trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Online Meetups (Megameetup Telepresence Results)
by Raemon — 2012-02-05T07:49:11.625Z

Yesterday the East Coast Megameetup experimented with a Google Hangout that gave non-locals a chance to interact. Results were mixed. The hangout got off to a late start due to technical difficulties and insufficient redundant planning.

Comments from the original discussion topic:

Konkvistador:

Pretty interesting demonstration of feasibility. It has convinced me that (small) virtual meets would be practical. If it wasn't for the late hour (and waking up my host for tonight) I'd probably stay around for a bit longer. I do wonder if anything like a rationality workshop or set of group exercises could be done in this way.

juliawise:

Feedback: I think the fun/interesting thing about being in a house with ~25 LessWrongers is being able to circulate around and jump in on conversations that sound interesting. Skype/google hangouts, however good the eventual sound quality, can't recreate this because you can only talk to the person who comes over to the screen. Even if they're talking about something besides the poor sound quality, it feels pretty forced. So I don't think technical fixes are going to improve the experience much.

I believe Konkvistador showed up earlier in the day and Julia later.

We ended up running three presentations between 4 PM and 6 PM (Nutrition, Leverage's Plan, and Consensus Techniques). Later we attempted to have group discussions that got the non-local people more involved. Anyone who attended, I'd appreciate feedback. My own impressions:

1) Make sure you have a good, hardline internet connection. (We had this during the presentations, tried to move the laptops to a quieter room for discussion and found the intermittent disconnects to be unworkable)

2) Telepresent Presentations are viable, but require better planning.

The first two presentations seemed to go pretty well. The sound and video were not great, but the speaker could be understood and the powerpoints were simple white text on a black background, so they showed up reasonably on camera. The third speaker was a little quiet and the slides, while visible in the room, didn't show up very well (even using the screen-sharing capability - the image still turned out a little blurry).

The computer was kept on mute, but we had two people engaging with the non-locals via chat. Non-locals could submit questions for us to read aloud, and then have the speaker respond to. This seemed ...
What are some cool things a LWer can do at Yale, Brown, and UChicago?
by InquilineKea — 2012-02-05T05:00:29.170Z

So I'm applying for grad schools right now, and am visiting Yale, Brown, and UChicago this month (I already got accepted into UChicago, and also got invited to expenses-paid visits to both Yale and Brown). I'm visiting Yale in just 2 days.

So what are some cool things a LWer can do at those places? And which professors do research that a LWer could potentially find very interesting? Which universities would a LWer find himself/herself most at home at?

Also, is there anything else I need to know about those places?

I'm still waiting for decisions from Columbia and MIT (and got rejected by Caltech).
[SEQ RERUN] Arguing "By Definition"
by MinibearRex — 2012-02-05T03:07:17.294Z

Today's post, Arguing "By Definition" was originally published on 20 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You try to establish membership in an empirical cluster "by definition". You wouldn't feel the need to say, "Hinduism, by definition, is a religion!" because, well, of course Hinduism is a religion. It's not just a religion "by definition", it's, like, an actual religion. Atheism does not resemble the central members of the "religion" cluster, so if it wasn't for the fact that atheism is a religion by definition, you might go around thinking that atheism wasn't a religion. That's why you've got to crush all opposition by pointing out that "Atheism is a religion" is true by definition, because it isn't true any other way.

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 Sneaking in Connotations, 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.
East Coast Megameet Google Hangout, today at 3PM
by Raemon — 2012-02-04T18:06:40.072Z

Today is the East Coast Less Wrong Megameetup. We'll be trying an experiment - running a Google Hangout in the main discussion room. To participate, you'll need a Google+ account, but if you have any kind of Google account (for youtube, e-mail, or anything) you can easily add a Google+ account without filling out much additional information.

The schedule for the day is:

3 PM: Hangout starts, followed by an hour of freeform discussion

Talks start at 4 PM, and continue through 9

4 PM: Nutrition/Health by Jolly

5 PM: Leverage Research by Geoff Anders

6 PM: Consensus Technology by Oliver Carefull

7 PM: Psychology by Jasen Murray

8 PM: Rational Communities by Raymond Arnold

https://plus.google.com/hangouts/e641e55fa340e98d8d10ecad8f2a86abd13c4e06?hl=en&authuser=0#
Top 5 regrets of the dying [link]
by Dr_Manhattan — 2012-02-04T17:56:22.156Z

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying?fb_action_ids=10151236956340524&fb_action_types=news.reads&fb_source=other_multiline

Interesting b/c future concerns and what other people think type of concerns are not much of a factor here.
Quantification of eyewitness reliability?
by DataPacRat — 2012-02-04T12:33:39.637Z

This mentions some of the limitations of eyewitness testimony; does anybody here have any references giving any hard numbers about how reliable eyewitness accounts are, under any given circumstances?

I'd like to be more conscious about my Bayesian-type updates of my beliefs based on general accounts of what people say. So far, I've started using a rule-of-thumb that somebody telling me something is so is worth approximately 1 decibel of belief (1/3rd of a bit); evidence, but about the weakest evidence possible, nulled by any opposing accounts, and countered by any more substansive evidence.

If possible, I'd like to know exactly how reliable such testimony tends to be in one particular set of circumstances - time since the thing being reported, level of emotional involvement, etc - to use as a baseline, and at least roughly how strongly such factors change that. (I'll actually be very surprised if this particular set of data currently exists in ready form - but I'll be satisfied if I can get even order-of-magnitude approximations, so that I know whether or not the rules-of-thumb I end up using are at least within plausible spitting distance.)
Is Sunk Cost Fallacy a Fallacy?
by gwern — 2012-02-04T04:33:49.585Z

I just finished the first draft of my essay, "Are Sunk Costs Fallacies?"; there is still material I need to go through, but the bulk of the material is now there. The formatting is too gnarly to post here, so I ask everyone's forgiveness in clicking through.

To summarize:

sunk costs are probably issues in big organizations

but maybe not ones that can be helped

sunk costs are not issues in animals

they appear to be in children & adults

but many apparent problems can be explained as part of a learning strategy

there are few clear indications sunk costs are genuine problems

much of what we call 'sunk cost' looks like simple carelessness & thoughtlessness

(If any of that seems unlikely or absurd to you, click through. I've worked very hard to provide multiple citations where possible, and fulltext for practically everything.)

I started this a while ago; but Luke/SIAI paid for much of the work, and that motivation plus academic library access made this essay more comprehensive than it would have been and finished months in advance.
[SEQ RERUN] Sneaking in Connotations
by MinibearRex — 2012-02-04T01:50:01.627Z

Today's post, Sneaking in Connotations was originally published on 19 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You try to sneak in the connotations of a word, by arguing from a definition that doesn't include the connotations. A "wiggin" is defined in the dictionary as a person with green eyes and black hair. The word "wiggin" also carries the connotation of someone who commits crimes and launches cute baby squirrels, but that part isn't in the dictionary. So you point to someone and say: "Green eyes? Black hair? See, told you he's a wiggin! Watch, next he's going to steal the silverware."

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 Categorizing Has Consequences, 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.
lesswrong.ru domain for translation project?
by BT_Uytya — 2012-02-03T19:27:05.209Z

Hello.

Me and a group of a fellow aspiring rationalists work on Russian translation of LessWrong.
The project is considerable; I think it is worthy of a paid second-level domain.
Too bad rationality.ru is already taken. So are rationalist.ru, ratio.ru and similar others.
Well, there is an option. Would it be impudent of us to store our translations in the lesswrong.ru?
Weekly LW Meetups: Cambridge, Houston, Melbourne, Pittsburgh, Vancouver, Waterloo
by FrankAdamek — 2012-02-03T16:29:01.720Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Need more people for Vancouver meetup: 28 January 2012 03:03PM
Pittsburgh Meetup: Big Gaming Fun 3!: 29 January 2012 01:00PM
Houston Meetup - 1/29: 29 January 2012 02:00PM
Waterloo Meetup: 30 January 2012 08:00PM
Salt Lake City LW Meetup #2 Logistics: 04 February 2012 03:00PM
First Brussels meetup: 11 February 2012 11:00AM
Sydney Rationality meet-up No.2: 15 February 2012 06:00PM
Ongoing Ohio Meetup: 19 February 2012 04:00PM

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

Cambridge UK: 28 January 2012 06:00PM
Melbourne practical rationality meetup: 03 February 2012 07:00PM

Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, and West Los Angeles.

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, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be 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, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Waterloo.

If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know!
Fireplace Delusions [LINK]
by mas — 2012-02-03T04:13:12.538Z

Sam Harris, in his recent article called The Fireplace Delusion, tries to make you feel what it's like to react to a cached belief being irreparably destroyed. Just incase you forgot what your apostasy (if you had one, of course) was like in its early stages.

What are some of the Fireplace Delusions you've come across in your days?

EDIT: WOODSMOKE HEALTH EFFECTS
Meetup : Salt Lake City Meetup #2
by adamisom — 2012-02-03T03:46:50.968Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Salt Lake City Meetup #2

WHEN:
04 February 2012 03:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
248 E 100 S, Salt Lake City, UT 8411, USA

The 2nd meetup will be at Nostalgia Cafe, 248 E 100 S, this Saturday at 3:00 pm. Saturdays at 3 was the preferred choice by a large margin.

By the way, a tentative 3rd meetup would probably be in a more central location, possibly Taylorsville Library, though I'm just hazarding a guess since I don't know where everyone present last time and otherwise interested lives.

The 2nd Meetup's agenda may--or may not--change. I realize that a presentation on probability theory may not be possible at even a very large table in a cafe. If that doesn't work until next time, I suggest one thing to do is brainstorm ideas (and next actions) for ksvanhorn and DanNuffer's for-profit rationality training idea. Another is to gauge interest in and discuss instrumental rationality (I have a couple of ideas), and in general have a few more one-on-one conversations.

Discussion article for the meetup : Salt Lake City Meetup #2
Formulas of arithmetic that behave like decision agents
by Nisan — 2012-02-03T02:58:42.692Z

I wrote this post in the course of working through Vladimir Slepnev's A model of UDT with a halting oracle. This post contains some of the ideas of Slepnev's post, with all the proofs written out. The main formal difference is that while Slepnev's post is about programs with access to a halting oracle, the "decision agents" in this post are formulas in Peano arithmetic. They are generally uncomputable and do not reason under uncertainty.

These ideas are due to Vladimir Slepnev and Vladimir Nesov. (Please let me know if I should credit anyone else.) I'm pretty sure none of this is original material on my part. It is possible that I have misinterpreted Slepnev's post or introduced errors.

We are going to define a world function , a -ary function1 that outputs an ordered pair of payoff values. There are functions such that and for any . In fact is a function in the three variables and .

We are also going to define an agent function that outputs the symbol or . The argument is supposed to be the Gödel number of the world function, and is some sort of indexical information.

We want to define our agent such that

( denotes the Gödel number of . means that is provable in Peano arithmetic. represents the numeral for . I don't care what value has when isn't the Gödel number of an appropriate -ary function.)

There is some circularity in this tentative definition, because a formula standing for appears in the definition of itself. We get around this by using diagonalization. We'll describe how this works just this once: First define the function as follows:

This function can be defined by a formula. Then the diagonal lemma gives us a formula such that .

This is our (somewhat) rational decision agent. If it can prove it will do one thing, it does another; this is what Slepnev calls "playing chicken with the universe". If it can prove that is an optimal strategy, it chooses ; and otherwise it chooses .

First, a lemma about the causes and consequences of playing chicken:

Lemma 1. For any ,

( is a binary-valued function such that is true exactly when there is a proof of in Peano arithmetic. For brevity we write instead. is the proposition that Peano arithmetic, plus the axiom that Peano arithmetic is consistent, is a consistent theory.)

Proof. (1) By definition of ,

So

(2) By the principle of explosion,

(3) By the de...
One last roll of the dice
by Mitchell_Porter — 2012-02-03T01:59:56.996Z

Previous articles: Personal research update, Does functionalism imply dualism?, State your physical account of experienced color.

In phenomenology, there is a name for the world of experience, the "lifeworld". The lifeworld is the place where you exist, where time flows, and where things are actually green. One of the themes of the later work of Edmund Husserl is that a scientific image of the real world has been constructed, on the basis of which it is denied that various phenomena of the lifeworld exist anywhere, at any level of reality.

When I asked, in the previous post, for a few opinions about what color is and how it relates to the world according to current science, I was trying to gauge just how bad the eclipse of the lifeworld by theoretical conceptions is, among the readers of this site. I'd say there is a problem, but it's a problem that might be solved by patient discussion.

Someone called Automaton has given us a clear statement of the extreme position: nothing is actually green at any level of reality; even green experiences don't involve the existence of anything that is actually green; there is no green in reality, there is only "experience of green" which is not itself green. I see other responses which are just a step or two away from this extreme, but they don't deny the existence of actual color with that degree of unambiguity.

A few people talk about wavelengths of light, but I doubt that they want to assert that the light in question, as it traverses space, is actually colored green. Which returns us to the dilemma: either "experiences" exist and part of them is actually green, or you have to say that nothing exists, in any sense, at any level of reality, that is actually green. Either the lifeworld exists somewhere in reality, or you must assert, as does the philosopher quoted by Automaton, that all that exists are brain processes and words. Your color sensations aren't really there, you're "having a sensation" without there being a sensation in reality.

What about the other responses? kilobug seems to think that pi actually exists inside a computer calculating the digits of pi, and that this isn't dualist. Manfred thinks that "keeping definitions and referents distinct" would somehow answer the question of where in reality the actual shades of green are. drethelin says "The universe does not work how it feels to us it works" withou...
What will rationality look like in the future?
by DataPacRat — 2012-02-03T01:28:37.168Z

One of the standard methods of science-fiction world-building is to take a current trend and extrapolate it into the future, and see what comes out. One trend I've observed is that over the last century or so, people have kept coming up with clever new ways to find answers to important questions - that is, developing new methods of rationality.

So, given what we do currently know about the overall shape of such methods, from Godel's Incompleteness Theory to Kolmogorov Complexity to the various ways to get around Prisoner's Dilemmas... Then, at least in a general science-fictional world-building sense, what might we be able to guess or say about what rationalists will be like in, oh, 50-100 years?
Question on math in "A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation"
by Mark_Eichenlaub — 2012-02-02T22:29:56.587Z

"A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation" (http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical) defines a proper rule for a betting game as one where the payoff is maximized by betting an amount proportional to the probability of success.

The first example rule given is that the payoff is one minus the negative of the squared error, so for example if you make a bet of .3 on the winner, your payoff is 1-(1-.3)^2 = .51.

This doesn't seem like a good example. It works if there are only two options, but I don't think it works if there are three or more. For example, we imagine P(red) = .5, P(blue) = .2, P(green) = .3. If we place bets of .5, .2, and .3 respectively, the expected return I get is .6. (edit: Fixed a mistake pointed out by Douglas Knight.)

However, if I place bets of .51, .19, .3 the expected return is .60173. I have that the condition for maximization is

(1-R)P(R) = (1-B)P(B) = (1-G)P(G),

which I got by taking partial derivatives of the expectation and setting them equal. ("R" stands for the bet placed on red and "P(R)" for the probability of red, etc.) This is different than simply R=P(R), etc.

So does the article have a mistake, or do I, or did I miss part of the context?
Elevator pitches/responses for rationality / AI
by lukeprog — 2012-02-02T20:35:23.304Z

I'm trying to develop a large set of elevator pitches / elevator responses for the two major topics of LW: rationality and AI.

An elevator pitch lasts 20-60 seconds, and is not necessarily prompted by anything, or at most is prompted by something very vague like "So, I heard you talking about 'rationality'. What's that about?"

An elevator response is a 20-60 second, highly optimized response to a commonly heard sentence or idea, for example, "Science doesn't know everything."

Examples (but I hope you can improve upon them):

"So, I hear you care about rationality. What's that about?"

Well, we all have beliefs about the world, and we use those beliefs to make decisions that we think will bring us the most of what we want. What most people don't realize is that there is a mathematically optimal way to update your beliefs in response to evidence, and a mathematically optimal way to figure out which decision is most likely to bring you the most of what you want, and these methods are defined by probability theory and decision theory. Moreover, cognitive science has discovered a long list of predictable mistakes our brains make when forming beliefs and making decisions, and there are particular things we can do to improve our beliefs and decisions. [This is the abstract version; probably better to open with a concrete and vivid example.]

"Science doesn't know everything."

As the comedian Dara O'Briain once said, science knows it doesn't know everything, or else it'd stop. But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can use whatever theory most appeals to you. Anybody can do that, and use whatever crazy theory they want.

"But you can't expect people to act rationally. We are emotional creatures."

But of course. Expecting people to be rational is irrational. If you expect people to usually be rational, you're ignoring an enormous amount of evidence about how humans work.

"But sometimes you can't wait until you have all the information you need. Sometimes you need to act right away."

But of course. You have to weigh the cost of new information with the expected value of that new information. Sometimes it's best to just act on the best of what you know right now.

"But we have to use intuition sometimes. And sometimes, my intuitions are pretty good!"

But of course. We even have lots of data on which situations are conduc

...