trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Rational Discussion of Controversial Topics
by cleonid — 2015-07-01T11:15:48.689Z

Two months ago we began testing an experimental website for Rational Discussion of Politics. Our main goal was to create a platform that would allow high quality discussion of controversial topics without resorting to any forms of censorship. The website is now ready and new members are welcome to join the discussions.

Many thanks to all the LessWrong members who have been taking part in this project.

P.S. A note to new users. A key feature of the new website is the automated recommendation system which evaluates all comments and articles based on their potential interest for each user. The recommendation system has passed the initial calibration, but its ongoing performance is sensitive to the number of user ratings per comment/article. So rating posts that you read is highly encouraged.
Monthly Bragging Thread July 2015 
by elharo — 2015-07-01T11:07:07.666Z

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.

Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.

So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?
Rationality Quotes Thread July 2015 
by elharo — 2015-07-01T11:04:44.958Z

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

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

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: American History
by RobinZ — 2015-07-01T01:26:08.155Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: American History

WHEN:
04 July 2015 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

We'll be congregating at the courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery from 3:00 - 3:30 until closing.

The topic is American History, but that doesn't mean it needs to be American Revolution. For example, Eileen will be bringing a copy of Plunkitt of Tammany Hall to read from; but as usual, feel free to start side conversations about whatever is of interest to you.

Upcoming meetups:

Jul 12: Fermi Estimates

Jul 19: Fun & Games

Jul 26: Meta Meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: American History
Solving sleep: just a toe-dipping
by Capla — 2015-06-30T19:38:40.663Z

[For the past few months I’ve been undertaking a mostly independent study of sleep, and looking to build a coherent model of what sleep does and find ways to optimize it. I’d like to write a series of posts outlining my findings and hypotheses. I’m not sure if this is the best venue for such a project, and I’d like to gauge community interest. This first post is a brief overview of one important aspect of sleep, with a few related points of recommendation, to provide some background knowledge.]

In the quest to become more effective and productive, sleep is an enormously important process to optimize. Most of us spend (or at least think we should spend) 7.5 to 8.5 hours in bed every night, a third of a 24 hour day. Not sleeping well and not sleeping sufficiently have known and large drawbacks, including decreased attention, greater irritability, depressed immune function, and generally weakened cognitive ability. If you’re looking for more time, either for subjective life-extension, or so that you can get more done in a day, taking steps to sleep most efficiently, so as to not spend more than the required amount of time in bed and to get the full benefit of the rest, is of high value.

Understanding the inner mechanisms of this process, can let us work around them. Sleep, baffling as it is (and it is extremely baffling), is not a black box. Knowing how it works, you can organize your behavior to accommodate the world as it is, just as taking advantage of the principles of aerodynamics, thrust, and lift, enables one to build an airplane.

The most important thing to know about sleep and wakefulness is that it is the result of a dual process: how alert a person feels is determined by two different and opposite functions. The first is termed the homeostatic sleep drive (also, homeostatic drive, sleep load, sleep pressure, and process S), which is determined solely by how long it has been since an individual has last slept fully. The longer he/she’s been awake, the greater his/her sleep drive. It is the brain's biological need to sleep. Just as sufficient need for calories produces hunger, sufficient sleep-drive produces sleepiness. Sleeping decreases sleep drive, and sleep drive drops faster (when sleeping) then it rises (when awake).

Neuroscience is complicated, but it seems the chemical correlate of sleep drive is the build-up of adenosine in the basal ...
Effective Altruism vs Missionaries? Advice Requested from a Newly-Built Crowdfunding Platform.
by lululu — 2015-06-30T17:39:09.721Z

Hi, I'm developing a next-generation crowdfunding platform for non-profit fundraising. From what we have seen, it is aeffective tool, more about it below. I'm working with two other cofounders, both of whom are evangelical Christians. We get along well in general, but that I strongly believe in effective altruism and they do not.

We will launch a second pilot fundraising campaign in 2-3 weeks. My co-founders have arranged for us fund raise for is a "church planting" missionary organization. This is so opposed my belief in effective altruism I feel uncomfortable using our effective tool to funnel donors' dollars in THIS of all directions. This is not the reason I got involved in this project.

My argument with them is that we should charge more to ineffective nonprofits such as colleges, religious, or political organizations, and use that extra to subsidize the campaign and money-processing costs of the effective non-profits. I think this is logically consistent with earning to give. But I am being outvoted two-to-one by people who believe saving lives and saving souls are nearly equally important.

So I have two requests:

1. If anyone has advise on how to navigate this (including any especially well written articles that would appeal to evangelical Christians, or experience negotiating with start-up cofounders).

2. If anyone has personal connections with effective or effective-ish non-profits, I would much prefer to fundraise for them than my co-founder's church connections. Caveat: the org must have US non-profit legal status.

About the platform: the gist our concept is that we're using a lot of psychology and biases and altruism research to nudge more people towards giving and also nudge them towards a sustained involvement with the nonprofit in question. We're using some of the tricks that made the ice bucket challenge so successful (but with added accountability to ensure that visible involvement actually leads to monetary donations). Users can pledge money contingent on their friend's involvement, which motivates people in the same way that matching donations motivate people. Giving is very visible, and people are more likely to give if they see friends giving. Friends are making the request for funding, which creates a sense of personal connection. Each person's mini-campaign has an involvement goal and a time limit (3 friends in 3 days) to create ...
Selecting vs. grooming
by  — 2015-06-30T10:48:45.469Z

Content warning: meta-political, with hopefully low mind-killer factor.

Epistemic status: proposal for brain-storming.

- Representative democracies select political leaders. Monarchies and aristocracies groom political leaders for the job from childhood. (Also, to a certain extent they breed them for the job.)

- Capitalistic competition selects economic elites. Heritable landowning aristocracies groom economic elites from childhood. (Again, they also breed them.)

- A capitalist employer selects an accountant from a pool of 100 applicants. A feudal lord would groom a serf boy who has a knack for horses into the job of the adult stable man.

It seems a lot like selecting is better than grooming. After it is the modern way and hardly anyone would argue capitalism doesn't have a higher economic output than feudalism and so on.

But... since it was such a hugely important difference through history, perhaps, it was one of the things that really defined the modern world because it determines the whole social structure of societies past and present, that I think it should deserve some investigation. There may be something more interesting lurking here than just saying selection/testing won over grooming, period.

1) Can aspects of grooming as opposed to selecting/testing be steelmanned, are there corner cases when it could be better?

2) A pre-modern, medievalish society that nevertheless used a lot of selection/testing was China - I am thinking about the famous mandarin exams. Does this seem to have had any positive effect on China compared to other similar societies? I.e. is this even like that it is a big factor in the general outcomes of 2015 West vs. 1515 West? Comparing old China with similar medievalish but not selectionist (but inheritance based) societies would be useful for isolating this factor, right?

3) Why exactly does selecting and testing work better than grooming (and breeding) ?

4) Is it possible it works better because people do the breeding (intelligent people tend to marry intelligent people etc.) and grooming (a child of doctors will have an entirely different upbringing than a child of manual laborers) on their own, thus the social system does not have to do it, it is enough / better for the social system to do the selection, to do the testing of the success of the at-home grooming?

5) Any other interesting insight or reference?

Note: this is NOT about...
Meetup : July Rationality Dojo: Bayesian Reasoning
by MelbourneLW — 2015-06-30T09:08:48.087Z

Discussion article for the meetup : July Rationality Dojo: Bayesian Reasoning

WHEN:
05 July 2015 03:30:00PM (+0800)

WHERE:
Jenny Florence Room, Level 3, Ross House, 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

The Less Wrong Sunday Rationality Dojos are self-improvement sessions for those committed to the Art of Rationality and personal growth, on the first Sunday of each month.

1) Discussion: Bayesian Reasoning
Patrick Robotham will cover the history and philosophy of Bayesian probability, and discuss real world applications.
Bio: Patrick is a data scientist at Bellroy.

2) Goal setting. As always, we will trouble shoot and set goals, and review the personal goals we committed to at the previous Dojo. (I will have done X by the next Dojo.) We have a Google form for goals (optional) and Melbourne Less Wrong organisers have access to the form results if you wish to review the goals you set last month.

3) Our second support lottery! One person drawn from a hat (or beanie) gets to call on our collective resources to help them win at life over the next month. To get a ticket in the lottery, you need to have helped last month's winner.
This is an experiment in building a culture of cooperation and support.

4) Lightning talks: Learnt something cool? Gained an insight from one of the Less Wrong sequences? Share it with Melbourne LW! Speakers are limited to 5 minutes including questions. If you have something you would like to present a lightning talk on, please let one of the organisers know, either beforehand or on the day.

The Dojo is likely to run until about 6:30pm, after which some people will get dinner together.

If you have any trouble finding the venue or getting in, text or call Nick on 0452276425.

If you would like to present at a future Dojo or suggest a topic, please fill it in on the Rationality Dojo Roster:
http://is.gd/dojoroster

To organise similar events, please send an email to melbournelw@gmail.com

Discussion article for the meetup : July Rationality Dojo: Bayesian Reasoning
The Thing and the Symbolic Representation of The Thing
by Zvi — 2015-06-30T00:15:13.000Z

Let’s assume there is a thing that all would agree is, in context, a Good Thing(tm) that someone in your situation would want.

Do you want the thing, or do you want the symbolic representation of the thing?*

This sounds like an easy question; obviously you want the thing! Alas, it is often not that simple. Even when the thing itself would be most valuable, often the symbolic representation of the thing is what is in demand and gets produced.

One of MetaMed’s biggest mistakes was not realizing that this applied to health care. As Robin Hanson put it, health care is not about health: The system is more concerned with making sure everyone is able to signal, to others and to themselves, that they care deeply and that they are doing everything they can. This drives people’s decisions strongly enough to usually dominate decision making when the stakes are high. The actual health effects of the decisions involved are often a secondary concern, and the costs a distant third. The risk of not doing the standard thing, or what your doctor told you to do, looms larger than the fact that you believe that the decision is wrong; if you go against that advice, then you are not doing the responsible thing, you don’t care for yourself or your loved ones, and everything that happens to you after that is your fault.

Unsurprisingly, this leads to some very poor decisions when looked at in terms of what has a positive impact on the people’s health. And of course, everyone involved being afraid of being sued (far beyond the statistical danger of actually being sued) every time they deviate from the standard of care makes this that much worse.

MetaMed’s central thesis was that people cared enough about their health that if the information on how to save their life was available to them, they would have to buy it, and they would be willing to pay at least a small fraction of what that information was worth.

This theory was tested, and was conclusively falsified. Or rather, the following was conclusively falsified:

If a person is convinced that information could become available that might save their life, that person will often be willing to buy that information for a small fraction of what that belief implies the information is worth to them.

The experiment was not a randomized controlled trial, nor was the sample size all that big, but the data was clea...
Top 9+2 myths about AI risk
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2015-06-29T20:41:24.724Z

Following some somewhat misleading articles quoting me, I thought I’d present the top 9 myths about the AI risk thesis:

That we’re certain AI will doom us. Certainly not. It’s very hard to be certain of anything involving a technology that doesn’t exist; we’re just claiming that the probability of AI going bad isn’t low enough that we can ignore it.

That humanity will survive, because we’ve always survived before. Many groups of humans haven’t survived contact with more powerful intelligent agents. In the past, those agents were other humans; but they need not be. The universe does not owe us a destiny. In the future, something will survive; it need not be us.

That uncertainty means that you’re safe. If you’re claiming that AI is impossible, or that it will take countless decades, or that it’ll be safe... you’re not being uncertain, you’re being extremely specific about the future. “No AI risk” is certain; “Possible AI risk” is where we stand.

That Terminator robots will be involved. Please? The threat from AI comes from its potential intelligence, not from its ability to clank around slowly with an Austrian accent.

That we’re assuming the AI is too dumb to know what we’re asking it. No. A powerful AI will know what we meant to program it to do. But why should it care? And if we could figure out how to program “care about what we meant to ask”, well, then we’d have safe AI.

That there’s one simple trick that can solve the whole problem. Many people have proposed that one trick. Some of them could even help (see Holden’s tool AI idea). None of them reduce the risk enough to relax – and many of the tricks contradict each other (you can’t design an AI that’s both a tool and socialising with humans!).

That we want to stop AI research. We don’t. Current AI research is very far from the risky areas and abilities. And it’s risk aware AI researchers that are most likely to figure out how to make safe AI.

That AIs will be more intelligent than us, hence more moral. It’s pretty clear than in humans, high intelligence is no guarantee of morality. Are you really willing to bet the whole future of humanity on the idea that AIs might be different? That in the billions of possible minds out ther

...
Parenting Technique: Increase Your Child’s Working Memory
by James_Miller — 2015-06-29T19:51:48.067Z

I continually train my ten-year-old son’s working memory, and urge parents of other young children to do likewise. While I have succeeded in at least temporarily improving his working memory, I accept that this change might not be permanent and could end a few months after he stops training. But I also believe that while his working memory is boosted so too is his learning capacity.

I have a horrible working memory that greatly hindered my academic achievement. I was so bad at spelling that they stopped counting it against me in school. In technical classes I had trouble remembering what variables stood for. My son, in contrast, has a fantastic memory. He twice won his school’s spelling bee, and just recently I wrote twenty symbols (letters, numbers, and shapes) in rows of five. After a few minutes he memorized the symbols and then (without looking) repeated them forward, backwards, forwards, and then by columns.

My son and I have been learning different programming languages through Codecademy. While I struggle to remember the required syntax of different languages, he quickly gets this and can focus on higher level understanding. When we do math learning together his strong working memory also lets him concentrate on higher order issues then remembering the details of the problem and the relevant formulas.

You can easily train a child’s working memory. It requires just a few minutes of time a day, can be very low tech or done on a computer, can be optimized for your child to get him in flow, and easily lends itself to a reward system. Here is some of the training we have done:

I write down a sequence and have him repeat it.

I say a sequence and have him repeat it.

He repeats the sequence backwards.

He repeats the sequence with slight changes such as adding one to each number and “subtracting” one from each letter.

He repeats while doing some task like touching his head every time he says an even number and touching his knee every time he says an odd one.

Before repeating a memorized sequence he must play repeat after me where I say a random string.

I draw a picture and have him redraw it.

He plays N-back games.

He does mental math requiring keeping track of numbers (i.e. 42 times

...
Two-boxing, smoking and chewing gum in Medical Newcomb problems
by Caspar Oesterheld — 2015-06-29T10:35:58.162Z

I am currently learning about the basics of decision theory, most of which is common knowledge on LW. I have a question, related to why EDT is said not to work.

Consider the following Newcomblike problem: A study shows that most people who two-box in Newcomblike problems as the following have a certain gene (and one-boxers don't have the gene). Now, Omega could put you into something like Newcomb's original problem, but instead of having run a simulation of you, Omega has only looked at your DNA: If you don't have the "two-boxing gene", Omega puts $1M into box B, otherwise box B is empty. And there is $1K in box A, as usual. Would you one-box (take only box B) or two-box (take box A and B)? Here's a causal diagram for the problem:

Since Omega does not do much other than translating your genes into money under a box, it does not seem to hurt to leave it out:

I presume that most LWers would one-box. (And as I understand it, not only CDT but also TDT would two-box, am I wrong?)

Now, how does this problem differ from the smoking lesion or Yudkowsky's (2010, p.67) chewing gum problem? Chewing Gum (or smoking) seems to be like taking box A to get at least/additional $1K, the two-boxing gene is like the CGTA gene, the illness itself (the abscess or lung cancer) is like not having $1M in box B. Here's another causal diagram, this time for the chewing gum problem:

As far as I can tell, the difference between the two problems is some additional, unstated intuition in the classic medical Newcomb problems. Maybe, the additional assumption is that the actual evidence lies in the "tickle", or that knowing and thinking about the study results causes some complications. In EDT terms: The intuition is that neither smoking nor chewing gum gives the agent additional information.
Open Thread, Jun. 29 - Jul. 5, 2015 
by Gondolinian — 2015-06-29T00:14:15.292Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.