Between the Theosophists, ...
Soulless morality
by PhilGoetz — 2009-03-14T21:48:49.463Z

Follow-up to: So you say you're an altruist

The responses to So you say you're an altruist indicate that people have split their values into two categories:

values they use to decide what they want

values that are admissible for moral reasoning

(where 2 is probably a subset of 1 for atheists, and probably nearly disjoint from 1 for Presbyterians).

You're reading Less Wrong. You're a rationalist. You've put a lot of effort into education, and learning the truth about the world. You value knowledge and rationality and truth a lot.

Someone says you should send all your money to Africa, because this will result in more human lives.

What happened to the value you placed on knowledge and rationality?

There is little chance that any of the people you save in Africa will get a good post-graduate education and then follow that up by rejecting religion, embracing rationality, and writing Less Wrong posts.

Here you are, spending a part of your precious life reading Less Wrong. If you spend 10% of your life on the Web, you are saying that that activity is worth at least 1/10th of a life, and that lives with no access to the Web are worth less than lives with access. If you value rationality, then lives lived rationally are more valuable than lives lived irrationally. If you think something has a value, you have to give it the same value in every equation. Not doing so is immoral. You can't use different value scales for everyday and moral reasoning.

Society tells you to work to make yourself more valuable. Then it tells you that when you reason morally, you must assume that all lives are equally valuable. You can't have it both ways. If all lives have equal value, we shouldn't criticize someone who decides to become a drug addict on welfare. Value is value, regardless of which equation it's in at the moment.

How do you weigh rationality, and your other qualities and activities, relative to life itself? I would say that life itself has zero value; the value of a life is the sum of the values of things done and experienced during that life. But society teaches the opposite: that mere life has a tremendous value, and anything you do with your life has negligible additional value. That's why it's controversial to execute criminals, but not controversial to lock them up in a bare room for 20 ...
Closet survey #1
by  — 2009-03-14T07:51:04.675Z

What do you believe that most people on this site don't?

I'm especially looking for things that you wouldn't even mention if someone wasn't explicitly asking for them. Stuff you're not even comfortable writing under your own name. Making a one-shot account here is very easy, go ahead and do that if you don't want to tarnish your image.

I think a big problem with a "community" dedicated to being less wrong is that it will make people more concerned about APPEARING less wrong. The biggest part of my intellectual journey so far has been the acquisition of new and startling knowledge, and that knowledge doesn't seem likely to turn up here in the conditions that currently exist.

So please, tell me the crazy things you're otherwise afraid to say. I want to know them, because they might be true.
The Least Convenient Possible World
by Scott Alexander — 2009-03-14T02:11:15.177Z

Related to: Is That Your True Rejection?

"If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents’ arguments. But if you’re interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents’ arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse."

-- Black Belt Bayesian, via Rationality Quotes 13

Yesterday John Maxwell's post wondered how much the average person would do to save ten people from a ruthless tyrant. I remember asking some of my friends a vaguely related question as part of an investigation of the Trolley Problems:

You are a doctor in a small rural hospital. You have ten patients, each of whom is dying for the lack of a separate organ; that is, one person needs a heart transplant, another needs a lung transplant, another needs a kidney transplant, and so on. A traveller walks into the hospital, mentioning how he has no family and no one knows that he's there. All of his organs seem healthy. You realize that by killing this traveller and distributing his organs among your patients, you could save ten lives. Would this be moral or not?

I don't want to discuss the answer to this problem today. I want to discuss the answer one of my friends gave, because I think it illuminates a very interesting kind of defense mechanism that rationalists need to be watching for. My friend said:

It wouldn't be moral. After all, people often reject organs from random donors. The traveller would probably be a genetic mismatch for your patients, and the transplantees would have to spend the rest of their lives on immunosuppressants, only to die within a few years when the drugs failed.

On the one hand, I have to give my friend credit: his answer is biologically accurate, and beyond a doubt the technically correct answer to the question I asked. On the other hand, I don't have to give him very much credit: he completely missed the point and lost a valuable effort to examine the nature of morality.
So I asked him, "In the least convenient possible world, the one where everyone was genetically compatible with everyone else and this objection was invalid, what would you do?"
He mumbled something about counterfactuals and refused to answer. But I learned something very important from him, and t...
On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists
by MBlume — 2009-03-13T23:48:50.617Z

Related to: Is Santa Real?, Raising the Sanity Waterline

Related on OB: Formative Youth

JulianMorrison writes:

If you want people to repeat this back, write it in a test, maybe even apply it in an academic context, a four-credit undergrad course will work.

If you want them to have it as the ground state of their mind in everyday life, you probably need to have taught them songs about it in kindergarten.

There's been some discussion here on the formation of rationalist communities.

If you look at any large, well-established religious community, you will see an extraordinary amount of attention being paid to the way children are raised. This is hardly surprising, since upbringing is how new members enter the community. Far more people become Mormons because they were raised by Mormon parents than because they had a long talk with two guys in white shirts.

This doesn't seem to be the case in the rationalist community. Looking at how we all got here, I don't see all that many who were simply raised by rationalist parents, and had a leg up. Maybe this is a sampling bias -- a straightforward, enlightened upbringing is not as dramatic as a break from fundamentalist religion, and perhaps people don't think it's a story worth telling.

But I don't think we can count out the possibility that we're just not doing the job of passing on our memes. I can even see a few reasons why this might be the case. In mixed marriages, it is usually the more devout parent, and especially the parent from the more demanding religion, who has the say in raising the children. Thus, we see spouses convert to Catholicism, to Orthodox Judaism, to Mormonism, but rarely to Congregationalism, or Unitarianism. On this totem pole, atheism seems to be pretty much at the bottom.

And perhaps this also has something to do with the shyness of the atheist parent. Even in unmixed marriages, the unspoken thought seems to be "so, our children will become atheists just because their parents were atheists, just as Baptist children become Baptist because their parents were Baptist -- are we really any better?" We resent the idea of the religionists forcing their foolish memes on their children, and want ours to choose their own paths. We think if we just get out of the way, our children will do whatever is right for them, as though by doing this we could make them th...
Epistemic Viciousness
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2009-03-13T23:33:48.785Z

Someone deserves a large hattip for this, but I'm having trouble remembering who; my records don't seem to show any email or OB comment which told me of this 12-page essay, "Epistemic Viciousness in the Martial Arts" by Gillian Russell. Maybe Anna Salamon?

We all lined up in our ties and sensible shoes (this was England) and copied him—left, right, left, right—and afterwards he told us that if we practised in the air with sufficient devotion for three years, then we would be able to use our punches to kill a bull with one blow.
I worshipped Mr Howard (though I would sooner have died than told him that) and so, as a skinny, eleven-year-old girl, I came to believe that if I practised, I would be able to kill a bull with one blow by the time I was fourteen.
This essay is about epistemic viciousness in the martial arts, and this story illustrates just that. Though the word ‘viciousness’ normally suggests deliberate cruelty and violence, I will be using it here with the more old-fashioned meaning, possessing of vices.

It all generalizes amazingly. To summarize some of the key observations for how epistemic viciousness arises:

The art, the dojo, and the sensei are seen as sacred. "Having red toe-nails in the dojo is like going to church in a mini-skirt and halter-top... The students of other martial arts are talked about like they are practicing the wrong religion."

If your teacher takes you aside and teaches you a special move and you practice it for 20 years, you have a large emotional investment in it, and you'll want to discard any incoming evidence against the move.

Incoming students don't have much choice: a martial art can't be learned from a book, so they have to trust the teacher.

Deference to famous historical masters. "Runners think that the contemporary staff of Runner's World know more about running than than all the ancient Greeks put together. And it's not just running, or other physical activities, where history is kept in its place; the same is true in any well-developed area of study. It is not considered disrespectful for a physicist to say that Isaac Newton's theories are false..." (Sound familiar?)

"We martial artists struggle with a kind of poverty—data-poverty—which makes our beliefs hard to test... Un

...