trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Explanations for Less Wrong articles that you didn't understand
by Kaj_Sotala — 2014-03-31T11:19:44.106Z

ErinFlight said:

I'm struggling to understand anything technical on this website. I've enjoyed reading the sequences, and they have given me a lot to thing about. Still, I've read the introduction to Bayes theorem multiple times, and I simply can't grasp it. Even starting at the very beginning of the sequences I quickly get lost because there are references to programming and cognitive science which I simply do not understand.

Thinking about it, I realized that this might be a common concern. There are probably plenty of people who've looked at various more-or-less technical or jargony Less Wrong posts, tried understanding them, and then given up (without posting a comment explaining their confusion).

So I figured that it might be good to have a thread where you can ask for explanations for any Less Wrong post that you didn't understand and would like to, but don't want to directly comment on for any reason (e.g. because you're feeling embarassed, because the post is too old to attract much traffic, etc.). In the spirit of various Stupid Questions threads, you're explicitly encouraged to ask even for the kinds of explanations that you feel you "should" get even yourself, or where you feel like you could get it if you just put in the effort (but then never did).

You can ask to have some specific confusing term or analogy explained, or to get the main content of a post briefly summarized in plain English and without jargon, or anything else. (Of course, there are some posts that simply cannot be explained in non-technical terms, such as the ones in the Quantum Mechanics sequence.) And of course, you're encouraged to provide explanations to others!
Meetup : Canberra Meetup: Life hacks part 1
by DanielFilan — 2014-03-31T07:28:32.358Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra Meetup: Life hacks part 1

WHEN:
12 April 2014 07:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
ANU Arts Centre

Before coming to the meetup, please investigate some kind of life hack: an activity which you suspect that most meetup attendees do not perform, but will make them more rational, more healthy, more happy, more clever, or otherwise improve their lives in some way.

Examples of the sort of thing that I mean are:

-Daily meditation

-Intermittent fasting

-Using a certain nootropic

-Using LW study hall

-Activities involved in liking someone on purpose: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2a5/on_enjoying_disagreeable_company/

-Training yourself to notice confusion: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jpu/a_selfexperiment_in_training_noticing_confusion/

-Anything listed here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jrt/lifestyle_interventions_to_increase_longevity/

-Anything listed here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jgy/try_more_things/

Please choose one life hack (or more if you're keen), and look into why it might be worth trying. During the meetup, we will discuss the life hacks that people have looked into, and at the end of the meetup, everyone will commit to try one such life hack. Then, at the next meetup, we will discuss how well each life hack worked, and hopefully discover some effective ways to make our lives better. Vegan snacks will be provided.

General meetup info:

If you use Facebook, please join our group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/lwcanberra/

Structured meetups are held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until 10 pm at the XSite (home of the XSA), located upstairs in the ANU Arts Centre.

There will be LWers at the Computer Science Students Association's weekly board games night, held on Wednesdays from 7 pm in the CSIT building, room N101.

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra Meetup: Life hacks part 1
Meetup : Sydney Meetup - April
by taryneast — 2014-03-31T01:03:03.643Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Meetup - April

WHEN:
23 April 2014 07:30:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
Sydney City RSL, 565 George St, Sydney, Australia 2000

We're going well, so fourth meetup, here we come!

6:30 PM for early discussion 7PM general dinner-discussion after dinner we'll have our rationality exercise and a more specific discussion-topic.

I'll book another table under the name "less wrong". Last meetup we were in the restaurant on level 2. When I arrive I'll facebook about where exactly the table is located.

We'll have general discussion over dinner, followed by a rationality exercise and more specific discussion-topic.

This month's theme is:
"Health and well-being. What works and doesn't work for me"

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Meetup - April
Meetup : Sydney Social Meetup - April (Bridge walk)
by taryneast — 2014-03-31T00:58:41.192Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Social Meetup - April (Bridge walk)

WHEN:
10 April 2014 06:30:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
Milsons Point Station, Milsons Point NSW 2061, Australia

5:30pm. We will walk across the bridge and eat dinner in the city at around 7ish (TBA).

Current proposal for dinner is a pot-luck lunch in Hyde Park. I will facebook our location when we arrive.

Proposed walk on google maps:

https://maps.google.com.au/maps?q=Milsons+Point+Station,+Milsons+Point,+New+South+Wales+to+Hyde+Park,+Elizabeth+Street,+Sydney,+New+South+Wales&saddr=Milsons+Point+Station,+Milsons+Point,+New+South+Wales&daddr=Hyde+Park,+Elizabeth+Street,+Sydney,+New+South+Wales&hl=en&ll=-33.859761,151.209211&spn=0.033285,0.051155&sll=-33.852633,151.207581&sspn=0.033288,0.051155&geocode=Ff-M-_0dTE8DCSnLmt0Yi64SazGb5XnhMJCPTg%3BFQ4j-_0dDE0DCSFg9vH5aH0BDykN-UHsFa4SazFg9vH5aH0BDw&oq=milsons+point+train+station+to+hyde+park,+sydney&dirflg=w&t=m&z=15

It's an early start - apologies for those who can't get time off work for the actual walk. We wanted to avoid too much walking in darkness.

You can meet us for the dinner-part. I will facebook our location when we arrive, on the Sydney LW facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/219526434802422/

Discussion article for the meetup : Sydney Social Meetup - April (Bridge walk)
Wheat: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
by Scott Alexander — 2014-03-31T00:26:51.000Z

After hearing conflicting advice from diet books and the medical community, I decided to look into wheat.

There are two sets of arguments against including wheat in the diet. First, wheat is a carbohydrate, and some people support low carbohydrate diets. Second, something might be especially dangerous about wheat itself.

It was much easier to figure out the state of the evidence on low-carbohydrate diets. They seem to be at least as good and maybe a little better for weight loss than traditional diets, but this might just be because there are lots of carbohydrates that taste very good and when forced to avoid them, people eat less stuff. They may or may not positively affect metabolic parameters and quality of life. (1, 2, 3, 4). They don’t seem to cause either major health benefits or major health risks in the medium term, which is the longest term for which there is good data available – for example, they have no effect on cancer rates. Overall they seem solid but unspectacular. But there’s a long way between “low carbohydrate diet” and “stop eating wheat”.

So I was more interested in figuring out what was going on with wheat in particular.

Wheat contains chemicals [citation needed]. The ones that keep cropping up (no pun intended) in these kinds of discussions are phytates, lectins, gluten, gliadin, and agglutinin, the last three of which for your convenience have been given names that all sound alike.

Various claims have been made about these chemicals’ effects on health. These have some prima facie plausibility. Plants don’t want to be eaten [citation needed] and they sometimes fill their grains with toxins to discourage animals from eating them. Ricin, a lectin in the seeds of the castor oil plant so toxic it gets used in chemical warfare, is a pretty good example. Most toxins are less dramatic, and most animals have enzymes that break down the toxins in their preferred food sources effectively. But if humans are insufficiently good at this, maybe because they didn’t evolve to eat wheat, some of these chemicals could be toxic to humans.

On the other hand, this same argument covers every pretty much every grain and vegetable and a lot of legumes – pretty much every plant-based food source except edible fruits. So we need a lot more evidence to start worrying about wheat.

I found the following cl...
The Ten Commandments of Rationality
by Sophronius — 2014-03-30T16:36:50.092Z

(Disclaimer/TL;DR: This article, much like Camelot, is a silly place/post. Nonetheless I think it presents a pretty solid list of 10 rationality lessons to take away from Less Wrong which must not be forgotten upon pain of eternal damnation/irrationality.)

In a realm not far from here, somewhere within a bustling metropolis, there lies an old and dusty book. It is placed in a most conspicuous location; in the middle of a busy street where countless citizens walk by it every day. Yet none pick it up, for it is placed on a pedestal just high enough that it cannot be reached or seen easily, and the slight inconvenience of standing on one’s toes to reach for it is sufficient to deter most. Yet if a traveller were sufficiently aware to look up and see the book, and curious enough to reach for it, and willing to suffer the slight discomfort of having to touch its muddy cover to open and read its ancient pages, that one would find within a wealth of wisdom and rationality that would transform the reader’s life forever. For this is the most holy Book of Bayes, and its first and last pages both read thusly:

The Ten Commandments of Rationality

1) Thou shalt never conflate the truth or falsehood of a proposition with any other characteristic, be it the consequences of the proposition if it be true, or the consequences of believing it for thyself personally, or the pleasing or unpleasant aesthetics of the belief itself. Furthermore, thou shalt never let thy feelings regarding the matter overrule what thy critical faculties tells thee, or in any other way act as if reality might adjust itself in accordance with thine own wishes.

2) Thou shalt not accept any imperfect situation if it may be optimized, nor shalt thou abstain from improving upon a situation by imagining ever better options without acting on any of them, nor must thee allow thyself to be paralyzed with fear or apathy or indecision when any action is still superior to doing nothing at all. Thus let it be said: Thou shalt not allow thyself to be beaten by a random number generator.

3) Thou shalt not

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Meetup : Tempe, AZ (ASU)
by MumpsimusLane — 2014-03-30T15:51:50.135Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Tempe, AZ (ASU)

WHEN:
04 April 2014 06:30:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
300 E Orange Mall, Tempe, AZ

We'll meet at the usual location, the entrance to the Hayden Library at ASU at 6:30 PM. Last time, we stayed until around 9:30 PM IIRC, and this meeting will probably be similar. There probably won't be food, so eat before showing up.

The plan is: free discussion. If there are any newcomers, introductions could happen. If we have the patience for it, meta.

Discussion article for the meetup : Tempe, AZ (ASU)
How valuable is volunteering?
by JonahS — 2014-03-29T21:55:41.983Z

This essay was written for high school and college students who are considering volunteering. I'm interested in finding high social value activities for high school and college students to engage in, and would be grateful for any suggestions.

High school and college students are often just starting to think about how to make a difference and improve the world. One salient option available to them is volunteering. How valuable is volunteering?

One way in which volunteering can be valuable is that it can be enjoyable. This is the primary motivation of some volunteers. Another way in which volunteering can be valuable is that it can build skills. Building skills is valuable to the extent that you need them later on. As an example, working on an open source software project is often cited as a good way of developing programming skills.

What of the direct social value of volunteering to others? There are many factors that cut against volunteering having social value to others in general:

Factors that cut against volunteering having social value

Volunteering to help people who can afford to pay generally doesn't help them much, or simply saves them money

In general, people are willing to pay for work that they find useful. If you're doing volunteer work to help people who have the capacity to pay, you're often either:

Doing work that doesn't help them enough for them to be willing to pay for it.

Saving them some money.

Saving people money when they can afford to pay is not an effective way of helping people.

Volunteering to help people who would be willing to pay can reduce the job prospects of those who would be paid

The article before you pay to volunteer abroad, think of the harm you might do reports on Americans doing volunteer projects in Cambodia. The projects are ones that locals would have otherwise been willing to pay poor Cambodians to do. Because the Americans were willing to do them for free, the poor Cambodians weren't hired.

Volunteer activities targeted at those in need are often less helpful than giving cash

People generally know what they need best better than outsiders do, and this points in the direction of giving them money to purchase the services and goods that they need most rather than providing services that they may or may not benefit from.

There are exceptions to this – for example, it may be more efficient to have...
Increasing the pool of people with outstanding accomplishments
by JonahS — 2014-03-28T22:45:16.733Z

In How can Cognito Mentoring do the most good? I included a section on our potential social value. I want to flesh out what we hope to achieve.

Consider the following people:

Scott Alexander. One of Less Wrong's major contributors, and writes Slate Star Codex. His articles regularly get hundreds of Facebook shares.

Bryan Caplan. GMU economist, blogger at EconLog, inspired the creation of Open Borders.

Alex K Chen. A Quora celebrity who has asked 20k+ questions and written ~2k answers. One of our advisees reported to changing his major based on some of Alex's Quora answers.

Paul Christiano. Shifted away from doing pure math and theoretical computer science exclusively, and has played a major role in the effective altruist community, doing research for GiveWell, MIRI and 80,000 Hours, and is involved in a miscellany of other related projects.

Anton Geraschenko, Scott Morrison and David Zureick-Brown. They started MathOverflow, one of the first and largest online communities for academic researchers to discuss research-level questions.

Elie Hassenfeld and Holden Karnofsky. Started GiveWell, which moved ~$17 million to its recommended charities last year, with the money moved growing exponentially over time.

David Jay. Founded the Asexual Visibility and Education Network which has 70k registered members.

Paul Niehaus. An UCSD economist who founded GiveDirectly. GiveDirectly appears to be much more cost-effective than most charities that work in the developing world. It's one of GiveWell's top recommended charities, and is perhaps the first organization of its kind.

Richard Rusczyk. Founded Art of Problem Solving, which offers ~50 classes at a given time for high potential math students, and which hosts forums that have 144k registered users.

Peter Singer. A philosopher who may be the most pivotal figure behind the animal welfare movement and the effective altruism movement.

Ted Suzman. Cofounded Graffiti Labs while in college, the first product of which has over 1.5 million monthly users, and is earning to give.

Eliezer Yudkowsky. He started MIRI, which could appreciably reduce the risk of extinction from artificial intelligence. He started Less Wrong, which has 8+ million page views per year, has given rise to communities around the world, an

...
Introducing Skillshare.im
by Peter Wildeford — 2014-03-28T21:27:50.299Z

by Patrick Brinich-Langlois and Ozzie Gooen

-

Communities once kept our ancestors from being torn apart by mountain lions and tyrannosaurus rexes. Dinosaur violence has declined greatly since the Cretaceous, but the world has become more complex and interconnected. Communities remain essential.

Effective altruists have a lot to offer one another. But we're geographically dispersed, so it's hard to know whom to ask for help. Skillshare.im is built to fix this.

Skillshare.im is a place for effective altruists to share their skills, items, and couches with one another.

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Offer skills or things that you're willing to share. Request items that other people have offered. Here are a few things people have offered on the site:

access to academic papers

advice on fundraising, careers, nutrition, productivity, startups, investments, etc.

French translation (two people!)

math tutoring

lodging in Switzerland, the Bay Area, London, Melbourne, and Oxford

-

As of this writing, we already have 59 offers from 55 people. With your help, we can make it 60 offers from 56 people!

Why use Skillshare.im, instead of getting the things you need the normal way? Certain things, like career advice or study buddies, can be hard to get. Even if you can find someone who has what you're looking for, you might enjoy the opportunity to relationships with other altruists. Plus, by participating in Skillshare.im, you show that the community of do-gooders is welcoming and supportive, qualities that may draw in new people.

You can be notified of new offers and requests by Twitter or RSS. As with all .impact software, the source code is available on GitHub. We use a publicly accessible Trello board to track bugs and features.

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We'd love to hear what you think about the site. Is it awesome, or a horrifically inefficient use of our resources? What could be improved? Send us an e-mail or leave a comment.
Effective Effective Altruism Fundraising and Movement-Building
by ChrisHallquist — 2014-03-28T21:05:09.726Z

The title of this post isn't a typo—its purpose is to ask how we can effectively do fundraising and movement-building for the effective altruism movement. This is an important question, because the return on these activities is potentially very high. As Robert Wiblin wrote on the topic of fundraising over a year ago:

GiveWell’s charity recommendations – currently Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative – are generally regarded as the most reliable in their field. I imagine many readers here donate to these charities. This makes it all the more surprising that it should be pretty easy to start a charity more effective than any of them.

All you would need to do is found an organisation that fundraises for whoever GiveWell recommends, and raises more than a dollar with each dollar it receives. Is this hard? Probably not. As a general rule, a dollar spent on fundraising seems to raise at least several dollars.

Similarly, a more recent post at the 80,000 Hours blog asked "What cause is most effective?" and ended up concluding that "promoting effective altruism" was tied with "prioritization research" for the currently most effective cause. According to 80,000 Hours:

Promoting effective altruism is effective because it’s a flexible multiplier on the next most high-priority cause. It’s important because we expect the most high-priority areas to change a great deal, so it’s good to build up general capabilities to take the best opportunities as they are discovered. Moreover, in the recent past, investing in promoting effective altruism has resulted in significantly more resources being invested in the most high-priority areas, than investing in them directly. For instance, for every US$1 invested in GiveWell and Giving What We Can, more than $7 have been moved to high-priority interventions.

However, there are a number of questions to ask about this: for example, can we trust 80,000 Hours' estimates of the multiplier on giving to Give Well and GWWC? Might other organizations (such as the Centre for Effective Altruism, which is behind 80,000 Hours) be more effective at movement-building?

One interesting question is whether, from a movement-building perspective, it might make sense to (1) donate to an organization that both does movement building / cause-prioritization as well as m...
Logical thermodynamics: towards a theory of self-trusting uncertain reasoning
by Squark — 2014-03-28T16:06:27.154Z

Followup to: Overcoming the Loebian obstacle using evidence logic

In the previous post I proposed a probabilistic system of reasoning for overcoming the Loebian obstacle. For a consistent theory it seems natural the expect such a system should yield a coherent probability assignment in the sense of Christiano et al. This means that

a. provably true sentences are assigned probability 1

b. provably false sentences are assigned probability 0

c. The following identity holds for any two sentences φ, ψ

[1] P(φ) = P(φ and ψ) + P(φ and not-ψ)

In the previous formalism, conditions a & b hold but condition c is violated (at least I don't see any reason it should hold).

In this post I attempt to achieve the following:

Solve the problem above.

Generalize the system to allow for logical uncertainty induced by bounded computing resources. Note that although the original system is already probabilistic, in is not uncertain in the sense of assigning indefinite probability to the zillionth digit of pi. In the new formalism, the extent of uncertainty is controlled by a parameter playing the role of temperature in a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.

Construction

Define a probability field to be a function p : {sentences} -> [0, 1] satisfying the following conditions:

If φ is a tautology in propositional calculus (e.g. φ = ψ or not-ψ) then p(φ) = 1

For all φ: p(not-φ) = 1 - p(φ)

For all φ, ψ: P(φ) = P(φ and ψ) + P(φ and not-ψ)

Probability fields are a convex set: a convex linear combination of probability fields is a probability field. Essentially, probability fields are probability measures in the space of truth assignments consistent w.r.t. propositional calculus.

We define the energy of a probability field p to be E(p) := Σφ Σv 2-l(v) Eφ,v(p(φ)). Here v are pieces of evidence as defined in the previous post, Eφ,v are their associated energy functions and l(v) is the length of (the encoding of) v. We assume that the encoding of v contains the encoding of the sentence φ for which it is evidence and Eφ,v(p(φ)) := 0 for all φ except the relevant one. Note that the associated energy functions are constructed in the same way as in the prev

...
Meetup : Philadelphia, PA: Goal Factoring Exercise
by NancyLebovitz — 2014-03-28T04:50:33.624Z

Philadelphia, PA: Goal Factoring Exercise

WHEN: 30 March 2014 5:00 PM

WHERE: Philadelphia

The meetup is at Nam Phuong (llth and Broad) at 5:00 PM. This is a TIME CHANGE from the usual.

This is an extra meetup because Ben Landau-Taylor is in town. He'll be leading an exercise in Goal Factoring, which is a planning technique developed by his colleagues at Leverage Research and taught at CFAR's workshops.

From CFAR: Do you ever find yourself saying, “Unfortunately, I have to… X?” Goal factoring teaches you to systematically break down everything obvious and non-obvious you’re accomplishing, and ask about ways you could achieve those factors separately and more effectively – a new perspective on everything from reading habits to email etiquette to outings with friends.

<a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lesswrong-philadelphia">Discussion group/mailing list</a>