trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Bangalore Meetup
by anandjeyahar — 2014-12-26T17:15:00.057Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Bangalore Meetup

WHEN:
10 January 2015 11:02:00AM (+0530)

WHERE:
Central Mall, MG road, bangalore

1st meetup of then new year for less wrongers in bangalore. Let's use the meetup.com page for co-ordinating. http://www.meetup.com/Bangalore-LessWrongers-Meetup/events/219133638/.
And here's a mailing list. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/bangalore-lesswrongers

Discussion article for the meetup : Bangalore Meetup
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-12-26T15:54:33.912Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on December 19th. The following summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta December Meetup - Game Night!: 27 December 2014 07:00AM
Copenhagen: December Meetup: 20 December 2014 03:00PM
East Coast Solstice Megameetup: 20 December 2014 03:00PM
European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
Sandy, UT (SLC) - Debugging: 19 December 2014 12:00PM

Utrecht: a critique of effective altruism: 04 January 2015 02:00PM

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: 03 January 2026 01:30PM
London Social Meetup, 21/12/2014: 21 December 2014 02:00PM
Moscow Meetup: biology, CBT and something mysterious: 22 December 2014 02:00PM
Sydney Summer Solstice: 21 December 2014 06:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games: 21 December 2014 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, 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 overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta...
CFAR in 2014: Continuing to climb out of the startup pit, heading toward a full prototype
by AnnaSalamon — 2014-12-26T15:33:08.388Z

Summary: We outline CFAR’s purpose, our history in 2014, and our plans heading into 2015.

Highlights from 2014.

Improving operations.

Attempts to go beyond the current workshop and toward the ‘full prototype’ of CFAR: our experience in 2014 and plans for 2015.

Nuts, bolts, and financial details.

The big picture and how you can help.

One of the reasons we’re publishing this review now is that we’ve just launched our annual matching fundraiser, and want to provide the information our prospective donors need for deciding. This is the best time of year to decide to donate to CFAR. Donations up to $120k will be matched until January 31.[1]

To briefly preview: For the first three years of our existence, CFAR mostly focused on getting going. We followed the standard recommendation to build a ‘minimum viable product’, the CFAR workshops, that could test our ideas and generate some revenue. Coming into 2013, we had a workshop that people liked (9.3 average rating on “Are you glad you came?”; a more recent random survey showed 9.6 average rating on the same question 6-24 months later), which helped keep the lights on and gave us articulate, skeptical, serious learners to iterate on. At the same time, the workshops are not everything we would want in a CFAR prototype; it feels like the current core workshop does not stress-test most of our hopes for what CFAR can eventually do. The premise of CFAR is that we should be able to apply the modern understanding of cognition to improve people’s ability to (1) figure out the truth (2) be strategically effective (3) do good in the world. We have dreams of scaling up some particular kinds of sanity. Our next goal is to build the minimum strategic product that more directly justifies CFAR’s claim to be an effective altruist project.[2]

Highlights from 2014

Our brand perception improved significantly in 2014, which matters because it leads to companies being willing to pay for workshop attendance. We were covered in Fast Company -- twice -- the Wall Street Journal, and The Reasoner. Other mentions include Forbes, Big Think, Boing Boing, and Lifehacker. We’ve also had some interest in potential training for tech companies.

Our curriculum is gaining a second tier in the f...
Open and closed mental states
by Vika — 2014-12-26T06:53:26.244Z

I learned a game at Burning Man this year that was about connecting to people and reading their nonverbal signals, called the "open-closed" game (h/t Minda Myers). There are two people in the game, and one is trying to approach the other and place a hand on their shoulder. No words can be exchanged, except that person who is being approached can announce their emotional state as "open" or "closed". When they say "closed", the approacher may not get any closer until they say "open" again. The approachee monitors themselves for any internal discomfort associated with the other person, and says "closed" if that is the case. The approacher tries to keep the other person comfortable through their body language and eye contact, to get them to remain "open".

I have recently started playing this game with myself, with "open" representing openness to experience or being in the moment, and "closed" representing tunnel vision or discomfort with the way things are going. In a way, I imagine being "approached" by whatever situation I'm in, or whatever sequence of experiences is happening, instead of a person. I ask myself whether I am in the open or closed state, and try to shift to the open state whenever I notice being in the closed state.

There are a couple of reasons to try to do this. In the open state, I tend to be happier, more curious and observant and have more new thoughts. From a week of tracking my mental states and thought status using TagTime, I can make a preliminary conclusion that while old thoughts do occur in the open state, new thoughts never occur in the closed state. While the closed state makes me more efficient at doing straightforward tasks (e.g. by making me less distractable), it makes me less efficient at doing less straightforward tasks (e.g. by increasing my tendency to optimize locally rather than globally).

This is related to the concept of "againstness" taught by Valentine Smith at CFAR, which is a sense of resisting something about the situation at hand. Learning to notice this sense more quickly is a valuable thing I learned at CFAR and through my meditation practice. Redirecting attention to body sensations is supposed to be helpful for dissipating againstness, but I have found it difficult to get myself to do this in the moment, and not particularly reliable. Following the driving principle of "focusing on the road and not the curb"...
Methodology for predicting speed dating participants' decisions
by JonahS — 2014-12-25T20:43:44.825Z

In my last post I described phenomena that I used to predict speed dating participants' decisions by estimating the participants' general selectivity and perceived desirability. I was planning on following up with a discussion of the phenomena that I used to refine the model by taking into account differences between individuals. But since comments focused on methodology rather than the empirical phenomena, I decided to write about methodology first, so that readers wouldn't have to disbelief while reading my next post.

This post is more dense and technical than my last one. I wrote it for readers who want to check the details of the work, or who have strong interest in statistics and/or machine learning. If you don't fall into either category but are interest in the series, you can skip it without loss of continuity.

Here I'll address three points:

The situation that I attempted to simulate and how faithful one should expect the simulation to be.

The exact definitions of rating averages that I referenced in my last post

My criteria for including a feature in the model.

Most of the code that I used is here.

The simulation

The underlying question that I attempted to address is "Suppose that a speed dating company wanted to organize events with more matches. How could machine learning help?"

As Ryan Carey pointed out, the model that I developed uses data about other speed dates that participants had been on to predict decisions on a given speed date. It is possible to make nontrivial predictions exclusively using information that was available before the participants attended the events, but I haven't systematically explored how well one could do. So the model that I developed is potentially useful only in the special case where participants had attended similar past events.

In fact, the participants in the dataset attended only a single speed dating event, not multiple events, so it's not possible to directly check whether the model would in fact predict behavior at future events based on past events. I instead simulated a situation where participants had attended similar events in the past, by imagining that for a given date, all other dates that the pair of people had been on had occurred in a past event.

It's very likely that the simulation overstates the predictive power that the model would give in practice, if for no o...
Using Doulingo 'Immersion' feature to translate HPMOR
by efim — 2014-12-25T20:25:49.599Z

I have been using (alongside other learning tools) Duolingo for more than a year now and with considerable success in learning Spanish language.

I used immersion for learning purposes, but just recently it dawned on me that I could use it to translate HPMOR into different languages while simultaneously promoting it in wide audience.

My first attempt was uploading first untranslated chapter (on hpmor.com listed Spanish translation up to 24th chapter).

Half of it got translated before the upload drowned in new more recent uploads from other people.

First idea was to get 'commercial' license to keep uploaded chapter on top, but right now i'll try to break chapters into smaller chunks, since uploads up to 500 - 700 sentences get fully translated.

Because Doulingo for free lets you upload only web-pages I will gather english chunks in a vk.com group (google docs can't be uploaded to Duolingo).

I am posting this to make public commitment to continue to post chunks of untranslated chapters of HPMOR to Duolingo and get roughly translated texts out of it.

Even though Doulingo translations usually are quite good I suspect that there got to be some kind of checking.

What could be the solution? Could we organize e-mail broadcast for native Spanish speakers in LW to read and check translated chunks? They could be stored on google docs and be available for correction.

And also if\when I succeed in translation of a full chapter of HPMOR into spanish, how could it be added to hpmor site?

[edit to add links]

vk group with english and spanish chunks:https://vk.com/hpmor_en_to_sp_by_duolingo

latest duolingo chunk (ch.25 part 2): https://www.duolingo.com/translation/b665ba41aa75970134b14adb81de9fcf

first duolingo chunk (ch.25 full): https://www.duolingo.com/translation/7921153db4ef97a13e5c308151d0f8ae

P.S this project might not work, if Duo users won't find content interesting enough.
Why "Changing the World" is a Horrible Phrase
by ozziegooen — 2014-12-25T06:04:48.902Z

Steve Jobs famously convinced John Scully from Pepsi to join Apple Computer with the line, “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?”. This sounds convincing until one thinks closely about it.

Steve Jobs was a famous salesman. He was known for his selling ability, not his honesty. His terminology here was interesting. ‘Change the world’ is a phrase that both sounds important and is difficult to argue with. Arguing if Apple was really ‘changing the world’ would have been pointless, because the phrase was so ambiguous that there would be little to discuss. On paper, of course Apple is changing the world, but then of course any organization or any individual is also ‘changing’ the world. A real discussion of if Apple ‘changes the world’ would lead to a discussion of what ‘changing the world’ actually means, which would lead to obscure philosophy, steering the conversation away from the actual point.

‘Changing the world’ is an effective marketing tool that’s useful for building the feeling of consensus. Steve Jobs used it heavily, as had endless numbers of businesses, conferences, nonprofits, and TV shows. It’s used because it sounds good and is typically not questioned, so I’m here to question it. I believe that the popularization of this phrase creates confused goals and perverse incentives from people who believe they are doing good things.

Problem 1: 'Changing the World' Leads to Television Value over Real Value

It leads nonprofit workers to passionately chase feeble things. I’m amazed by the variety that I see in people who try to ‘change the world’. Some grow organic food, some research rocks, some play instruments. They do basically everything.

Few people protest this variety. There are millions of voices giving the appeal to ‘change the world’ in the way that would validate many radically diverse pursuits.

TED, the modern symbol of the intellectual elite for many, is itself a grab bag of a ways to ‘change the world’, without any sense of scale between pursuits. People tell comedic stories, sing songs, discuss tales of personal adventures and so on. In TED Talks, all presentations are shown side-by-side with the same lighting and display. Yet in real life some projects produce or...
Factoring cost-effectiveness
by owencb — 2014-12-24T23:25:24.230Z

Summary: We can split the cost-effectiveness of an intervention into how good the cause is, and how good the intervention is relative to the cause. This perspective could help our efforts in prioritisation by letting us bring appropriate tools to bear on the different parts.

Cost-effectiveness comparisons

When we choose between giving time or money to different interventions, we’re making a comparison. It’s nice to know what these comparisons come down to. There are a lot of sources of evidence, and different ones will be more appropriate in different contexts. For this post I'll assume that we are seeking the most cost-effective interventions.

Say we are comparing between intervention x in cause area X, and intervention y in cause area Y. How they compare depends on things like how well thought-out x and y are, how competent the people and organisations implementing them are, as well as how valuable X is as a whole compared to Y.

These are all important factors in telling us how x and y ultimately compare, but they’re quite different from one another. So it shouldn’t be a surprise if it’s best to use different methods to compare the different factors. I think this is the case.

Consider the equation:

Cost-effectiveness of intervention = (cost-effectiveness of area) * (leverage ratio of intervention)

The left-hand side of this equation expresses how much good is achieved per unit of resources invested in the intervention. For the intervention x we’ll denote this G(x). The right-hand side breaks this up as C(X), how much good is achieved per unit of resources invested in X as a whole, and a ‘leverage ratio’ L(x) which expresses the ratio of how effective x is compared to X as a whole [1].

Now to compare between x and y we’re interested in the ratio G(x)/G(y). We can use the above equation to expand this:

G(x)/G(y) = (C(X)L(x))/(C(Y)L(y)).

This rearranges to:

G(x)/G(y) = C(X)/C(Y) * L(x)/L(y).

Here we’ve split the comparison into two parts, each of which is comparing like with like. This is a good general strategy: making comparisons between dissimilar things is hard, and our intuitions are sometimes terrible at it, so it’s helpful to break it into more comparable chunks [2].

Comparing cause effectiveness

Comparing the cost-effectiveness of different cause areas is quite far removed from everyday experi...
2015 New Years Resolution Thread 
by Andy_McKenzie — 2014-12-24T22:16:35.669Z

The new year is a popular Schelling point to make changes to your activities, habits, and/or thought processes. This is often done via the New Year's Resolution. One standard piece of advice for NYRs is to make them achievable, since they are often too ambitious and people end up giving up and potentially falling victim to the what-the-hell effect.

Wikipedia has a nice list of popular NYRs. For ideas from other LW contributors, here are some previous NYRs discussed on LW:

Somervta aimed to spend at least two hours/week learning to program (here)

ArisKatsaris aimed to tithe to charity (here)

Swimmer963 aimed to experiment more with relationships (here)

RichardKennaway aimed to not die (here)

orthonormal aimed (for many years in a row) to make new mistakes (here)

Perplexed aimed to avoid making karma micromanagement postmortems (here)

Yvain aimed to check whether there was a donation matching opportunity the next week before making a donation (here)

(If one of these were from you, perhaps you'd like to discuss whether they were successful or not?)

In the spirit of collaboration, I propose that we discuss any NYRs we have made or are thinking of making for 2015 in this thread.
Pomodoro for Programmers
by Peter Wildeford — 2014-12-24T18:26:49.923Z

Unless you’ve been living under a productivity rock, you probably have heard of the Pomodoro Technique, where you use a timer to do 25 minutes of focused work, and then take a five minute break.

I used to use this technique a lot, up until I started doing computer programming.

You see, with computer programming, I get into this mysterious flow that consumes me, and I keep blazing passed the 25 minute interval, and the buzz of the Pomodoro merely distracts me and derails my work.

However, it’s still important to re-focus, even as a programmer. So I’ve tentatively settled on the following: 45 minutes of intense work followed by 15 minutes of intense break, using this custom timer made in a snap. (Inspired by the idea of "tocks", attributed to the co-founders of Beeminder, though I can’t seem to find a canonical post explaining it. Update: a canonical post was just written, seemingly by coincidence.)

You probably know what happens in the period of intense work — uninterrupted work in a distraction-free environment where I code like a mad man. If anything bubbles up in my mind that’s not a task, I write it down to address later.

But the intense break is important.

Here’s my routine:

1.) A bit of rest. Look away from the computer. Let loose. Focus.

2.) Ask myself — am I comfortable? Do I need to do anything to rearrange my working environment? Am I sufficiently free from distractions? Do I need to do anything to address past distractions? Do I need to refill my water bottle? Do I need to get more food?

3.) What did I do over the past 45 minutes? Did I do it right? Does it need revision?

4.) What did I miss over the past 45 minutes? Do I have any important emails that need to be processed right away? Did anyone send me messages over HipChat? Any FB notifications? I disconnect from these services while during my work sprint, but the urgency of work communication requires me to reconnect every once in awhile. I try to put off responding to messages until the end of the day if they don’t require an urgent response, though.

5.) What should I do during the next 45 minute interval? Am I on track to accomplish my goals? Will my next 45 minute interval be distraction-free? Do I need to do anything to address future distractions?

6.) Are there any quick tasks I can accomplish? Any emails I need to send? Any notes I need...
Nth_Level_Player
by Minds_Eye — 2014-12-24T00:54:43.612Z

In a recent post Gwerley covered Constructive Developmental Theory, and Subject-Object Notation. I'll be going through a basic description of the ideas, as well as adding related ideas from the Four Player Model.

Constructive Developmental Theory:

Constructive Developmental Theory is a Theory of Mind that splits the development of people into five levels, though the levels each have a unique set of advantages/disadvantages, not being "better" or "worse" than one another.1 This theory is largely based on if the individual is subject to something or able to hold it as an object using meta cognition, such that each level holds the previous levels as special cases.2 This progress makes it so a higher order mind will notice things a lower order cannot.

First Order/The Impulsive Mind

An impulsive mind has only it's reflexes as an object.

At this level an organism3 is still sorting out sensory input, and does not yet have a theory of mind.

Second Order/The Instrumental Mind

As an Instrumental Mind the being is able to understand the difference between self and other.

Though second order minds understand the concept of self they are subject to their wants, needs and desires.4

At this level the person has only one viewpoint. (Solipsism)

Third Order/The Socialized Mind

The Socialized mind is able to hold as an object their emotions, needs and desires.

This level is subject to cultural in-group/out-group pressures.

They are defined by their relation to society.

This relation makes them susceptible to the wants and needs of others, making them likely to try and do/say what [they think] others want.

Their reliance on society and authority makes them good followers.

58% of adults are on this level.

*With the bulk of people being on this level it's important to keep status with them. Failure to do so risks loosing momentum on any movement you're working on. (Trans humanism, Cryonics or FAI being the three that jump to mind with this community.)

Fourth Order/The Self-Authoring Mind

The Self-Authoring Mind is able to hold as an object the environment it belongs to.

Self-Authors are still subject to their own ideologies.

They are defined by what they think of themselves in relation to their ideologies as a static unchanging state dependent on their ideology. (The "self" can

...
LINK: Nematode brain uploaded with success
by polymathwannabe — 2014-12-23T23:27:25.856Z

The connectome for the 302 neurons of the nematode C. elegans was put in charge of a Lego robot. Without any additional programming, the simulated brain started using the robot parts just like the original worm's organs.

"When you think about it, the brain is really nothing more than a collection of electrical signals."