trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Catching Up With the Present From the Developing World
by diegocaleiro — 2013-05-07T12:59:06.778Z

Hi all, I'm leaving Lesswrong for a few months to pursue a Masters, and this Text below will never be finished. It is just a story of what is it like to grow up outside where everything is going on, a country where humanities are sad and terrible, and people are fun, but not quite wise.

Original Summary: Two things (Note: Were going to) permeate this text, an autobiographical short account of what is it like to grow up far from where things are happening, and an outside view account of some of the people and institutions (MIRI,LW,Leverage Research, FHI,80k,GWWC) whom presently carry, as far as I can see, the highest expected value gamble of our time. I have visited all those institutions, and my account here should be considered just a biased, one subjective perspective data point, not a proper evaluation of those places. Other people who come from developing world countries might have interesting stories to tell, and I'd encourage them to do so (Pablo in Argentina, many in India, China and elsewhere)

(NOTE: There is nothing about the institutions here, only the growing up part was written by the time I decided to halt this writing)

Far away, across the sea

As is the case with most outliers, outcasts, and outsiders in general, a large amount of sociological facts were determinant of me being the first person in Brazil acquainted with the cluster of ideas to which the institutions mentioned belong. Jonatas, the other Brazilian who entered this world early on (2004), has a very similar story to tell. The prerequisites seem to have been: young, middle class, children of early adopters, inclined towards philosophy, living in a cosmopolitan area, with a particular disregard for authority (uncommon in Brazil), high IQ (aprox 4 SDs above Brazilian average) beginning to get stuck in a nonsense university system in the humanities. Due to expected income considerations and a large variance in income among Brazilians, most of the high IQ people go for Medicine, Engineering, Law and sometimes physical sciences. Thus many of the humanities become just signalling that you praise the right authorities (right here meaning whomever your advisor or professor was compelled to praise by his professor) and the cycle rolls on and on.

So I was left with good resources (time, curiosity, intellectual eagerness) and internet access. The web changed it all. It was hard to ...
[SEQ RERUN] My Way
by MinibearRex — 2013-05-07T05:35:31.400Z

Today's post, My Way was originally published on 17 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

I sometimes think of myself as being like the protagonist in a classic SF labyrinth story, wandering further and further into some alien artifact, trying to radio back a description of what I'm seeing, so that I can be followed. But what I'm finding is not just the Way, the thing that lies at the center of the labyrinth; it is also my Way, the path that I would take to come closer to the center, from whatever place I started out. And yet there is still a common thing we are all trying to find. We should be aware that others' shortest paths may not be the same as our own, but this is not the same as giving up the ability to judge or to share.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Of Gender and Rationality, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Be Nice to Non-Rationalists
by wobster109 — 2013-05-07T02:27:31.590Z

Note: I have no intention of criticizing the person involved. I admire that (s)he made the "right" decision in the end (in my opinion), and I mention it only as an example we could all learn from. I did request permission to use his/her anecdote here. I'll also use the pronoun "he" when really I mean he/she.

---

Once Pat says “no,” it’s harder to get to “yes” than if you had never asked.

---

Crocker's rules has this very clear clause, and we should keep it well in mind:

Note that Crocker's Rules does not mean you can insult people; it means that other people don't have to worry about whether they are insulting you. Crocker's Rules are a discipline, not a privilege. Furthermore, taking advantage of Crocker's Rules does not imply reciprocity. How could it? Crocker's Rules are something you do for yourself, to maximize information received - not something you grit your teeth over and do as a favor.

Recently, a rationalist heard over social media that an acquaintance - a friend-of-a-friend - had found their lost pet. They said it was better than winning a lottery. The rationalist responded that unless they'd spent thousands of dollars searching, or posted a large reward, then they're saying something they don't really mean. Then, feeling like a party-pooper and a downer, he deleted his comment.

I believe this was absolutely the correct things to do. As Miss Manners says (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/06/AR2007020601518.html), people will associate unpleasant emotions with the source and the cause. They're not going to say, oh, that's correct; I was mistaken about the value of my pet; thank you for correcting my flawed value system.

Instead they'll say, those rationalists are so heartless, attaching dollar signs to everything. They think they know better. They're rude and stuck up. I don't want to have anything to do with them. And then they'll think walk away with a bad impression of us. (Yes, all of us, for we are a minority now, and each of us reflects upon all of us, the same way a Muslim bomber would reflect poorly on public opinion of all Muslims, while a Christian bomber would not.) In the future they'll be less likely to listen to any one of us.

The only appropriate thing to say in this case is "I'm so happy for you." But that doesn't mean we can't promote ourselves ever. Here are some alternatives.

At

...
Using Evolution for Marriage or Sex 
by diegocaleiro — 2013-05-06T05:34:57.443Z

Returned to original title, for the good reasons given here

There was a recent post in Discussion which at time of this writing held staggering 454 commentaries, which inclined me to write an evolutionary psychology and social endocrinology derived post on courtship, and Mating Intelligence, to share some readings on recent discussions and evidence coming from those areas. I've been meaning to do this for a while, and a much longer version could have been written, with more specific case studies and citations and an academic outlook, yet I find this abridged personal version more adequate for Lesswrong. In no area more disclaimers are desirable than when speaking about evolutionary drives for mating. It touches emotions, gender issues, morality, societal standards, and it speaks of topics that make people shy, embarrassed, angry and happy on a weekly basis, so I'll begin with a few paragraphs of disclaimers.

I'll try to avoid saying anything that I can remember having read in a Pick Up Artist book, and focus on using less known mating biases to help straight women and men find what they look for in different contexts. This post won't work well for same-gender seduction. If you object irrevocably to evolutionary psychology, just so stories, etc... I suggest you refrain from commenting, and also reading, why bother?

Words of caution on reading people (me included) talking about evolutionary psychology, specially when applied to current people: Suspicious about whether there is good evidence for it? Read this first, then if you want Eliezer on the evolutionary-cognitive difference, and this if your feminist taste buds activate negatively. If you never heard of Evolutionary Psychology (which includes 8 different bodies of data to draw from), check also an Introduction with Dawkins and Buss.

When I say "A guy does D when G happens" please read: "There are statistically significant, or theoretically significant reasons from social endocrinology, or social and evolutionary psychology to believe that under circumstances broadly similar to G, human males, on average, will be inclined towards behaving in manners broadly similar to the D way. Also, most tests are made with western human males, tests are less than 40 years old, subject to publication bias, and sometimes done by people who don't understand math well enough to do their statistics homework, they have not...
[SEQ RERUN] Of Gender and Rationality
by MinibearRex — 2013-05-06T03:49:02.329Z

Today's post, Of Gender and Rationality was originally published on 16 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Analysis of the gender imbalance that appears in "rationalist" communities, suggesting nine possible causes of the effect, and possible corresponding solutions.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Bayesians vs. Barbarians, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Pascal's Muggle (short version)
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2013-05-05T23:36:13.940Z

Shortened version of: Pascal's Muggle: Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence

One proposal which has been floated for dealing with Pascal's Mugger is to penalize hypotheses that let you affect a large number of people, in proportion to the number of people affected - what we could call perhaps a "leverage penalty" instead of a "complexity penalty". This isn't just for Pascal's Mugger in particularly, it seems required to have expected utilities in general converge when the 'size' of scenarios can grow much faster than their algorithmic complexity.

Unfortunately this potentially leads us into a different problem, that of Pascal's Muggle.

Suppose a poorly-dressed street person asks you for five dollars in exchange for doing a googolplex's worth of good using his Matrix Lord powers - say, saving the lives of a googolplex other people inside computer simulations they're running.

"Well," you reply, "I think that it would be very improbable that I would be able to affect so many people through my own, personal actions - who am I to have such a great impact upon events? Indeed, I think the probability is somewhere around one over googolplex, maybe a bit less. So no, I won't pay five dollars - it is unthinkably improbable that I could do so much good!"

"I see," says the Mugger.

A wind begins to blow about the alley, whipping the Mugger's loose clothes about him as they shift from ill-fitting shirt and jeans into robes of infinite blackness, within whose depths tiny galaxies and stranger things seem to twinkle. In the sky above, a gap edged by blue fire opens with a horrendous tearing sound - you can hear people on the nearby street yelling in sudden shock and terror, implying that they can see it too - and displays the image of the Mugger himself, wearing the same robes that now adorn his body, seated before a keyboard and a monitor.

"That's not actually me," the Mugger says, "just a conceptual representation, but I don't want to drive you insane. Now give me those five dollars, and I'll save a googolplex lives, just as promised. It's easy enough for me, given the computing power my home universe offers. As for why I'm doing this, there's an ancient debate in philosophy among my people - something about how we ought to sum our expected utilities - and I mean to use the video of this event to make a point at the n...
Maximizing Your Donations via a Job
by Alexei — 2013-05-05T23:19:05.116Z

In November of 2012 I set a goal for myself: find the most x-risk reducing role I can fill. At first I thought it would be by working directly with MIRI, but after a while it became clear that I could contribute more by simply donating. So my goal became: find the highest paying job, so I can donate lots of money to CFAR and MIRI.

A little bit of background on me. Started programming in 2000. Graduated in 2009 with Bachelor's in computer science. Worked for about a year and a half at a game company. Then did my own game startup for about a year. Then moved to the bay area and joined a game startup here, which was acquired 10 months later. Worked a bit at the new company and then left. So, just under four years of professional programming experience, but primarily in the game industry. Almost no leadership / managerial experience, aside from the startup I did where I hired freelancers.

Below is my experience of finding a software engineering job in the Silicon Valley. If you are not an engineer or not in the Silicon Valley, I think you'll still find a lot of useful information here.

Pre-game

Before sending out my resume, I spent about a month preparing. I read Intro to Algorithms, which was very good overall, but not a huge help in preparing for interviews.[1] I read Cracking the Coding Interview, which was extremely helpful. (If you read only one book to prepare, make it this one.) The book has a lot of questions that are similar to the ones you'll actually see during interviews. I also did TopCoder problems, which were pretty helpful as well.[2] Looking back, I wish I spent more time finding actual interview questions online and doing more of those (that's why CCI book was so helpful).

After several weeks of preparation, I compiled a long list of companies I was going to apply to. I checked on GlassDoor to see what kind of salary I could expect at each one. I then rated all the companies. Companies with low salaries and poor personal fit received the lowest rating.

I started by applying to companies with the lowest ratings. This way I could use them as practice for the companies I thought would actually make a competitive offer. This was the right move and worked very well. (Another friend of mine did the same approach with good results as well.) Remember, you are not just doing those interviews to practice the coding problems, you are practicing pit...
Meetup : Berkeley: Information theory and the art of conversation
by Nisan — 2013-05-05T22:35:00.823Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Information theory and the art of conversation

WHEN: 08 May 2013 07:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE: Berkeley, CA

Abstract: A Bayesian definition of surprise is as follows: Given a distribution P over models M and some observed data D, the surprise of D is the Kullback-Liebler divergence from the prior to the posterior:

http://goo.gl/cKE6w

A good experiment or a good conversation is one that has a high expectation of surprise, E[S(D, M)]. In this meetup we will practice having good conversations by using the strategy "Ask the question whose answer will surprise you most."

The meetup will begin on Wednesday at 7:30pm. For directions to Zendo, see the mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/bayarealesswrong

or call me at:

http://i.imgur.com/Vcafy.png

Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: Information theory and the art of conversation
Meetup : London Special Guests: Jaan Tallinn and Michael Vassar of MetaMed 
by kerspoon — 2013-05-05T20:48:48.329Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Special Guests: Jaan Tallinn and Michael Vassar of MetaMed

WHEN:
11 May 2013 01:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
London (Shakespeares Head, Holborn)

We have three specials guests! Jaan, Michael, and Cat (see below) are flying in to the UK and will be joining us for a meetup. As usual, it is simply a few people with common interests chatting for a few hours. Anyone can come along, don't feel like you need to have read the sequences. It's a fun way to spend a few hours. It's also nice to have people to bounce ideas off - we are a friendly bunch. Hope to see you there,
For more information see our google group (link below) or message me (kerspoon)
Guests:
- Jaan Tallinn, who participated in the development of Skype and Kazaa.
- Michael Vassar, the former president of the Singularity Institute and current Chief Science Officer of MetaMed.
- Cat Lavigne, CFAR instructor.
See:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/lesswronglondon/_h6lGBjnO9Q
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/had/michael_vassar_in_europe/ http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/h95/want_to_have_a_cfar_instructor_visit_your_lw_group/

Discussion article for the meetup : London Special Guests: Jaan Tallinn and Michael Vassar of MetaMed
Antijargon Project
by jefftk — 2013-05-05T17:26:33.879Z

When a group of people talk to each other a lot they develop terms that they can use in place of larger concepts. This makes it easier to talk to people inside the group, but then it's harder to talk about the same ideas with people outside the group. If we were smart enough to keep up fully independent vocabularies where we would always use the right words for the people we were talking to, this wouldn't be an issue. But instead we get in the habit of saying weird words, and then when we want to talk to people who don't know those words we either struggle to find words they know or waste a lot of time introducing words. Especially when the group jargon term offers only a minor advantage over the non-jargon phrasing I think this is a bad tradeoff if you also want to speak to people outside the group.

Recently I've been working on using as little jargon as possible. Pushing myself to speak conventionally, even when among people who would understand weird terms a little faster, can be frustrating, but I think I'm also getting better at it.

I also posted this on my blog
[Link] More Right launched
by mstevens — 2013-05-05T15:51:40.077Z

Various people (including Konkvistador who has been talking about it the most) have launched their blog More Right

"A group blog, More Right is a place to discuss the many things that are touched by politics that we prefer wouldn’t be, as well as right wing ideas in general. It grew out of the correspondences among like minded people in late 2012, who first began their journey studying the findings of modern cognitive science on the failings of human reasoning and ended it reading serious 19th century gentlemen denouncing democracy. Surveying modernity, we found cracks in its façade. Findings and seemingly correct ideas, carefully bolted down and hidden, met with disapproving stares and inarticulate denunciation when unearthed. This only whetted our appetites. Proceeding from the surface to the foundations, we found them lacking. This is reflected in the spirit of the site."
Use Search Engines Early and Often
by katydee — 2013-05-05T08:33:01.758Z

The Internet contains vast amounts of useful content. Unfortunately, it also contains vast amounts of garbage, superstimulus hazards, and false, meaningless, or outright harmful information. One skill that is hence quite useful in the modern day is using search engines correctly, allowing you to separate the wheat from the chaff. When doing so, one can often uncover preexisting work that solves your problem for you, the answers to relevant factual questions, and so on. It is rare to find a situation where search engines are outright useless-- at the very least they tend to point you in the direction of useful information.

Further, the time cost of setting up and refining a search is extremely low, meaning that most of the time "just Google it" should in fact be your default response to a situation where you don't have very much information.[1] Overall, I consider one's ability to use search engines-- and, just as importantly, one's ability to recognize what types of situations can benefit from using them-- a basic but fairly significant instrumental rationality skill.

Much of the above sounds extremely obvious, and in point of fact it should be-- but the fact remains that people don't use search engines anywhere near as often as they seemingly should. I've frequently found myself in situations where someone in the same room as me asks me a trivially searchable factual question while we are both using computers. Worse still, I've been in situations where people do the same over IRC! The existence of lmgtfy indicates that others have noticed this issue before, and yet it remains a problem.

So, how can we do better?

One easy trick that I've found very helpful is to use Goodsearch instead of Google. Goodsearch is a service that automatically donates a cent to a charity of your choice whenever you search.[2] Further, it can be installed into your search toolbar in Firefox, making the activation cost of using Goodsearch rather than Google essentially zero if, like me, you tend to search in the search bar instead of the URL field. Goodsearch has had profound effects on my tendency to perform searches because it gives me a little hit of "doing good" every time I perform a search, thus encouraging me to do so in more situations, thus causing me to accrue more money via Goodsearch, etc.

This has not only made me more productive by causing me to search more but added positi...
Ray Kurzweil joins Google to work on AI (link)
by D_Alex — 2013-05-05T05:59:21.860Z

I am very curious what will come out of this. Does Kurzweil really have some insightful ideas that will help advance AI? He used to be quite the technocrat, but I have the feeling that he is more a philosopher these days than a technical person. But maybe progress toward a new philosophical approach is exactly what the AI needs... comments sought!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/04/29/interview-how-ray-kurzweil-plans-to-revolutionize-search-at-google/
Health/Longevity Link List
by Dorikka — 2013-05-05T03:17:30.281Z

Dying or becoming severely physically/mentally ill is very likely going to significantly lower the output of your utility function, so it would probably be a very bad idea to ignore the low-hanging resources which can significantly extend the time for which you are alive and well. I have attempted to search LessWrong for a list of such resources, and haven't been able to find one.

Are there any books, websites, or posts that contain significantly low-hanging fruit in this area? If so, please list them in the comments below.