trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Programming-like activities?
by robot-dreams — 2015-01-08T00:37:57.513Z

Programming is quite a remarkable activity:

It has an extremely low barrier to entry

You don't need expensive equipment

You don't need to be in a particular location

You don't need special credentials

You can finding information / resources just by opening the internet

You can learn it / do it independently

It gives you rapid feedback (which can lead to rapid growth)

It gives you frequent rewards (which gives a huge boost in motivation)

It's objective and unforgiving (this is a good thing, because it teaches you how to confront reality)

It's intellectually stimulating

It's useful in the real world

Corollary: you can make money or even build a career out of it

It's badass (or are you telling me that Hackers WASN'T your favorite movie of all time?)

What are some other "programming-like" activities?

I mean this in the sense of "activities that also satisfy the above criteria", but suggestions don't have to satisfy ALL of the criteria. Here are some of the first ideas that come to mind when I try to answer the question myself:

Electronics (but this is basically still programming)

Math (lacks "rapid feedback" and "frequent rewards"; "useful in the real world" is also questionable)

Go, poker, video games (usually lacks "useful in the real world", sometimes lacks "badass")

Juggling, poi (lacks "intellectually stimulating" and "useful in the real world")

However, I've already exhausted my creativity and I'm hoping to go much deeper than this. Thoughts?
Comments on "When Bayesian Inference Shatters"?
by Crystalist — 2015-01-07T22:56:55.393Z

I recently ran across this post, which gives a lighter discussion of a recent paper on Bayesian inference ("On the Brittleness of Bayesian Inference"). I don't understand it, but I'd like to, and it seems like the sort of paper other people here might enjoy discussing.

I am not a statistician, and this summary is based on the blog post (I haven't had time to read the paper yet) so please discount my summary accordingly: It looks like the paper focuses on the effects of priors and underlying models on the posterior distribution. Given a continuous distribution (or a discrete approximation of one) to be estimated from finite observations (of sufficiently high precision), and finite priors, the range of posterior estimates is the same as the range of the distribution to be estimated. Given models that are arbitrarily close (I'm not familiar with the total variance metric, but the impression I had was that, for finite accuracy, they produce the same observations with arbitrarily similar probability), you can have posterior estimates that are arbitrarily distant (within the range of the distribution to be estimated) given the same information. My impression is that implicitly relying on arbitrary precision of a prior can give updates that are diametrically opposed to the ones you'd get with different, but arbitrarily similar priors.

First, of course, I want to know if my summary's accurate, misses the point, or wrong.

Second, I'd be interested in hearing discussions of the paper in general and whether it might have any immediate impact on practical applications.

Some other areas of discussion that would be of interest to me: I'm also not entirely sure what 'sufficiently high precision' would be. I also have only a vague idea of the circumstances where you'd be implicitly relying on the arbitrary precision of a prior. I'm also just generally interest in hearing what people more experienced/intelligent than I am might have to say here.
The decline of violence as a lens for understanding effective altruism
by alwhite — 2015-01-07T17:16:14.615Z

Greetings all! There's a puzzle that I'm working on and I'm interested to see what the members of this community have to say about it.
I am an electrical engineer that is currently working on a master's in counseling. One of the big questions I keep asking myself in this program is "how effective is this field in making the world a better place"?

To help focus the discussion I want to focus on violence. This video from Steven Pinker is a great overview of the data http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence. But for those who don't want to spend the time to watch it, the short version is that violence per capita is at an all time low for human history, and other people will state it as "there has never been a safer time in history".

The question then, why is this so?

My personal belief on this is that our technology advancement has reduced the effort it takes for people to survive so there is less drive to become hostile towards people who have what we need. This belief applied to effective altruism would suggest that the most effective method of improving all of human life would be to continue to increase our technology level so that there is an abundance of basic needs and no one has a need to become hostile. I do believe that as a planet, we do not yet have that abundance so I don't believe this is merely a matter of redistribution. The GWP (gross world product) per capita, as of 2014, was $12,400 USD, which is just barely above the poverty line for an individual. This is why I say, we're not yet producing enough to truly eliminate need.

From this belief, I wonder if social movements and psychological training are really doing anything in comparison to the need that exists.

Going back to the violence issue, I am thinking if we can understand why violence has been declining we can also understand what is truly effective in bettering the human condition. I believe the reason is technological advancement. Does anyone have any good evidence to suggest other reasons?

Are we possibly at a tipping point? Has our past been dominated by technological advancement but now we're reaching a level where more socially oriented advancements will be more effective?

Thoughts?
Some recent evidence against the Big Bang
by JStewart — 2015-01-07T05:06:27.945Z

I am submitting this on behalf of MazeHatter, who originally posted it here in the most recent open tread. Go there to upvote if you like this submission.

Begin MazeHatter:

I grew up thinking that the Big Bang was the beginning of it all. In 2013 and 2014 a good number of observations have thrown some of our basic assumptions about the theory into question. There were anomalies observed in the CMB, previously ignored, now confirmed by Planck:

Another is an asymmetry in the average temperatures on opposite hemispheres of the sky. This runs counter to the prediction made by the standard model that the Universe should be broadly similar in any direction we look.

Furthermore, a cold spot extends over a patch of sky that is much larger than expected.

The asymmetry and the cold spot had already been hinted at with Planck’s predecessor, NASA’s WMAP mission, but were largely ignored because of lingering doubts about their cosmic origin.

“The fact that Planck has made such a significant detection of these anomalies erases any doubts about their reality; it can no longer be said that they are artefacts of the measurements. They are real and we have to look for a credible explanation,” says Paolo Natoli of the University of Ferrara, Italy.

... One way to explain the anomalies is to propose that the Universe is in fact not the same in all directions on a larger scale than we can observe. ...

“Our ultimate goal would be to construct a new model that predicts the anomalies and links them together. But these are early days; so far, we don’t know whether this is possible and what type of new physics might be needed. And that’s exciting,” says Professor Efstathiou.

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Planck/Planck_reveals_an_almost_perfect_Universe

We are also getting a better look at galaxies at greater distances, thinking they would all be young galaxies, and finding they are not:

The finding raises new questions about how these galaxies formed so rapidly and why they stopped forming stars so early. It is an enigma that these galaxies seem to come out of nowhere.

http://carnegiescience.edu/news/some_galaxies_early_universe_grew_quickly

http://mq.edu.au/newsroom/2014/03/11/granny-galaxies-discovered-in-the-early-universe/

The newly classified galaxies are striking in that they look a lot like those in today's univers

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Exams and Overfitting
by robot-dreams — 2015-01-06T19:35:44.500Z

When I hear something like "What's going to be on the exam?", part of me gets indignant. WHAT?!?! You're defeating the whole point of the exam! You're committing the Deadly Sin of Overfitting!

Let me step back and explain my view of exams.

When I take a class, my goal is to learn the material. Exams are a way to answer the question, "How well did I learn the material?"[1]. But exams are only a few hours long, so it's unfeasible to have questions on all of the material. To deal with this time constraint, an exam takes a random sample of the material and gives me a "statistical" rather than "perfect" answer to the question, "How well did I learn the material?"

If I know in advance what topics will be covered on the exam, and if I then prepare for the exam by learning only those topics, then I am screwing up this whole process. By doing very well on the exam, I get the information, "Congratulations! You learned the material covered on the exam very well." But who knows how well I learned the material covered in class as a whole? This is a textbook case of overfitting.

To be clear, I don't necessarily lose respect for someone who asks, "What's going to be on the exam?". I understand that different people have different priorities[2], and that's fine by me. But if you're taking a class because you truly want to learn the material, in spite of any sacrifices that you might have to make to do so[3], then I'd like to encourage you not to "study for the test". I'd like to encourage you not to overfit.

[1] When I say "learned", I mean in the "Feynman" sense, not in the "teacher's password" sense. I believe that a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for an exam to check for this kind of learning is to have problems that I've never seen before.

[2] Someone might care much more about getting into medical school than, say, mastering classical mechanics. I respect that choice, and I acknowledge that someone might be in a system where getting a good grade in physics is required for getting into medical school, even though mastering classical mechanics isn't required for becoming a good doctor.

[3] There were a few terms when I felt like I did a really good job of learning the material (conveniently, I also got really good grades during these terms). But for these terms, one ...
Meetup : Brussels - Mindfulness and mental habits
by Roxolan — 2015-01-06T13:39:38.289Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels - Mindfulness and mental habits

WHEN:
10 January 2015 01:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles

LessWrong has been a bit quiet of late, partly because some of its best would-be contributors have focused on their own blogs. (This doesn't bode well for the long-term health of the site, but I'm not quite ready to rename this group SlateStarCodex Brussels.)

Among the most interesting off-site developments is sort of a generalization of the ideas discussed in Ugh Fields and Noticing Confusion: an ongoing conversation on mindfulness and trainable mental habits. Most of it is on Brienne Strohl's Agenty Duck (though there's a good deal of less link-able spillover on Facebook), and brand-new The Mind's UI should be all about it.

It's the month of new year's resolutions, as good a time as any to discuss such concrete self-improvement techniques.

We will meet at 1 pm at "La Fleur en papier doré, close to the Brussels Central station. The meeting will be in English to facilitate both French and Dutch speaking members.

If you are coming for the first time, please consider filling out this one minute form to share your contact information.

The Brussels meetup group communicates through a Google Group.

Meetup announcements are also mirrored on meetup.com

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels - Mindfulness and mental habits
Low Hanging fruit for buying a better life
by taryneast — 2015-01-06T10:11:15.242Z

What can I purchase with $100 that will be the best thing I can buy to make my life better?

I've decided to budget some regular money to improving my life each month. I'd like to start with low hanging fruit for obvious reasons - but when I sat down to think of improvements, I found myself thinking of the same old things I'd already been planning to do anyway... and I'd like out of that rut.
Constraints/more info:

be concrete. I know - "spend money on experiences" is a good idea - but what experiences are the best option to purchase *first*

"better" is deliberately left vague - choose how you would define it, so that I'm not constrained just by ways of "being better" that I'd have thought of myself.

please assume that I have all my basic needs met (eg food, clothing, shelter) and that I have budgeted separately for things like investing for my financial future and for charity.

apart from the above, assume nothing - Especially don't try and tailor solutions to anything you might know and/or guess about me specifically, because I think this would be a useful resource for others who might have just begun.

don't constrain yourself to exactly $100 - I could buy 2-3 things for that, or I could save up over a couple of months and buy something more expensive... I picked $100 because it's a round number and easy to imagine.

it's ok to add "dumb" things - they can help spur great ideas, or just get rid of an elephant in the room.

try thinking of your top-ten before reading any comments, in order not to bias your initial thinking. Then come back and add ten more once you've been inspired by what everyone else came up with.

Background:

This is a question I recently posed to my local Less Wrong group and we came up with a few good ideas, so I thought I'd share the discussion with the wider community and see what we can come up with. I'll add the list we came up with later on in the comments...

It'd be great to have a repository of low-hanging fruit for things that can be solved with (relatively affordable) amounts of money. I'd personally like to go through the list - look at candidates that sound like they'd be really useful to me and then make a prioritised list of what to work on first.
Meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - How bad statistics can ruin your life
by luminosity — 2015-01-06T07:49:43.752Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - How bad statistics can ruin your life

WHEN:
01 February 2015 04:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
Humanist House, 10 Shepherd St Chippendale

Join us at our February dojo for a session on statistics given by Tim Josling. As per usual, some of us will head off for a group dinner after the session. All are welcome to join.

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Rationality Dojo - How bad statistics can ruin your life
Superintelligence 17: Multipolar scenarios
by KatjaGrace — 2015-01-06T06:44:45.533Z

This is part of a weekly reading group on Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence. For more information about the group, and an index of posts so far see the announcement post. For the schedule of future topics, see MIRI's reading guide.

Welcome. This week we discuss the seventeenth section in the reading guide: Multipolar scenarios. This corresponds to the first part of Chapter 11.

Apologies for putting this up late. I am traveling, and collecting together the right combination of electricity, wifi, time, space, and permission from an air hostess to take out my computer was more complicated than the usual process.

This post summarizes the section, and offers a few relevant notes, and ideas for further investigation. Some of my own thoughts and questions for discussion are in the comments.

There is no need to proceed in order through this post, or to look at everything. Feel free to jump straight to the discussion. Where applicable and I remember, page numbers indicate the rough part of the chapter that is most related (not necessarily that the chapter is being cited for the specific claim).

Reading: “Of horses and men” from Chapter 11

Summary

'Multipolar scenario': a situation where no single agent takes over the world

A multipolar scenario may arise naturally, or intentionally for reasons of safety. (p159)

Knowing what would happen in a multipolar scenario involves analyzing an extra kind of information beyond that needed for analyzing singleton scenarios: that about how agents interact (p159)

In a world characterized by cheap human substitutes, rapidly introduced, in the presence of low regulation, and strong protection of property rights, here are some things that will likely happen: (p160)

Human labor will earn wages at around the price of the substitutes - perhaps below subsistence level for a human. Note that machines have been complements to human labor for some time, raising wages. One should still expect them to become substitutes at some point and reverse this trend. (p160-61)

Capital (including AI) will earn all of the income, which will be a lot. Humans who own capital will become very wealthy. Humans who do not own income may be helped with a small fraction of others' wealth, through charity or redistribution. p161-3)

If the humans, brain emulations or other AIs receive resources from a co

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Meetup : Washington, D.C.: Meta Meetup
by RobinZ — 2015-01-06T02:34:08.503Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Meta Meetup

WHEN:
11 January 2015 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery

We will be meeting in the Kogod Courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery (8th and F Sts or 8th and G Sts NW, go straight past the information desk from either entrance) to discuss the running of the meetup group - what you like, what you want, and what you'd change. As usual, we will congregate between 3:00 and 3:30.

The goal of this meetup is twofold: first, to give the de-facto organizers of the group a better understanding of how well we have been serving this community, and second, to help make the group better going forward. We would like the main conversation to be productive towards these ends, but are otherwise open to whatever kind of input people choose to give; as always, people are allowed and encouraged to start side conversations if and when they would prefer.

According to WMATA, there will be buses replacing trains on the Blue and Yellow lines between Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and King Street stations. The Verizon Center has no scheduled events.

Upcoming meetups:

Jan. 18: Fun & Games (bring games, play games, converse, socialize, or any combination thereof)

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington, D.C.: Meta Meetup
Meetup : Sydney Meetup - January
by taryneast — 2015-01-05T22:56:54.831Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Meetup - January

WHEN:
28 January 2015 06:30:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
City Of Sydney RSL Club 565 George Street, Sydney, Australia 2000

Regular location - City of Sydney RSL
The restaurant on Level 2

Regular time (starting about 6:30)

Topic: Resolutions!

Description: Do they work? If so - which ones are the best to choose? and how do you stick to them so you actually achieve them?

Bring your resolutions, or come and let us help you figure out some.

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Meetup - January
What does being x% on board with the program of a movement mean?
by Sarunas — 2015-01-05T21:20:25.698Z

(Disclaimer: this is an exploration of possibilities of one simple model. Scott Aaronson's story is merely a starting point, merely a motivating example. This post does not claim to somehow reveal some kind of "true motivation" behind people's actions)

Recently Scott Aaronson stated that he is "97% on board with the program of feminism". This post is neither about Scott Aaronson, nor about feminism. It is a post about what does being 97 percent on board even mean. In this particular case it was probably just a figure of speech, I don't think there was anything more than that. But I think the question itself is still interesting. What does "x% agreeing" with another person or movement (let's use the word "movement" quite loosely even for things that wouldn't be called "movements" using everyday language) mean? What does "mostly agreeing" mean? This post presents one (not necessarily the only) possible model of what might be behind statements like these. The model is very simple and, if correct, could shed some light onto one particular aspect of how movements might work.

For the sake of simplicity, in this post I will assume that given a specific concrete question, person1 either agrees, or disagrees with a person2, and, similarly, person1 either agrees or disagrees with a specific point in a movement's program. Then "person1 agreeing with someone about something" is a function that outputs either 0 or 1. The arguments of this function are (person1, person2, question/statement) or (person1, movement, question/statement). Now, given person1 and person2 (or person1 and movement) one can take a list of questions/statements, and calculate the percentage of agreement for this questionnaire. If a movement has a list of statements (in other words, a list of yes/no questions) "what this movement is all about", then we can similarly calculate person1's percentage of agreement with this movement.

For the sake of simplicity, I am talking specifically about concrete and specific yes/no questions and statements. In this case, very broad statements should be understood as being shorthands for long lists of specific statements (i.e. "X should always do Y" should be understood as a shorthand for the list "X should do Y in a situation1", "X should do Y in a situation2", etc.).

The point I am trying to make is this. The length of these lists of questions/statements is usually

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