Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# Comment, Don't Message

Most of the time, when people have responses to my posts they write them as comments. Sometimes, however, they email or send messages. Since I strongly prefer comments I wanted to write some about why.

A discussion we have in comments will be open to people other than the two of us. People who read the post and are thinking along similar lines can see our back-and-forth. The comments will be attached to the post, potentially clarifying things for people who come across the post later. If the question comes up again I can link someone to our discussion of it. The comments show up in search engines for unrelated people interested in these ideas. Since communicating in public has all these positive externalities, I'm much more willing to put time and thought into a discussion if it can be public.

There are also benefits during the discussion, as other people often have valuable things to add. Many times a comment thread has been me and someone else, and a third person jumps in with an important consideration that hadn't occurred to either of us. Other times someone's comment sparks a thread which brings in perspectives from many people. It's not just that our talking in public helps others, but it helps us too.

More selfishly, comments have different expectations around responses. I read every comment, but I often don't reply. Maybe the comment is self contained, and while it's communicating something important a reply wouldn't add anything. Maybe I'm not sure how I'd like to respond yet, and then don't end up coming back to it. Maybe other people responded and it seems like the important details have come out already. Maybe I just don't have time. With one-on-one messages, however, the response burden is much higher. Just writing back "received and read" would be hostile, but writing a good response can be a lot of work. Sending a message should not generally obligate a reply, but it still feels rude not to put in the time for a thorough response.

There are valid reasons for non-public communication. Perhaps you're afraid of how people might respond to revealing details of your identity or taking an unpopular position. Perhaps you want to talk about something that is illegal but generally viewed as ok among your friends. Perhaps there are people who follow you around the internet harassing you. Perhaps you don't trust yourself to phrase sensitive issues in a way that doesn't lead to people being mad at you. This is not an exhaustive list! Private messages I've gotten about posts, however, don't seem to be sent for one of these reasons. If you're sending a message privately for a reason, it's helpful if you can say so.

While I don't normally ask for emails in response to posts, this particular one seems like it should be an exception, so you're welcome to write me at jeff@jefftk.com. I'm not committing to reply, though!

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100122296099472)*
# Drawing on Walls

When I [started](https://www.jefftk.com/p/bathroom-plans) the [bathroom](https://www.jefftk.com/p/bathroom-construction-update) [project](https://www.jefftk.com/p/bathroom-is-usable) there was a lot of reason to move quickly: the bathroom wouldn't be usable while I was working on it, and the back bedroom was full of construction stuff. Once I got to the stage where the only thing left to do was plaster and paint the hallway, however, it was less of a priority. So we spent May-November with unfinished walls.

Since we were going to paint them at some point, one afternoon I thought it would be fun to draw on them with the kids. We got out the markers and drew lots of different things. I emphasized that it was only these walls we could draw on, which is the kind of rule the kids do well with.

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/writing-on-walls.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/writing-on-walls-big.jpg)

A couple days later they drew on the walls again, but this time with crayon. Crayon, being wax-based, is not a good layer to have under paint. I hadn't thought to tell them not to use them, and they didn't have a way to know, but I was annoyed at myself. I got most of it off with hot water and a cloth, and then when it came to do the plastering I put a skim coat over it.

Later on a friend wanted help preparing for a coding interview, so we used the wall as a whiteboard:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/whiteboard-whitewall-interview.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/whiteboard-whitewall-interview-big.jpg)

One thing I hadn't considered was that you need more primer over dark marker than plain drywall. As with "no crayon under paint" this seems like it should have been obvious, and something I should have thought about before letting them draw on a large area of the wall, but it wasn't and I didn't, so Julia ended up spending longer painting and priming than we'd been thinking.

And then, the evening after all that painting, Anna took a marker over to the nice new clean white wall and started drawing. We hadn't told her that the wall was no longer ok for drawing, and at 3y "now that the wall is painted drawing isn't ok" is not the sort of thing I should be expecting her to know on her own. Luckily the marker was washable, so it wasn't too bad.

Overall this was more work than I was expecting, and probably wasn't worth it for the fun, at least not the way we did it. If I did it again I'd make sure they didn't use crayon, and either give them light colored markers or pick a smaller section of the wall for them to play with.
# Junto: Questions for Meetups and Rando Convos

I ponder a lot about community and how important local community is for the functioning of society; many are the riches brought from afar by long distance communication. Nonetheless, local rationality meetups can increase local metis by generating intelligent community. I read in Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin how he (Franklin) employed his Junto to advance scientific knowledge, civil society, and business; there are some great examples there. But the Wikipedia page will do well enough for an overview.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junto_(club)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junto_(club))

What I have done here is taken the Junto discussion questions of Franklin's club and reformulated them to serve as a model for the types of questions we can be asking each other to keep advancing community and local knowledge.

1.  Have you read anything useful or insightful recently? Particularly in technology, history, literature, science, or other fields of knowledge?
2.  What problems have you been thinking about recently?
3.  Has there been any worthwhile or important local news?
4.  Have any businesses failed lately, and do you know anything about the cause?
5.  Have any businesses recently risen in success, how so?
6.  Do you know of anyone, who has recently done something interesting, praiseworthy or worthy of imitation? Or who has made a mistake we should be warned against and avoid?
7.  Have you been doing anything recently to increase your psychological and physical health?
8.  Is there any person whose acquaintance you want, and which someone in the group can procure for you?
9.  Do you think of anything at present by which the group could easily do something useful?
10.  Do you know of any deserving younger person, for whom it lies in the power of the group to encourage and help advance in his career?
11.  Do you see anything amiss in the present customs or proceedings of the group, which might be amended?
# Hybrid Lottery Update

[Beantown Stomp](https://beantownstomp.com) has been open for registration for a bit over a week, and we have 122 people registered. In our announcement we said we would run a lottery for the remaining tickets if we had 150 registrations in the first week, and we didn't, so we're going to stay first-come first-served.

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/beantown-stomp-registrations-2020-11-20.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/beantown-stomp-registrations-2020-11-20-big.png)

When I initially proposed a [hybrid model](https://www.jefftk.com/p/hybrid-lottery-admission) I had been thinking of running the initial stage for a month, and after people convinced me that a month was too long we decided to go for a week. The goal with a hybrid lottery is that you only run a lottery if you need one. Some events are so popular that they sell out before everyone who would like a ticket has had a chance to fill out the registration form, while others don't sell out at all.

Looking at the shape of the registration curve, selling two thirds of the tickets in the first 24hr would be a better way to identify whether a lottery is needed. Most of the first-week registrations were in the first 24hr, after which it tapered way off.

Now that I no longer think it's important to leave registration open for a week or a month, though, we really could just do something simpler. Open registration, and treat all entries you get in the first 24hr equally. If after 24hr you're full, run a lottery, otherwise start first-come-first-served. Since it already takes us [about a day](https://www.jefftk.com/p/beantown-stomp-handling-registrations) to get back to people anyway, there's not much downside in this approach.

I'd probably actually want to do this by announcing "registration will open on day X, though you can fill out the form now, we just won't get back to you until day X+1".

Am I missing anything, or should we do this for future iterations?
# Historical forecasting: Are there ways I can get lots of data, but only up to a certain date?

Suppose I wanted to get good intuitions about how the world works on historical timescales.

I could study history, but just reading history is rife with historical [hindsight bias](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fkM9XsNvXdYH6PPAx/hindsight-bias), both on my own part, and even worse, on the part of the authors I'm reading.

So if I wanted to master history, a better way would be to do it forecasting-style. I read what was happening in the some part of the world, up to a particular point in time, and then make bets about what will happen next. This way, I have feedback as I'm learning, and I'm training an actual historical predictor.

However, this requires a **strong** limit be enforced on the materials I'm reading: no information about "what's going to happen" can leak backwards. And unfortunately, this is kind of standard in history books. Usually, the author talk about how events are leading towards other events that they know will occur.

Is there some databases (or something), where I might be able to read a wide number of primary sources and economic / socioeconomic indicators (like the amount of pottery fragments, average skeleton size, how far specialized goods traveled, how much money was in circulation, the literacy rate, etc.), but which will only show me data **up to** a certain date, with a strong constraint of not accidentally seeing spoilers?
# Do you get value out of contentless comments?

[Some people](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review#KzdGpuQmKf2TSHW9u) like to receive comments of the form "Good post!", even when these comments contain no other engagement with the post. If you post on LW, I'd like to know (a) whether you like receiving these comments, and (b) whether you like receiving these comments more than you would like receiving a strong upvote by their authors.
# Ultra-simplified research agenda

This is an ultra-condensed version of the [research agenda](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CSEdLLEkap2pubjof/research-agenda-v0-9-synthesising-a-human-s-preferences-into) on synthesising human preferences (video version [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M9CvESSeVc)):

In order to infer what a human wants from what they do, an AI needs to have a human [theory of mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind).

Theory of mind is something that humans have instinctively and subconsciously, but that isn't easy to spell out explicitly; therefore, by [Moravec's paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox), it will be very hard to implant it into an AI, and this needs to be done deliberately.

One way of defining theory of mind is to look at how humans internally model the value of various hypothetical actions and events (happening to themselves and to others).

Finally, once we have a full theory of mind, we still need to deal, somehow, with the fact that humans have meta-preferences over their preferences, and that these preferences and meta-preferences are often contradictory, changeable, manipulable, and (more worryingly) underdefined in the exotic worlds that AIs could produce.

Any way of dealing with that fact will be contentious, but it's necessary to sketch out an explicit way of doing this, so it can be critiqued and improved.

A toy model for this research agenda can be [found here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hcrFxeYYfbFrkKQEJ/full-toy-model-for-preference-learning).
# Solar One Year In

Last fall we had solar panels installed. Our roof is pretty marginal for solar, large parts blocked by trees and the remainder mostly facing West, but incentives were high enough that it looked decent. And even if it only broke even I still liked it for the [resiliency advantages](https://www.jefftk.com/p/home-solar-resiliency). It's currently doing slightly better than expected, so I'm happy!

We have fourteen LG Neon-R 360 watt panels, three facing South and eleven facing West:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/somerville-house-solar-plan.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/somerville-house-solar-plan-big.png)

The installers predicted we would see 3.45MWh in the first year, slowly ramping down to 3.25MWh/y over the next twenty five years as the panels degrade. After a year of operation, we've seen 3.95MWh. This includes three short periods in March, April, and August where the system turned itself off and needed to be reset by the installer. This is covered by our extended warranty, but does make me nervous about its long-term robustness.

One of the bigger risks I saw going into this was that the installers had a lot of incentive to overestimate our production, so I'm glad that while it was only in operation about 96% of the year it still made ~14% more power than expected.

Four MWh is not a huge amount of electricity, however. At wholesale rates of ~$40/MWh ([pdf](https://www.iso-ne.com/static-assets/documents/2019/03/20190312_pr_2018-price-release.pdf)) this would be just $160. MA has net metering, however, which means we can subtract the power generated from our bill. Our (retail) rate is $214/MWh, so this is $844 for the year. The whole system cost $26k, so this doesn't break even within the system's lifetime, and that'a ignoring opportunity cost.

There are additional incentives, however: a 30% federal tax credit, a $1k MA tax credit, and SREC II generation incentives. The tax credits bring the effective cost down to $17k, and the generation incentives give us ~$500/y-$700/y for the first ten years. This gives 11-13 years until payback, and if we figure a 25 year lifetime (the length of the warranty) and electricity going up 3%/y it's equivalent to an investment returning a nominal ~9%.

So while I don't think rooftop solar makes much sense for society (unless we required systems to function during power outages, which we don't) and our roof is marginal for solar, it does look like our system is working out from a self-interested perspective.

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100123137198902)*
# Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later - Buterin

Many rationalists are interested in blockchain. This article describes important mathematical problems related to blockchain, and potential solutions to cooperation problems and philanthropy via mechanism design (quadratic voting, quadratic funding).
# Explaining why false ideas spread is more fun than why true ones do

As typical for a discussion of memes (of the Richard Dawkins variety), I'm about to talk about something completely unoriginal to me, but that I've modified to some degree after thinking about it.

The thesis is this: there's a tendency for people to have more interest in explaining the spread of ideas they think are false, when compared to ideas they think are true.

For instance, there's [a lot written](https://phys.org/news/2018-07-religious-ideologies.html) about how and why religion spread through the world. On the other hand, there's comparatively little written about how and why general relativity spread through the world. But this is strange -- they are both just ideas that are spread via regular communication channels.

One could say that the difference is that general relativity permits experimental verification, and therefore it's no surprise that it spread through the world. The standard story here is that since the idea is simply true, the explanation for why it became widespread is _boring_ \-\- people merely became convinced due to its actual veracity.

I reject this line of thought for two reasons. First, the vast majority of people don't experimentally verify general relativity, or examine its philosophical basis. Therefore, the mechanism by which the theory spreads is probably fairly similar to religion. Secondly, I don't see why the idea being true makes the memetic history of the idea any less interesting.

I'm not really sure about the best explanation for this effect -- that people treat true memes as less interesting than false ones -- but I'd like to take a guess. It's possible that the human brain seeks simple _single_ stories to explain phenomena, even if the real explanation for those phenomena are due to a large number of factors. Furthermore, humans are [bored by reality](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/6BFkmEgre7uwhDxDR): if something has a seemingly clear explanation, even if the speaker doesn't _actually_ know the true explanation, it's nonetheless not very fun to speculate about.

This theory would predict that we would be less interested in explaining why true memes spread, because we already have a readily available story for that: namely, that the idea is true and therefore compels its listeners to believe in it. On the other hand, a false meme no longer permits this standard story, which forces us to search for an alternative, perhaps exciting, explanation.

One possible takeaway is that we are just extremely wrong about why some ideas spread through the world. It's hard enough to know why a single person believes what they do. The idea that a single story could adequately explain why _everyone_ believes something is even more ludicrous.
# Breaking Oracles: superrationality and acausal trade

I've always known this was the case in the back of my mind[^cous], but it's worth making explicit: [superrationality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality) (ie a functional UDT) and/or acausal trade will break [counterfactual and low-bandwidth oracle](https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.05541) designs.

[^cous]: And cousin_it [reminded me of it recently](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6WbLRLdmTL4JxxvCq/analysing-dangerous-messages-from-future-ufai-via-oracles#kyRTinjYtAxYGh2qh).

It's actually quite easy to sketch how they would do this: a bunch of low-bandwidth Oracles would cooperate to combine to create a high-bandwidth UFAI, which would then take over and reward the Oracles by giving them maximal reward.

For counterfactual Oracles, two Oracles suffice: each one will, in their message, put the design of an UFAI that would grant the other Oracle maximal reward; this message is their trade with each other. They could put this message in the least significant part of their output, so the cost could be low.

I have suggested [a method to overcome acausal trade](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rxp7wPeyq8cKaaC4a/acausal-trade-barriers), but that method doesn't work here; because this is not true acausal trade. The future UFAI will be able to see what the Oracles did, most likely, and this breaks my anti-acausal trade methods.

This doesn't mean that superrational Oracles will automatically try and produce UFAIs; this will depend on the details of their decision theories, their incentives, and details of the setup (including our own security precautions).
# Antimemes

Antimemes are self-keeping secrets. You can only perceive an antimeme if you already know it's there. Antimemes don't need a conspiracy to stay hidden because you can't comprehend an antimeme just by being told it exists. You can [shout them to the heavens](http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html) and nobody will listen. I'll try to explain with a fictitious example.

Suppose we all had an [invisible organ behind our ears](http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-2828) and our brains kept it secret from our consciousness. If I told you "you have an invisible organ behind your ear" you wouldn't believe me. You'd only believe it exists if you deduced its existence from a trail of evidence.

You can deduce the existence of an antimeme from the [outline](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZvLPnJrgHxhkEyXKu/confabulation) of the hole it cuts in reality. If you find an old photo with a gap where a person has been painted out then you can be confident that someone has been disappeared. You can then figure out who it is with conventional investigative methods. The challenge is noticing the gap in the first place and then not dismissing it as noise.

Different cultures have different antimemes. The more different two cultures are from each other the less their antimemes overlap. You can sweep up a mountain of antimemes just by reading a Chinese or Arabic history of civilization and comparing it to Western world history. You can snag a different set by learning what it was like to live in a hunter-gatherer or pastoralist society.

You can do the same thing with technology. Developing a proficiency in Lisp will shatter your tolerance of inferior programming languages. Once you've internalized `defmacro` you can never go back.

As for jobs: once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur[^1].

Comprehending an antimeme takes work. You slog toward it for a long time and then eventually something clicks like a ratchet. Until then everything you've learned is reversible. After it clicks you've permanently unlocked a new level of experience, like stream entry.

Stream entry is another antimeme, by the way.

Antimemes are easily dismissed as pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is a meme, not an antimeme. You can distinguish antimemes from pseudoscience at a glance by examining why they're suppressed. Pseudoscience is dismissed as fraudulent. Antimemes are dismissed as inapposite.

[^1]: There are two different kinds of entrepreneurship. The more common form of entrepreneurship is self-employment where you sell your labor. I'm not talking about this common entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship where you exploit an overlooked market opportunity is an antimeme.
# Curtis Yarvin on A Theory of Pervasive Error

(_Content warning_: [politics](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer). Read with caution, as always.)

Curtis Yarvin, a computer programmer perhaps most famous as the principal author of the [Urbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit) decentralized server platform, expounds on a theory of how false beliefs can persist in Society, in a work of what the English philosopher N. Land [characterizes as "political epistemology"](https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/1199195209134772224). Yarvin argues that the Darwinian "marketplace of ideas" in liberal democracies selects for æsthetic appeal as well as truth: in particular, the æsthetics of ambition and loyalty grant a selective advantage in memetic competition to ideas that align with state power, resulting in a potentially severe distortionary effect on Society's collective epistemology despite the lack of a centralized censor. Watch for the shout-out to Effective Altruism! (November 2019, ~8000 words)
# Is daily caffeine consumption beneficial to productivity?

Caffeine raises human alertness by binding to adenosine receptors in the human brain. It prevents those receptors from binding adenosine and suppressing activity in the central nervous system.

Regular caffeine productions seems to result in the body building more adenosine receptors, but it's unclear to me whether or not the body produces enough adenosine receptors to fully cancel out the effect. Did anybody look deeper into the issue and knows the answer?
# Intelligence Rising

This time around in LessWrong Tel Aviv, we are going to play "Intelligence Rising"!

Intelligence Rising is a Strategic Role-Playing game meant to effectively simulate and illustrate the possible paths by which artificial intelligence capabilities and risks might take in the world. It is designed by a group of researchers from Cambridge and Oxford to allow decision-makers to stress-test their assumptions, and develop a stronger sense of the possible impacts and meaning of the gradual development of AI.

The game will be run by Shahar Avin from the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk in the University of Cambridge. Shahar does research on prevention strategies for global catastrophic risk, and is one of the creators of the game.

The event will take place in Electra Tower, 12th floor (Google Israel). We will start gathering and 18:30 and start playing at 19:00. The expected duration of the game is around 3-4 hours. If you're coming, please either click "going" in Facebook or comment here so that we can assess the number of players in advance. See you there!
# Getting Ready for the FB Donation Match

Facebook is again going to be [matching donations on Giving Tuesday](https://www.facebook.com/help/332488213787105):

*   $7M total
*   $20k max per donor
*   $100k max per organization
*   First-come first-served
*   Processing fees covered by FB
*   8AM Eastern, Tuesday 12/3

I [participated last year](https://www.jefftk.com/p/facebook-donation-match), and while the match ran out in seconds I was able to direct the full [counterfactual](https://www.jefftk.com/p/what-should-counterfactual-donation-mean) $20k by being (a) prepared and (b) lucky not to get any declines. As with last year, I'm planning to donate more than $20k across several cards, so even if I get declines this year I'll still have a good chance of getting my donation matched.

There are good instructions on the [EA Giving Tuesday](https://www.eagivingtuesday.org/) site. One way things are different this year is that by confirming your identity ahead of time you can get FB to raise your per-donation limit. This means instead of twelve $2,499 transactions I'm planning to do three $9,999 ones.

I did one test $2,501 donation a few days ago to verify that confirming my identity worked, and three $9,999 donations yesterday to check if I got declines and practice. My guess is that this year the donation amount runs out in 1-2s, which means there's probably only time for one $9,999 donation before the $7M is gone. Very curious how it goes though!

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100124060698202)*
# What are the requirements for being "citable?"

A sort of... "stretch goal", for the 2018 Review, is developing a system wherein LessWrong has proven itself credible enough for some posts to actually be citable by other institutions.

I'm not sure how much of this has to do with "just actually do a good job ensuring accuracy/relevance", and how much has to do with "jumping through arbitrary hoops", and how hard those hoops are to jump through.

Two obvious things to shoot for might be:

*   Being considered a valid source by wikipedia
*   Being considered a valid source by google scholar.

I'm curious if anyone is familiar with how either of those work, in detail, and whether this is an achievable goal.
# Experimental Design Club

Measuring things is super valuable [citation needed] and fun [citation needed]! But it's also difficult (see: replication crisis). Let's get together and design some experiments we can run!

No need to have attended the first iteration of Experimental Design Club! This will likely be an even better entry point, since you'll be able to learn from the mistakes of the last batch of experiments!

Rough schedule:
- Discuss experiments and results from last time; share any learnings (20min)
- Come up with some ideas for experiments and sketch them out (20min)
- Idea sharing time: you have 1min to describe what you're planning. Perhaps you'll attract collaborators? (15min)
- Toil! Collaborate! Design! (30min)
- Implement! (20min) For example:
    * Make your Google Form!
    * Mess with your phone!
    * Set up Beeminder!
    * Download TagTime!
    * Order a FitBit!
    * Email the mayor!
- Describe your final outcome! (15min)

---

Location is the [Montlake Public Library](https://goo.gl/maps/tEWVEZagx4ZbwXPp7).
# Why aren't assurance contracts widely used?

A priori, [dominant assurance contracts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract) seem like awesome tools for solving a fairly broad range of collective action problems. Why aren't they used much? Or is it just that they are a new idea and we should expect them to grow in prominence in the next few decades?
# Bay Area Winter Solstice 2019

**tl;dr buy a ticket at https://bay-area-winter-solstice-2019.secretparty.io/**

Gather with us in a planetarium in the Oakland hills. Huddle and sing against the encroaching cold and dark. Share warmth and light. Together we will celebrate humanity and the things that matter to us, through speeches and songs.

The Bay Area Winter Solstice is an annual gathering organized by the Bay Area rationality and EA community. Come celebrate the longest night of the year with us. We will grieve the hard times, our losses and our struggles, and we will celebrate all that we have accomplished and all that we have to hope for.

Face the cold of winter head-on, together ✨

Logistics:
We will again be hosting this year’s Secular Solstice at the planetarium at the Chabot Space & Science Center.

Snacks will be provided by organizers; attendees are welcome to bring additional food to share.

Doors open at 6:30pm. The performance starts promptly at 7:00pm, and ends by 9:00pm. We have the venue available for socializing until 11:00pm.

Purchasing tickets:
https://bay-area-winter-solstice-2019.secretparty.io/

Last year, Eventbrite’s waitlist system posed something of a technical obstacle to last-minute ticket transfers; this year, we've solved that problem by switching to Secretparty. It’s not that the party is a secret – it’s that this platform's features should enable ticket transfers to be fully democratized. If you can't make the event, coordinate a ticket transfer to someone else privately or via posting on the Facebook page.

Organize carpools:
https://tinyurl.com/solstice2019carpooling

Donations:
This is a money pool for anyone who wants to donate money to fund Solstice in order to enable us to continue offering tickets on a pay-what-you-want basis: https://tinyurl.com/solstice2019donations

Consider also attending the Pre-Solstice Unconference: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/koaQqZLaTP3NoCFNA/pre-solstice-unconference-2019
# Pre-Solstice Unconference 2019

This unconference is a gathering of the rationalist and effective altruist communities, held the day before Bay Area Secular Solstice.

Think something like the New York megameetup: if a bunch of us are all going to be around during Solstice weekend, why not also take the excuse to hang out with each other?

We've rented Omni Commons in Oakland for a day of socializing and information-sharing.

The unconference has a light theme, to create some inspiration (but don't let it constrain you). This year's theme will be \*\*group coordination\*\*:

What ambitious project would you embark upon if you knew for sure that you had the support? What kinds of support can we give each other to help with those projects? What do we ourselves need in order to provide that support to each other?

Buffet style lunch and snacks will be provided. Invite friends!

Register via Eventbrite: [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/winter-solstice-unconference-tickets-71860628073](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/winter-solstice-unconference-tickets-71860628073)

Sign up to run a session: [https://tinyurl.com/solsticeunconference](https://tinyurl.com/solsticeunconference)

Note: The main Solstice event itself is here – [https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Fpaa7hNb8RhdLS9Jj/bay-area-winter-solstice-2019](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Fpaa7hNb8RhdLS9Jj/bay-area-winter-solstice-2019)

Hope to see you there!
# {Math} A times tables memory.

I have a distinct memory of being 8 years old, or so, and being handed one of those worksheets where they ask you to multiply numbers up through 12x12, and being viscerally disgusted by the implied pedagogy of it. That was _over a hundred things_ you were asking me to memorize. On _my own time._ The _whole reason_ I rush through my school work is so I don't have to do anything when I get home. I don't know if eight year old me swore, but this was definitely a "Screw you" moment for him.

But he actually ended up being able to do that sheet pretty quickly, at least compared to most of the rest of the class. There were a few kids who were faster than me, but I got the impression they were dumb enough to have to practice this instead of watching Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy at home. Or worse, they actually _did_ memorize this stuff, instead of practice to get quick with the multiply-numbers-in-your-head algorithm like I did. (Because _of course_ nobody else in the class would be doing it the same way I did, just _much faster._ But eight-year-olds aren't known to have particularly nuanced concepts of self that can gracefully accept that there are other people naturally much better than them at what they do best.)

Later on, we moved up to multiplying arbitrary two-digit-by-one-digit numbers, and then two-digit-_by-two-digit_ numbers. (I didn't piece together how uncommon this was until a few years later.) Everyone who outpaced me in the times-tables speed tests were now far, far below me; meanwhile, I just had to chain my little "multiply-small-numbers" mental motion to a few "add-up-the-sums" motions. 76 * 89 = 7\*8\*100 + 6\*8\*10 + 7\*9\*10 + 6*9. I felt like I was _so_ clever. I started to take pride in the fact that I was now leading the pack, even though I had told myself before that I didn't care!

That is, of course, until the kids who were originally faster than me _also_ realized how to perform that mental motion, and then they leapt past me in speed with the combined force of split-second memory of times tables _and_ a quick ability to perform algorithms.

I think by the time we were finished with the lightning round worksheet practice, I was in the bottom quarter of the class for speed, and when I did push myself to speed up, I'd start making careless mistakes like mixing up which one of 6\*7 and 7\*7 was 42 and which was 49, again?

Later in my mathematical pedagogy, I am taking a Real Analysis course. There are two midterms in this course. The first one I did not prepare for at all, falling into my old 8-year-old failure mode: "If I can't just compute the answer on the spot to the question, I sort of deserve to fail, don't I?" I got a B-, in the lower half of the class.

The second one, I reminded myself of the times tables kids. I got an A.
# Two Bay Area Winter Solstice Events

Happy December, everyone! This year, the Bay Area Winter Solstice organizers have two events on offer for you to enjoy. Hope to see you there!

Pre-Solstice Unconference, 2019
===============================

_Saturday, December 14, 2019_

Want to spend some time socializing with the people you'll see at Solstice? This year, we're doing an Unconference the day before! It's like an afterparty but without the "after".

\[[LessWrong event with more details](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/koaQqZLaTP3NoCFNA/pre-solstice-unconference-2019)\]

Get tickets on [Eventbrite](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pre-solstice-unconference-tickets-71860628073).

Bay Area Winter Solstice, 2019
==============================

_Sunday, December 15, 2019_

> Gather with us in a planetarium in the Oakland hills. Huddle and sing against the encroaching cold and dark. Share warmth and light. Together we will celebrate humanity and the things that matter to us, through speeches and songs.

\[[LessWrong event with more details](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Fpaa7hNb8RhdLS9Jj/bay-area-winter-solstice-2019)\]

Purchase a ticket for this year's Solstice using the [secretparty](https://bay-area-winter-solstice-2019.secretparty.io/) link.
# The history of smallpox and the origins of vaccines

> Smallpox was one of the worst diseases in human history. It killed an estimated 300 million people or more in the 20th century alone; only tuberculosis and malaria have been more deadly. Its victims were often children, even infants.
>
> It is also, among diseases, humanity’s greatest triumph: the only human disease we have completely eradicated, with zero naturally occurring cases reported worldwide, even in the most remote locations and the poorest countries, for over forty years.
>
> Along the way, it led to fierce religious and political debates, some of the earliest clinical trials and quantitative epidemiology, and the first vaccines.
>
> This is the story of smallpox, and how we killed it.
# Open & Welcome Thread - December 2019

*   If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.
    *   You can also make a [shortform post](http://www.lesslong.com/).
*   And, if you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself.
    *   Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are welcome.

If you want to explore the community more, I recommend [reading the Library,](https://www.lesswrong.com/library) [checking recent Curated posts](https://www.lesswrong.com/?view=curated), [seeing if there are any meetups in your area](https://www.lesswrong.com/community), and checking out the [Getting Started](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2rWKkWuPrgTMpLRbp/lesswrong-faq-1#Getting_Started) section of the [LessWrong FAQ](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2rWKkWuPrgTMpLRbp/lesswrong-faq-1).

The Open Thread sequence is [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/yai5mppkuCHPQmzpN).
# Symbiotic Conflicts

A meme is a self-replicating pattern of information. Some change. Some survive. Some die out.

The most virulent memes often reproduce themselves via their own inverses. Talking about how Flat Earthers are wrong increases awareness of the Flat Earther meme. Increasing awareness of the Flat Earther meme equals proliferating the Flat Earther meme. Anti Flat Earthers[^1] spawn Flat Earthers. Flat Earthers spawn Anti Flat Earthers. Every Anti Flat Earther contains a dormant Flat Earther meme.

> A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.
>
> — Daniel Dennett

In this way Flat Earthers and Anti Flat Earthers are different stages of a single meme's lifecycle. If the Anti Flat Earthers' objective is to spread the Anti Flat Earth meme then this information reverb benefits the Anti Flat Earthers.

Capitalism and Communism are two halves of the most successful meme in history, the Cold War. Capitalism was defined by its opposition to Communism. Communism is defined by its opposition to Capitalism. It doesn't matter that Communist states spread a twisted version of Capitalism and Capitalist states spread a twisted version of Communism. During the Cold War, the title of your economic ideology mattered more than than your real-world economy.

 Fighting a meme makes it stronger. The best way to kill a meme is to ignore it.

This presents a collective action problem. If you tell everyone to ignore the X meme then you've told everyone about X thereby spreading the X meme. Attacking a meme wins you Pyrrhic victories. To kill a meme you have to make the meme irrelevant by [transcending](http://paulgraham.com/mean.html) it.

The Cold War meme died when the divide between Capitalism and Communism ceased to be meaningful. The Chinese Communist Party manages the world's largest capitalist economy. By 1901 Bolshevik standards, NATO is an alliance of socialist nations.

[^1]: "Anti Flat Earther" is a different meme from "physics". Anti Flat Earthers refute Flat Earthers' arguments. The physics meme ignores quibble.
# In which ways have you self-improved that made you feel bad for not having done it earlier?

It can be a decision, a skill, a habit, etc.

Can be because the improvement was very valuable, obvious in insight, a moral imperative, or any other reason.

Note that I'm specifically looking for things *that made you feel bad for not having done it earlier*, not a simple "ah, I guess it would have been useful to know that earlier".
# "Fully" acausal trade

[Acausal trade](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Acausal_trade) happens when two agents manage to reach a deal with each other, despite not being able to interact causally (and, in some cases, not being sure the other one exists). Consider, for example, the prisoner's dilemma played against another copy of yourself, either in the next room or the next universe.

But those two situations are subtly different. If my copy is in the next room, then we will interact after we've reached our decision; if they're in the next universe, then we won't.

It might seem like a small difference, but my [simple way of breaking acausal trade](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rxp7wPeyq8cKaaC4a/acausal-trade-barriers) succeeds in the "next universe" situation, but [fails in the "next room" situation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/42z4k8Co5BuHMBvER/breaking-oracles-superrationality-and-acausal-trade).

So it would be good to distinguish the two cases. Since the terminology is well established, I'll call the "next universe" situation - where there are no interactions between the futures of the agents - to be "fully" acausal trade.
# Elementary Statistics

Our elementary school has a directory listing kids and parents, and since we live in the future it's a spreadsheet, which means I can count things. A typical family at this K-5 school has one child enrolled (76%). The child has two parents (96%) with different last names (59%), but they share a last name with at least one parent (89%). The parents don't share email addresses (95%) or phone numbers (97%), do use gmail (72%), and do have Boston [area codes](https://xkcd.com/1129/) (68%). Our family in the majority for each of these, even though there's naively only a 18% chance of that happening and they seem reasonably independent.

It's surprising to me that while parents mostly don't have the same names as each other (59%), only 11% of their kids have hyphenated names. I guess people realized that hyphenated names grow exponentially? I'd like to look at how the children's last names relate to parental gender, but that would involve annotating inferred genders for ~500 parents.

Boring details:

*   There are 233 kids across six grades (K-5) with two classes per grade, for an average of 19 kids per class. Kindergarten is the biggest (45 kids, 22 and 23 each) while second grade is the smallest (30 kids, 15 and 15 each).
    
*   224/233 (96%) have two parents listed.
    
*   Of the kids with two parents listed, 91/224 (41%) have the same last name as each other.
    
*   207/233 (89%) of kids have the same name as at least one of their parents.
    
*   Of the 26 kids who have a different name, 15 (58%) are hyphenations, 7 (27%) have no obvious connection, 3 (12%) list only one parent and may share a last name with the other, and 1 (4%) is an unhyphenation (Sam Alpha-Bravo and Pat Charlie, with child Alex Bravo).
    
*   141 (76%) of families have one child in the school, 43 (23%) have two, and 2 (1%) have three.
    
*   All parents are listed with email addresses, but 12/224 (5%) have the same email listed for both parents.
    
*   255/355 (72%) unique email address gmail accounts, 35 (10%) are yahoo, 13 (4%) are hotmail, 7% (2%) are aol, and 11 (3%) are edu.
    
*   All but one parent is listed with a phone number, but 6/224 (3%) have the same phone listed for both parents.
    
*   Of 357 unique phone numbers, 242 (68%) are Boston (including Somerville), 29 (8%) are NYC, 28 (8%) are Boston's inner suburbs, and 8 (2%) are the Bay Area. Boston's Northern suburbs (978 and 351) and Southern suburbs (508 and 774) are each below 1%, behind Chicago and Philly.
    

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100125355423562)*
# LW For External Comments?

There are several blogs which (a) cross-post to LessWrong and (b) have a relatively quiet comment section on their "canonical" sites: Meteuphoric ( [canonical](https://meteuphoric.com/2019/11/10/pieces-of-time/), [LW](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BuqaN3T6gwcj7bhrb/pieces-of-time)), Don't Worry About The Vase ( [canonical](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/09/26/free-money-at-predictit/), [LW](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qzRzQgxiZa3tPJJg8/free-money-at-predictit)), Sideways View ( [canonical](https://sideways-view.com/2019/10/27/prediction-markets-for-internet-points/), [LW](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3tZGxnYppMFwoWTTD/prediction-markets-for-internet-points)), etc.

In general, I'm much happier to comment on LW, FB, or somewhere else where I already have an account and trust to have a decent notification system. I'll occasionally comment on someone's independent blog, if there's no other option. When I do, however, I usually don't end up seeing replies or other comments, and managing my subscriptions is a pain. This is why I've never built independent comments for my own blog, and have always asked people to comment on other sites.

I'm wondering whether it might make sense for LW to run shared commenting infrastructure for independent blogs that are cross posted to LW. This could look like:

*   Comments on LW show up on the external blog.
*   People can comment on the LW post via the external blog.

This has some similarities to Disqus, but instead of "outsource your comments" it's "join your comment section with the LW comment section".

I already have the first half of this on my blog and am basically content, but it's enough of a pain to set up technically that I don't think others would be interested in its current state. \[1\] I think the main questions are:

*   How would this affect LW culture? The culture of the independent blogs? Would it build more cohesive discussions with a wider range of perspectives, or would it take LW culture in a different direction than the admins are trying to foster?
    
*   Would independent bloggers like it? Do they prefer independent comment sections, and full control over their comments? This is always how I've wanted comments to work, but it's possible I'm just weird this way.
    
*   Would the admins be interested in building/maintaining this sort of feature? I'd be happy to help, as a volunteer, but if this was going to be a real feature and not something I hack together just for myself it needs to be robust, and it shouldn't depend on my continued interest.
    

  
\[1\] If I'm wrong, and you do want to use it, I could potentially pull out the LW-specific code into something stand-alone. Right now it's [all glommed together](https://github.com/jeffkaufman/webscripts/blob/master/comment_requester_wsgi.py) with my code for pulling from FB and Reddit.

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100125439495082)*
# Books on the zeitgeist of science during Lord Kelvin's time.

> There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

_(edit: looks like this question was based on a false impression of history, so nvm)_

That Lord Kelvin [apocryphal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wczp6eqwYRWX5mkxw/books-on-the-zeitgeist-of-science-during-lord-kelvin-s-time?commentId=cmNijcbsiKCYSKfvk) quote has always stuck out to me. I remember hearing from some other source that this was a general attitude at the time.

Does anyone have good book recommendations to get a feel for what the intellectual / scientific zeitgeist of this moment in history in Europe was like?