trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Giving What We Can needs your help!
by RobertWiblin — 2015-05-29T16:30:26.038Z

As you probably know, Giving What We Can exists to move donations to the charities that can most effectively help others. Our members take a pledge to give 10% of their incomes for the rest of their life to the most impactful charities. Along with other extensive resources for donors such as GiveWell and OpenPhil, we produce and communicate, in an accessible way, research to help members determine where their money will do the most good. We also impress upon members and the general public the vast differences between the best charities and the rest.

Many LessWrongers are members or supporters, including of course the author of Slate Star Codex. We also recently changed our pledge so that people could give to whichever cause they felt best helped others, such as existential risk reduction or life extension, depending on their views. Many new members now choose to do this.

What you might not know is that 2014 was a fantastic year for us - our rate of membership growth more than tripled! Amazingly, our 1066 members have now pledged over $422 million, and already given over $2 million to our top rated charities. We've accomplished this on a total budget of just $400,000 since we were founded. This new rapid growth is thanks to the many lessons we have learned by trial and error, and the hard work of our team of staff and volunteers.

To make it to the end of the year we need to raise just another £110,000. Most charities have a budget in the millions or tens of millions of pounds and we do what we do with a fraction of that.
We want to raise the money as quickly as possible, so that our staff can stop focusing on fundraising (which takes up a considerable amount of energy), and get back to the job of growing our membership.
Some of our supporters are willing to sweeten the deal as well: if you haven't given us more than £1,000 before, then they'll match 1:1 a gift between £1,000 and £5,000.
You can give now or email me (robert dot wiblin at centreforeffectivealtruism dot org) for our bank details. Info on tax deductible giving from the USA and non-UK Europe are also available on our website.

What we are doing this year
The second half of this year is looking like it will be a very exciting for us. Four books about effective altruism are being released this year, including one by our own trustee William MacAskill, which will ...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2015-05-29T15:35:15.570Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on May 22nd. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

Oslo LessWrong Meetup: 22 May 2015 05:15PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Ann Arbor, MI Discussion Meetup 6/13: 13 June 2015 01:30PM
Australian Less Wrong Mega Meetup #2: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
Australia-wide Mega-Camp!: 17 July 2015 07:00PM
Bratislava Meetup: 25 May 2015 06:00PM
European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
[Utrecht] 'The Most Good Good You Can Do' (Effective Altruism meetup): 31 May 2015 02:00PM
Warsaw: Newcomb's Problem & Decision Theories: 30 May 2015 06:30PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX - Caffe Medici - Mini-Talks: 23 May 2015 01:30PM
London meetup: 24 May 2015 02:00PM
Sydney Meetup - May: 27 May 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - Intuitive Bayes: 07 June 2015 04:00PM
Sydney Meetup - June: 24 June 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - July: 22 July 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - August: 26 August 2015 06:30PM
Sydney Meetup - September: 23 September 2015 06:30PM
Vienna: 20 June 2015 03:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Value of Information: 24 May 2015 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly ...
Approximating Solomonoff Induction
by Houshalter — 2015-05-29T12:23:20.214Z

Solomonoff Induction is a sort of mathematically ideal specification of machine learning. It works by trying every possible computer program and testing how likely they are to have produced the data. Then it weights them by their probability.

Obviously Solomonoff Induction is impossible to do in the real world. But it forms the basis of AIXI and other theoretical work in AI. It's a counterargument to the no free lunch theorem; that we don't care about the space of all possible datasets, but ones which are generated by some algorithm. It's even been proposed as a basis for a universal intelligence test.

Many people believe that trying to approximate Solomonoff Induction is the way forward in AI. And any machine learning algorithm that actually works, to some extent, must be an approximation of Solomonoff Induction.

But how do we go about trying to approximate true Solomonoff Induction? It's basically an impossible task. Even if you make restrictions to remove all the obvious problems like infinite loops/non-halting behavior. The space of possibilities is just too huge to reasonably search through. And it's discrete - you can't just flip a few bits in a program and find another similar program.

We can simplify the problem a great deal by searching through logic circuits. Some people disagree about whether logic circuits should be classified as Turing complete, but it's not really important. We still get the best property of Solomonoff Inducion; that it allows most interesting problems to be modelled much more naturally. In the worst case you have some overhead to specify the memory cells you need to emulate a Turing machine.

Logic circuits have some nicer properties compared to arbitrary computer programs, but they still are discrete and hard to do inference on. To fix this we can easily make continuous versions of logic circuits. Go back to analog. It's capable of doing all the same functions, but also working with real valued states instead of binary.

Instead of flipping between discrete states, we can slightly increase connections between circuits, and it will only slightly change the behavior. This is very nice, because we have algorithms like MCMC that can efficiently approximate true bayesian inference on continuous parameters.

And we are no longer restricted to boolean gates, we can use any function that takes real numbers. Like a function that takes a sum of ...
Meetup : Moscow: epistemology, framing, new project announcement
by Slava Matyukhin — 2015-05-29T11:58:48.056Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: epistemology, framing, new project announcement

WHEN:
31 May 2015 02:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, L'va Tolstogo 16

We're meeting at Yandex, at 7.Nebo (Extropolis is taken this time).

Please fill this form if you're planning to visit.

Planned activities:

Talk by marchdown on epistemology, Frege and Quine.

Report on a small framing research by Pion.

Proposal for a new online project (common database of volunteers for scientific experiments) by berekuk.

Afterparty activities:

Fallacymania game, organized by Alexander230.

Brainstorm on how to improve Fallacymania, facilitated by Yury.

Hackpad: https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/-31-2015-417xPxFa6Jv

Location details and info for the newcomers:

We meet outside of the Yandex office, near the archway and bike parking place. Here is a guide how to get to Yandex: http://company.yandex.ru/contacts/redrose/.

Security wants me to meet each member personally, so if you're late, please call me (Slava) at +7(926)313-96-42. Though I'll appreciate it if you're not late.

Expected duration of the meetup is 4-6 hours, depending on whether you'd like to stand for the afterparty activities. If you're not the member of our Moscow community yet, you might want to check out https://lesswrong-ru.hackpad.com/ , there's a lot of content about what's been going on for the last two years.

Also, please subscribe to our mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rationality-in-moscow

Discussion article for the meetup : Moscow: epistemology, framing, new project announcement
Request for Advice : A.I. - can I make myself useful?
by zslastman — 2015-05-29T09:13:20.183Z

I'm a PhD student wrapping up a doctorate in Genomics. I started in biology and switched to analysis because I have stupid hands. My opinion of my field is low. Working in it has, on on the bright side, taught me some statistics and programming. I'm roughly upper 5% on math ability, relative to my college class. Once upon a time I could solve ODEs, now most of my math is gone. However, I'm good with R, and can talk intelligently about mixed linear model, bayesianism vs. frequentism and about genetics, biochemistry and developmental biology. It's also taught me that huge segments of the biology literature are a mixture of non reproducible crap, and uninteresting, street-light science, dressed up as progress with deceptive plots and statistics. I think a large part of my lack of enthusiasm comes from my belief that advances in artificial intelligence are going to make human-run biology irrelevant before long. I think the ultimate problems we're tackling (predicting genotype from phenotype, reliable manipulation of biology, curing cancer/aging/death) are insoluble with our current methods - we need effective robots to do the experiments, and A.I. to interpret the results.

Here's what I want to ask the lesswrong hivemind:

1)Do you agree? Do you think there are important problems being tackled now in biology that someone with my skillset could be useful in? E.g. analyzing the brain with genetics to try and get a handle on how it's algorithms work? (I'm skeptical of this bottom up approach to the brain myself)

2)Do you think there are areas closer to the AI problem (or say, cryonics...) I could be usefully working on?

Sorry for bothering you with my personal problems, but I recall a thread a while ago inviting this sort of thing, so I thought I'd give it a try. I'm leaning towards the default option right now, which is to do some more courses, so I can say, bluff my way through Hadoop and Java, and then see how much cash I can earn in a boring private sector job. However, I'd prefer to do something I find intrinsically interesting.

Edit: Thanks guys - this has already been helpful.
[link] informational derivation of quantum theory
by Angela — 2015-05-29T09:10:28.750Z

Giulio Chiribella's paper, Informational derivation of quantum theory, provide a spookiness-free explanation of the foundations of quantum theory based on purification (every density matrix is the partial trace of a density matrix generated by a pure state), and further supports MWI.

"Quantum theory can be derived from purely informational principles. In particular, it belongs to a broad class of theories of information-processing that includes classical and quantum information theory as special cases. Within this class, quantum theory is identified uniquely by the purification postulate, stating that the ignorance about a part is always compatible with the maximal knowledge of the whole in an essentially unique way. This postulate appears as the origin of the key features of quantum information processing, such as no-cloning, teleportation, and error correction (see also Ref. [21]). The general vision underlying the present work is that the main primitives of quantum information processing should be derived directly from the principles, without the abstract mathematics of Hilbert spaces, in order to make the revolutionary aspects of quantum information immediately accessible and to place them in the broader context of the fundamental laws of physics."
Meetup : Oslo Meetup at Bitraf.
by FourFire — 2015-05-29T07:04:15.528Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Oslo Meetup at Bitraf.

WHEN:
29 May 2015 05:30:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Youngstorget 6, Oslo

Welcome to the second Lesswrong meetup, this time at a hackerspace.

The entrance is a bit quirky: a big green double door With "NILZ" in yellow writing over it, just ring the doorbell marked "bitraf" and say anything.

As with last meetup there will be several topics up for discussion, but I won't list them here.

I hope some of those who couldn't make it last week will turn up then :)

Discussion article for the meetup : Oslo Meetup at Bitraf.
A Challenge:  Maps We Take For Granted
by Sable — 2015-05-29T03:50:18.655Z

Imagine that you were instantly transported into (roughly) the 13th century. I'm not great at history, but I'm picturing sometime around the crusades. You're sitting there, reading this post on your computer, and BAM! Some guy in chain mail is asking you if thou art the spawn of a demon.

Given this situation, I present to you a challenge:

You are stranded in the past. You have no modern technology except your everyday clothes. The only thing you do have is your knowledge from the future.

What do you do?

I'll make this a little more structured for the sake of clarity.

1) You appear in Great Britain (or the appropriate analogue for your native culture).

2) Assume the language barrier is surmountable - in other words, it may not be easy, but you can communicate effectively (by learning the language, or simply adapting to an older version of your native tongue).

3) Further assume that you manage to gain the ear of a ruling lord (how is not important, just say you're a wizard or something) and that he provides you with enough money, labor, and expertise (carpenters, smiths, etc.) to build something *so long as you can describe it in enough detail*.

4) You are only allowed to pull from general, scientifically literate knowledge - high school/bachelor's level only.

5) You can't use your knowledge of future events to your advantage, as it requires too expert a grasp of history. Only your knowledge of the way the world actually works is available.

The reason for 4) has to do with the point of the question. I'm trying to figure out the kind of maps that we have today that are considered "general knowledge" - the kinds of things that are so obvious to us we tend to not realize that people in the past didn't know them.

I'll go first.

The germ theory of disease didn't achieve widespread acceptance until the 19th century. In other words, I'm the only person in the past who is quite confident about how diseases are spread. This means that I can offer practical advice about sanitation when dealing with injuries and plagues. I can make sure that people wash their hands before cutting other people up, and after dealing with corpses. I can make sure that cutting instruments are sanitized (they did have alcohol) before use. And so on. This should reduce the number of dea...
Why is a goal a good thing?
by Elo — 2015-05-29T03:00:21.471Z

It seems to be an important concept that setting goals is something that should be done. Why?

Advocates of goal-setting (and the sheer number of them) would imply that there is a reason for the concept.

I have to emphasis that I don't want answers that suggest - "Don't set goals", as is occasionally written. I specifically want answers that explain why goals are good. see http://zenhabits.net/no-goal/ for more ideas on not having goals.

I have to emphasise again that I don't mean to discredit goals or suggest that the Dilbert's Scott Adams "make systems not goals" suggestion is better or should be followed more than, "set goals". see http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102964992706/goals-vs-systems . I specifically want to ask - why should we set goals? (because the answer is not intuitive or clear to me)

Here in ROT13 is a theory; please make a suggestion first before translating:

Cer-qrpvqrq tbnyf npg nf n thvqryvar sbe shgher qrpvfvbaf; Tbnyf nffvfg jvgu frys pbageby orpnhfr lbh pna znxr cer-cynaarq whqtrzragf (V.r. V nz ba n qvrg naq pna'g rng fhtne - jura cerfragrq jvgu na rngvat-qrpvfvba). Jura lbh trg gb n guvaxvat fcnpr bs qrpvfvbaf gung ner ybat-grez be ybat-ernpuvat, gb unir cerivbhfyl pubfra tbnyf (nffhzvat lbh qvq gung jryy; jvgu pbeerpg tbny-vagreebtngvba grpuavdhrf); jvyy yrnq lbh gb znxr n orggre qrpvfvba guna bgurejvfr hacynaarq pubvprf.

Gb or rssrpgvir - tbnyf fubhyq or zber guna whfg na vagragvba. "V jnag gb or n zvyyvbanver", ohg vapyhqr n fgengrtl gb cebterff gbjneqf npuvrivat gung tbny. (fgevpgyl fcrnxvat bhe ybpny YrffJebat zrrghc'f tbny zbqry vf 3 gvrerq; "gur qernz". "gur arkg gnetrg". "guvf jrrx'f npgvba" Jurer rnpu bar yrnqf gb gur arkg bar. r.t. "tb gb fcnpr", "trg zl qrterr va nrebfcnpr ratvarrevat", "fcraq na ubhe n avtug fghqlvat sbe zl qrterr")

Qvfnqinagntr bs n tbnyf vf vg pna yvzvg lbhe bccbeghavgl gb nafjre fvghngvbaf jvgu abiry nafjref. (Gb pbagvahr gur fnzr rknzcyr nf nobir - Jura cerfragrq jvgu na rngvat pubvpr lbh znl abg pbafvqre gur pubvpr gb "abg rng nalguvat" vs lbh gubhtug uneq rabhtu nobhg vg; ohg ng yrnfg lbh zvtug pubbfr gur fyvtugyl urnyguvre bcgvba orgjrra ninvynoyr sbbqf).

I suspect that the word "goals" will need a good taboo, feel free to do so if you think that is needed in your explanation.
[Link] Small-game fallacies: a Problem for Prediction Markets
by Antisuji — 2015-05-28T03:32:05.146Z

Nick Szabo writes about the dangers of taking assumptions that are valid in small, self-contained games and applying them to larger, real-world "games," a practice he calls a small-game fallacy.

Interactions between small games and large games infect most works of game theory, and much of microeconomics, often rendering such analyses useless or worse than useless as a guide for how the "players" will behave in real circumstances. These fallacies tend to be particularly egregious when "economic imperialists" try to apply the techniques of economics to domains beyond the traditional efficient-markets domain of economics, attempting to bring economic theory to bear to describe law, politics, security protocols, or a wide variety of other institutions that behave very differently from efficient markets. However as we shall see, small-game fallacies can sometimes arise even in the analysis of some very market-like institutions, such as "prediction markets."

This last point, which he expands on later in the post, will be of particular interest to some readers of LW. The idea is that while a prediction market does incentivize feeding accurate information into the system, the existence of the market also gives rise to parallel external incentives. As Szabo glibly puts it,

A sufficiently large market predicting an individual's death is also, necessarily, an assassination market...

Futarchy, it seems, will have some kinks to work out.
The most important meta-skill
by Nanashi — 2015-05-27T15:51:02.150Z

Note: This article underwent a significant revision on 5/28/2015. Thank you to estimator for all your feedback.

The most important meta-skill that anyone can learn is how to learn skills. With practice, you learn how to pick up new skills as they are needed, which is infinitely (quite literally) more efficient than trying to learn each skill individually in advance.

There are two basic premises that this method relies on:

A skill can be eventually be broken down into a series of trivial sub-skills.

The skill and its sub-skills follows a Pareto distribution.

The Pareto principle states that typically, 80% of a system's effects can be linked to 20% of their causes. Or in this case, learning 20% of the trivial sub-skills will make you 80% proficient at the overall skill. Empirically, many systems, both artificial and natural have been proven to follow this distribution, and skills are no exception. This guide is intended to teach you how to identify that 20%.

What lies below this is almost 1,000 words to describe something that's ultimately about condensing things and taking shortcuts. So, to be true to this attitude, I'll start with the "20% version", and those so inclined can continue to read the other 80%.

Break the skill you want to learn into several sub-skills.

For each sub-skill, ask "Is this trivial?" If so, add that to your "trivial list". If not, repeat steps 1-2 for each sub-skill. Continue to iterate until all you have left is a list of trivial sub-skills.

For each trivial sub-skill, ask, "How can this go wrong, and what can I do if it does?" Add this to your list of back-up plans, unless it is redundant.

Sort your list of sub-skills by how easy they will be to learn, then start learning and practicing them. Any time something goes wrong or you encounter a situation you did not account for, use one of your back-up plans.

Repeat steps 1-4 for any sub-skills you encounter that you did not account for.

So, that was the short version. If you find you need more context, here goes. Note that the first premise uses the word "trivial", which then begs the question: "What makes a sub-skill trivial?" A convenient answer to that is: "If you personally feel sufficiently confident that you can do it." Or, in other words, "Can you look up how to do it on the internet?" Which means, if the problem itself is ...
Meetup : Canberra: More Zendo!
by DanielFilan — 2015-05-27T13:13:50.539Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: More Zendo!

WHEN:
13 June 2015 06:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
108 North Road, Acton, ACT

I really enjoyed Zendo last time we played it, so we're doing it again, but this time with things other than playing cards. The rules will be explained at the event, but in summary, one person is the 'Master', who has a secret rule in mind, and their 'Students' must guess the Master's rule in order to win. Further explanation is at the Wikipedia page (although note that we will be using simpler rules). As always, vegan snacks will be provided.

Note that after this, I will be in the USA until late July, and therefore unable to run meetups. However, other people are more than welcome to do so in my absence.

General meetup info:

If you use Facebook, please join our group.

Structured meetups are (usually) held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late in the CSIT building, room N101.

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: More Zendo!
Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Wise Sayings
by RobinZ — 2015-05-27T12:59:45.387Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Wise Sayings

WHEN:
31 May 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 Person who was going to do the MIRI Q&A will be unavailable, so instead we'll be meeting ostensibly to share and talk about wise sayings, but also to hang out and talk about whatever.

Upcoming meetups:

Jun. 7: Fun & Games

Jun. 14: Visit Museums

Jun. 21: Create and Complete

Jun. 28: Fun & Games

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Wise Sayings