trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
LW Women- Female privilege
by daenerys — 2013-05-05T01:58:29.631Z

Daenerys' Note: This is the last item in the LW Women series. Thanks to all who participated. :)

Standard Intro

The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series.

Several months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post. There is a LOT of material, so I am breaking them down into more manageable-sized themed posts.

Seven women replied, totaling about 18 pages.

Standard Disclaimer- Women have many different viewpoints, and just because I am acting as an intermediary to allow for anonymous communication does NOT mean that I agree with everything that will be posted in this series. (It would be rather impossible to, since there are some posts arguing opposite sides!)

To the submitters- If you would like to respond anonymously to a comment (for example if there is a comment questioning something in your post, and you want to clarify), you can PM your message and I will post it for you. If this happens a lot, I might create a LW_Women sockpuppet account for the submitters to share.

Please do NOT break anonymity, because it lowers the anonymity of the rest of the submitters.

Submitter E

I'm a girl, and by me that's only great.

No seriously. I've grown up and lived in the social circles where female privilege way outweigh male privilege. I've never been sexually assaulted, nor been denied anything because of my gender. I study a male-dominated subject, and most of my friends are polite, deferential feminism-controlled men. I have, however, been able to flirt and sympathise and generally girl-game my way into getting what I want. (Charming guys is fun!) Sure, there will eventually come a point where I'll be disadvantaged in the job market because of my ability to bear children; but I've gotta balance that against the fact that I have the ability to bear children.

In fact, most of the gender problems I personally face stem from biology, so there's not much I can do about them. It sucks that I have to be the one responsible for contraception, and that my attractiveness to men depends largely on my looks but the inverse is not true. But there's not much society can do to change biological facts, so I live with them.

I don't think it's a very disputed fact that women, in general, tend to be more emotional than men. I'm an INFJ...
Meetup : Padeborn Meetup May 8th
by Just_existing — 2013-05-04T17:34:31.864Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Padeborn Meetup May 8th

WHEN:
08 May 2013 07:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Gownsmen's Pub, Uni Paderborn, Warburger Straße 100, Paderborn

We are meeting once again in Paderborn.

The topics of this evening will probably include some thinking on how to introduce rationality to someone who doesn't know what you are talking about. Further topics will develop during the meetup or over the next days.

If you live in the area consider dropping by :)

Discussion article for the meetup : Padeborn Meetup May 8th
Estimates vs. head-to-head comparisons
by paulfchristiano — 2013-05-04T06:45:37.520Z

(Cross-posted from my blog.)

Summary: when choosing between two options, it’s not always optimal to estimate the value of each option and then pick the better one.

Suppose I am choosing between two actions, X and Y. One way to make my decision is to predict what will happen if I do X and predict what will happen if I do Y, and then pick the option which leads to the outcome that I prefer.

My predictions may be both vague and error-prone, and my value judgments might be very hard or nearly arbitrary. But it seems like I ultimately must make some predictions, and must decide how valuable the different outcomes are. So if I have to evaluate N options, I could do it by evaluating the goodness of each option, and then simply picking the option with the highest value. Right?

There are other possible procedures for evaluating which of two options is better. For example, I have often encountered advice of the form "if your error bars are too big, you should just ignore the estimate". To be most extreme, I could choose some particular axis on which options can be better or worse, and then pick the option which is best on that axis, ignoring all others. (E.g., I could choose the option which is cheapest, or the charity which is most competently administered, or whatever.)

If you have an optimistic quantitative outlook like mine, this probably looks pretty silly—if one option is cheaper, that just gets figured into my estimate for how good it is. If my error bars are big, as long as I keep track of the error bars in my calculation it is still better than nothing. So why would I ever want to do anything other than estimate the value of each option?

In fact I don’t think my intuition is quite right. To see why, let’s start with a very simple case.

A simple model

Alice and Bob are picking between two interventions X and Y. They only have a year to make their decision, so they split up: Alice will produce an estimate of the value of X and Bob will produce an estimate of the value of Y, and they will both do whichever one looks better. Let’s suppose that Alice and Bob are perfectly calibrated and trust each other completely, so that each of them believes the other’s estimate to be unbiased.

Suppose that intervention X is good because it reduces carbon emissions. First Alice dutifully estimates the reduc...
Seeking reliable evidence - claim that closing sweatshops leads to child prostitution
by  — 2013-05-04T02:51:15.363Z

I've been looking for reliable evidence of a claim I've heard a few times. The claim is that the closing of sweatshops (by anti-globalization activists) has resulted in many of the child workers becoming prostitutes. The idea is frequently proffered as an example of do-gooder foolishness ignoring basic economics and screwing people over.

However, despite searching for a while, I can't find anything to indicate that this actually happened.

Some guy at the Library of Economics and Liberty mentions it here:

In one famous 1993 case U.S. senator Tom Harkin proposed banning imports from countries that employed children in sweatshops. In response a factory in Bangladesh laid off 50,000 children. What was their next best alternative? According to the British charity Oxfam a large number of them became prostitutes.

But in the article, Paul Krugman mentions the Oxfam study without citation:

In 1993, child workers in Bangladesh were found to be producing clothing for Wal-Mart, and Senator Tom Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from countries employing underage workers. The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets -- and that a significant number were forced into prostitution.

I looked at some Oxfam stuff, but couldn't find the study.

A similar claim is made in The Race to the Top: The Real Story of Globalization by Tomas Larsson (go here and use the search tool for the word 'prostitution'), but doesn't mention the Oxfam study:

Keith E. Maskus, an economist at the University of Colorado, has studied the issue... He concludes that... "The celebrated French ban of soccer balls sewn in Pakistan for the World Cup in 1998 resulted in significant dislocation of children from employment. Those who tracked them found that a large proportion ended up begging and/or in prostitution,"

I looked for a paper or something by Maskus but came up empty.

I was taught this fact at a Poli Sci class in college, but I'm starting to think it's more likely to be an information cascade. Can anyone do a better job than me?

Thanks in advance.
Meetup : Visiting Sweden and Switzerland! Let's get together
by CatM — 2013-05-04T00:10:02.075Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Visiting Sweden and Switzerland! Let's get together

WHEN:
05 May 2013 02:09:26AM (+0200)

WHERE:
Switzerland (St. Galen, Basel, Bern) Sweden (Stockholm and Gothenburg)

Hello Europe!
I will be visiting Switzerland and Sweden in the next few days and I'd love
to get together with any and all interested LWers in the area.

Switzerland:
St. Gallen- May 5
Basel- May 6
Bern-May 7

Sweden:
Gothenburg-May 8
Stockholm -May 9 and 10

I'd love to do a CfAR class, join a meet up, get together socially or organize a comfort zone expansion outing (CoZE)!

Please email me if you are in any of those places and you'd like to
connect! (if you are in a place nearby and you'd like me to try and
visit, please let me know. I'm sure we can work something out.)

Also, if you have a meetup group/mailing list of people in those areas who
may want to connect, please pass the message along.

I had an amazing time getting to know the group in Berlin and I'm feeling
very inspired by the incredible people in the greater LW community!

original thread: http://lesswrong.com/lw/h95/want_to_have_a_cfar_instructor_visit_your_lw_group/

Warmly,
Cat

PS if anyone knows of good places to meet in those cities (or better yet is willing to host a gathering) please do let me know. Having a local person propose a meeting place is far more likely to be successful than my internet guess.

PPS If anyone has a couch to offer for the night it'd be greatly appreciated
email: cat@appliedrationality.org

Discussion article for the meetup : Visiting Sweden and Switzerland! Let's get together
Rationality Quotes May 2013
by katydee — 2013-05-03T20:02:50.312Z

Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)

Do not quote yourself.

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, London, Melbourne, Moscow, Vancouver, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2013-05-03T18:44:24.806Z

This summary was posted to LW main on April 26th. The following week's summary is posted here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

(Vancouver) Emotional Awareness : 27 April 2013 03:30PM
London Meetup, 28th April: 28 April 2013 02:00PM
Washington DC books meetup: 28 April 2013 03:00PM
Moscow, Measurements: 28 April 2013 04:00PM
Munich Meetup: 04 May 2013 03:00PM
Atlanta Lesswrong: Cryonics FAQ & Signing up Party!: 10 May 2013 07:00PM
Vienna meetup #3: 18 May 2013 04:00PM
Bratislava lesswrong meetup III: 20 May 2013 06:30PM
Berlin Social Meetup: 15 June 2013 05:00PM

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:

Austin, TX: 27 April 2019 01:30PM
Melbourne, practical rationality: 03 May 2013 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview 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, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouv...
Meetup : [Cambridge] How To Do Everything
by ModusPonies — 2013-05-03T14:56:22.079Z

Discussion article for the meetup : [Cambridge] How To Do Everything

WHEN:
05 May 2013 02:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
21 Ames St, Cambridge, MA

This meetup will focus on practical skills for organizing and motivating yourself to accomplish short-term goals. We’ll have a handful of speakers give brief (maybe 3-10 minute) talks on individual techniques, which we'll use as topics for short, focused group discussions. I expect this to last 45-60 minutes before we break up for general discussion until dinner.

Topics so far:

—The Getting Things Done method

—Beeminder

—Team productivity sessions

If you have a useful technique to share, please do! Let me know and I'll add you to the roster.
Cambridge/Boston-area Less Wrong meetups are on the first and third Sunday of every month at 2pm in the MIT Whitaker Building (21 Ames St, Bldg 56), room 180. Room number subject to change based on availability. Signs will be posted with the actual room number.

Discussion article for the meetup : [Cambridge] How To Do Everything
Meetup : [Moscow] Rationality and Media
by Yuu — 2013-05-03T06:17:52.462Z

Discussion article for the meetup : [Moscow] Rationality and Media

WHEN:
12 May 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Russia, Moscow, ulitsa L'va Tolstogo 16

Please use the following guide to get to the meetup: link. You need the second revolving door with the sign “Yandex Money” in Russian. We will meet you at 15:45 MSK with “LW” sign. And we will also check the entrance at 16:00 and 16:10, so please do not be late.

Main topics:

Prediction markets.

Practical rationality. We will train useful skills.

If you are going for the first time, you can fill this one minute form (in Russian), to share your contact information. You can also use personal messages here, or drop a message at lw@lesswrong.ru to contact me for any reason.

Reports from previous sessions can be found here, in Russian, now with photos.

Discussion article for the meetup : [Moscow] Rationality and Media
[SEQ RERUN] Bayesians vs. Barbarians
by MinibearRex — 2013-05-03T05:39:42.024Z

Today's post, Bayesians vs. Barbarians was originally published on 14 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Suppose that a country of rationalists is attacked by a country of Evil Barbarians who know nothing of probability theory or decision theory. There's a certain concept of "rationality" which says that the rationalists inevitably lose, because the Barbarians believe in a heavenly afterlife if they die in battle, while the rationalists would all individually prefer to stay out of harm's way. So the rationalist civilization is doomed; it is too elegant and civilized to fight the savage Barbarians... And then there's the idea that rationalists should be able to (a) solve group coordination problems, (b) care a lot about other people and (c) win...

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 Collective Apathy and the Internet, 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.
Developmental Thinking Shout-out to CFAR
by MarkL — 2013-05-03T01:46:56.866Z

Preamble

Before I make my main point, I want to acknowledge that curriculum development is hard. It's even harder when you're trying to teach the unteachable. And it's even harder when you're in the process of bootstrapping. I am aware of the Kahneman inside/outside curriculum design story. And, I myself have taught 200+ hours of my own computer science curricula to middle-school students. So this "open letter," is not some sort of criticism of CFAR's curriculum; It's a "Hey, check out this cool stuff eventually when you have time," letter. I just wanted to put all this out there, to possibly influence the next five years of CFAR.

Curriculum development is hard.

So, anyway, I don't personally know any of the people involved in CFAR, but I do know you're all great.

A case for developmental thinking

The point of this post is to make a case for CFAR to become "developmentally aware." Massive amounts of quality research has gone into describing the differences between 1) children, 2) adults, and 3) expert or developmentally advanced adults. I haven't (yet?) seen any evidence of awareness of this research in CFAR's materials. (I haven't attended a CFAR workshop, but I've flipped through some of the more recent stuff.)

Developmental thinking is a different approach than, e.g., cataloguing biases, promoting real-time awareness of them, and having a toolbox of de-biasing strategies and algorithms. Developmental literature gives clues to the precise cognitive operations that are painstakingly acquired over an entire lifetime, in a more fine-grained way than is possible when studying, say, already-expert performers or cognitive bias literature. I think developmental thinking goes deeper than "toolbox thinking" (straw!) and is an angle of approach for teaching the unteachable.

Below is an annotated bibliography of some of my personal touchstones in the development literature, books that are foundational or books that synthesize decades of research about the developmental aspects of entrepreneurial, executive, educational, and scientific thinking, as well as the developmental aspects of emotion and cognition. Note that this is personal, idiosyncratic, non-exhaustive list.

And, to qualify, I have epistemological and ontological issues with plenty of the stuff below. But some of these authors are brilliant, and the rest are smart, meticulous, and v...
Book Suggestion: "Diaminds" is worth reading (CFAR-esque)
by MarkL — 2013-05-03T00:19:01.587Z

The reason for this submission is that I don't think anyone who visits this website will ever read the book described below, otherwise. And that's a shame.

Simply stated, I think CFAR curriculum designers and people who like CFAR's approach should check out this book:

Diaminds: Decoding the Mental Habits of Successful Thinkers by Mihnea Moldoveanu

I claim that you will find illustrations of high-utility thinking styles and potentially useful exercises within. Yes, I am attempting to promote some random, highly questionable book to your attention.

You contemptuously object:

beware of other optimizing,

does Moldeveanu even have a secret identity?,

"decoding mental habits"?! People can't introspect,

anyone who entitles their book "Diaminds" can't be that smart,

and, what are you selling?

Stay with me.

Moldeveanu has a "secret identity" as a successful serial entrepreneur (first company sold for $21 million). And, he explicitly discusses the disadvantages of his book, his lack of experimental design, selection bias, explanation versus prediction, etc. The only grounds for his claim of having decoded the mental habits of successful thinkers is that he's done a lot of reading, thinking, and doing, and he has a bunch of interview transcripts of successful people. ("Interview transcripts?!")

You might have more objections:

If you dig around a little bit online you'll see that the second author writes highly rated popular business books.

If you read a little bit of the book, you'll hear a lot about Nicholas Nassim Taleb, black swans, poorly justified claims about how the mind uses branching tree searches, and other assorted suspicious physical, mathematical, and computational analogies for how the mind works.

He even asserts that "death is inevitable" (or something like that) in the introduction. *Gasp!*

Finally, you're thinking:

"There are 65 million titles out there. What are the chances that this particular crackpot book will be useful to me or CFAR?"

Stay with me.

Ok, still here? I think if you read this book you will continuously oscillate between swiftly-rising-annoyed-skepticism and hey-that's-uncommonly-smart-and-concisely-useful-and-I-could-try-that.

The exercises are not the sole value of the book, but here are some quickly assembled examples:

"Pick a past event that has been precisely recorded (

...
Meetup : [New York] Effective Altruism (Outdoor!) Dinner Discussion
by Raemon — 2013-05-02T23:45:30.441Z

Discussion article for the meetup : [New York] Effective Altruism (Outdoor!) Dinner Discussion

WHEN: 04 May 2013 05:00:40PM (-0400)

WHERE: Winterfell House, 316 West 138 Street New York NY 10030

Do you want to save the world? Do you want to mildly contribute to improving the world with your spare time or other resources and just want that mild contribution to be as effective as possible? Do you enjoy cookouts and potluck dinner discussions?

If any of the above are true (and you also happen to be living in or passing through NYC) you should come down to the Effective Altruism dinner party this Saturday.

The evening will be an informal potluck barbecue, where people can share past success stories and lessons learned, and talk about projects to collaborate on. Newcomers who are interested in the idea and trying to figure out how to go about having an impact can get familiar with some of the ideas behind the Effective Altruism community.

Discussion will be open-ended, but with some emphasis on startups, political action and other non-charity avenues for world-improvement.

Discussion article for the meetup : [New York] Effective Altruism (Outdoor!) Dinner Discussion