trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : First Meetup- Cleveland and Akron, Ohio
by daenerys — 2012-10-28T23:03:44.508Z

Discussion article for the meetup : First Meetup- Cleveland and Akron, Ohio

WHEN:
17 November 2012 08:03:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Cleveland, OH

I'm posting on behalf of someone who got in touch with me on the Ohio listserv. He is looking for people active in the Cleveland or Akron area. Right now, OHLW is only active in Cincinnati, Dayton, and Columbus.

If you are in Cleveland or Akron, or attend school in the area, please leave a comment here, or PM me. We will set a date and location once we figure out who is interested.

Thank you!

Discussion article for the meetup : First Meetup- Cleveland and Akron, Ohio
Meetup : Who's going to Skepticon 5?
by daenerys — 2012-10-28T16:17:48.875Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Who's going to Skepticon 5?

WHEN:
10 November 2012 01:06:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Springfield, Missouri

website: http://www.skepticon.org/

Skepticon is a free event, and super-awesome. You can see how awesome it is by watching the videos from last year.

Some of the workshops this year will be two CFAR Rationality Courses (given by Julia Galef and Spencer Greenberg) and a workshop on Ethical Rationality (by James Croft and Stephanie Zvan)

Anyway, I thought it would be a good idea to put up a meetup where LWers can post that they are attending, and then we can PM each other with some contact info, so we can try to meet up at some time throughout the weekend (I am loathe to set a specific time, because people's schedules might change, but feel free to, if you prefer).

My personal attendance is at about P=.7

Discussion article for the meetup : Who's going to Skepticon 5?
[Link] Epigenetics
by  — 2012-10-28T11:56:23.004Z

Your daily dose of science knowledge will once more be provided by Gregory Cochran, clearing up some misconceptions you may have heard about Epigenetics.

As I understand it, in some circles, there is a burgeoning hope that practice in this generation will somehow improve performance in the next – based on a word they have heard but do not understand. That word is epigenetics.

Genes can certainly be modified in ways that persist. For example, the cells in your skin produce more skin cells when they divide, rather than muscle cells or neurons. Most of your cells have a copy of the entire human genome, but only certain elements are expressed in a particular type of cell, and that pattern persists when that kind of cell divides. We understand, to a degree, some of the chemical changes that cause these lasting changes in gene expression patterns. One is methylation, a method of suppressing gene activity. It involves attaching a methyl group to a cytosine base. This methylation pattern is copied when somatic cells divide.

The question is whether A. such changes can persist into the next generation and B. if they do, is this some sort of adaptive process, rather than an occasional screwup? We’re interested in whether this happens in humans, so we’ll only consider mammals.

It’s rare, but sometimes it happens. It has only been found to happen at a few sites in the genome, and when it does happen, only a fraction of the offspring are affected. Probably the best known example is the agouti yellow allele in mice. Mice that carry this allele are fat, yellow, and prone to cancer and diabetes – some of them. Yellow mothers tend to have yellow babies, while genetically identical brown mothers mostly have brown babies. The agouti yellow allele is the product of a recent insertion in the genome, about 50 years ago. For the overwhelming majority of genes, the epigenetic markers are reset in a new embryo, which means that epigenetic changes induced by the parent’s experiences disappear. The embryo is back at square one. This agouti yellow allele is screwed up – somehow the reset isn’t happening correctly.

In mice, the mammalian species in which most such investigations have been done, the few other loca

...
Online Optimal Philanthropy Meeting
by theduffman — 2012-10-28T07:31:36.470Z

Update: The meeting will occur at 1.30pm Australian Eastern Daylights Savings time on Tuesday, November 6, 2012 in Australia (Monday evening in the Americas) on Google+ Hangouts.

Topics will include how to make near mode progress on far mode problems, the potential for cascades, cycles and recursive loops eg AI and idea propagation to dominate effective altruistic concern. Also, theories and plans can be proposed by all participants.

Why meet online?

Lots of us want to improve the world. By donating, performing rationality training, inspiring one and other and so on.

We're all in a state of limited information regarding how to best help. In hotspots for effective altruism like San Francisco and Oxford, effective altruists (EAs) are able to get high quality feedback on their ideas. But elsewhere, constructive, creative input is of limited supply.

Face-to-face meetups have so far been organised by The High Impact Network, Giving What We Can and these clearly allow members to complement one and others' knowledge, skills and resources (time, funding, etc), while boosting each others' determination.

One would expect online meetups to offer qualitatively similar benefits. The comparative advantage of online EA meetups could be:

1. helping experienced EAs to share the most up-to-date information and ideas quickly between geographically disparate meetups.

2. to inspire otherwise isolated EAs

3. to explore the utility of online video and other technology for spreading EA knowledge and skills.

Sounds good. How can I help?

I have written a draft task-list including an agenda here. http://checkvist.com/checklists/153407-online-optimal-philanthropy-meeting. I encourage you to email me for access before the meetup itself.

I have created a Whenisgood time chart here. Please use it to indicate when you are available to meet.

When?

At 1.30pm Melbourne Australian time on Google+ Hangouts. Do add me to your circles and expect an invite.

See you then.

- Theduffman | THINK Melbourne organiser | former Felicifia admin
Native Russian speakers wanted (for proofreading LW texts, again) 
by listic — 2012-10-28T06:00:16.190Z

This is a repeat from May, 20 post. If you are a native Russian speaker, could volunteer an hour or two to read the sequence and share your opinion on it, and haven't contacted me before (here, by email or on lesswrong.ru)

As part of an effort to familiarize Russian-speaking audience with Less Wrong materials, I am participating in an ongoing translation of a certain sequence of texts to Russian.

Now I need volunteers who are willing to read the text and give feedback on its quality. If you are native Russian speaker and can dedicate an hour or two to reading the sequence, please drop me an email to nickolai@intelligence.org and I'll give you the link. Later I'll update this post with an information on which text this was and which feedback I have got (your exact words can remain private if you wish).

I'm doing it this way so that name of the text and other's opinion won't influence your decision to participate and your opinion. Frankly, I think this mode of interaction should be a standard option in popular forum software, but it isn't.
Economy gossip open thread
by John_Maxwell — 2012-10-28T04:10:03.596Z

Diego Caleiro writes:

It amazes me that there is no "Sequence on how to make money in intelligent ways" or something of the sort in LessWrong.

I don't think a sequence is the quite the right approach to this. The economy is huge, complicated, and heterogeneous, and it's changing constantly. (Think of how complicated people are, then imagine how complicated their economy is.) It's hard for a single person to have a thorough understanding of everything, and even if someone did, their understanding would start becoming obsolete immediately.

And making money intelligently is very closely related to knowing what's going on in the economy. If you're training for a job, you want to develop skills that are in high demand. If you're starting a business, you want to sell stuff for a profit. You can only go so far identifying these opportunities by thinking things through from first principles.

I don't think most useful knowledge Less Wrong can share about what's going on in the economy is going to approach the certainty of carefully derived math or settled science. Instead, it'll be more like gossip. Since no one understands the entire economy, we won't get much firsthand knowledge. Lots of information will consist of hearsay and speculation that's subject to change at any time. (Incidentally, gathering such info and trying lots of stuff out may be a good preparatory activity for starting a business.)

Anyway, here's some gossip from me; feel free to post yours in the comments.

Employment

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains an Occupational Outlook Handbook with information on salary, education requirements, and job growth for a wide variety of jobs. Here are a few random interesting ones:

It may be possible to become an actuary (~$90K/yr, faster than average job growth, involves math) without a college degree if you pass a few actuarial exams

Diagnostic medical sonographer: requires only a 2-year degree, ~$65K/yr, much faster than average job growth

Michael Vassar was telling everyone to become a police officer a while ago. The BLS page looks only OK, maybe you can get a much higher salary in the right municipality?

Payscale.com looks pretty nice for salary info: college education return on investment data, top paying majors. See also: 5 ways to be mislead by salary rankings, G...
Heuristic: How does it sound in a movie?
by Stabilizer — 2012-10-28T01:30:55.252Z

Our internal dialogues are often exactly that: dialogues that suit a narrative. Narrative building (the basis of the narrative fallacy) is often quite detrimental to attempts to think clearly. It is therefore beneficial to detect and correct for biases introduced from narrative building. But it can be hard to distinguish a 'clear' thought from one that is a consequence of a narrative.

I offer a heuristic to make the distinction between a thought which is a direct attempt to model reality and a thought which is based solely on its suitability to a narrative:

Isolate a sentence uttered in your internal (or external) voice. It could also be a pattern of images, voices or feelings. Tastes and smells are harder to do in this technique, but I believe we rarely 'think' with our tastes and smells.

Imagine it in a movie or a story. Also see how easy it is for you come up with some music to suit this thought pattern. Also examine the suitability of the people in your thoughts as characters in a movie or TV show.

Evaluate its suitability to the above, narrative-like contexts.

If it seems very suitable, it is now much more likely that it is part of narrative building. Otherwise, it might be an 'accurate' thought.

Two examples:

1. When buying something: Often times, when I'm standing in a Starbucks line for a coffee and try to imagine why I'm standing there (when I can make my own coffee both at my home and at my office), I am usually returned with a feeling of being part of The People Who Do Things. Or one of being a Hard Worker who needs his Coffee to do his Hard Work with Focus and Determination. It fits too well while introducing a character in a novel. After I started noticing this, I've been realizing that coffee is not as useful in improving my focus as I thought it was earlier.

2. In conversations: This must be very familiar to most people. Anecdotes get highly embellished based on their suitability to a story. Also the way they are usually 'narrated' rather than just 'conveyed'. Realizing this when it happens can be quite useful.

Other examples?
Passive income for dummies
by John_Maxwell — 2012-10-27T07:25:33.383Z

I read one too many breathless blog posts on the virtues of passive income and decided to write a rebuttal. Much of this should be obvious to folks with a solid economics background; in fact, please correct me if I got anything wrong.

People seem to think in an odd way about passive income. One Helium.com author writes

I think the first time there was any money [in my Helium.com writer's account] was when it showed about 3 cents. That actually thrilled me.

...

Les called me and said "Quick, check your earnings page, tell me what you see for your credit card article (I thought, "here we go again with the 'Reddit' business"). I checked and lo and behold I had made around $4.00 in just a couple of hours for that one article he had submitted. Wow! Seriously. As the day progressed, it reached $8.00, then $10.00 and finally a little over $12.00.

Sub-minimum wages really are exciting, aren't they? (At the end of the story, the guy has won the proverbial Helium.com lottery, and ends up making $1,246 submitting an article on how he hacked a credit card company's balance transfer offer to reddit. If I recall correctly, this inspired a spate of Helium.com writers spamming reddit with their posts. Probably why I ended up reading his article in the first place.)

Now I just have to think of a way to employ people normally and trick them in to thinking that the income they're making is "passive"...

But even smart people are in to passive income. Here's Brian Armstrong, who looks pretty sharp: economics degree, Airbnb software engineer, and now Y Combinator startup founder. His blog is largely about passive income, and he even wrote a book about it a few years ago. So being an expert like this, we'd expect him to be making lots, right?

In this post, he gives his breakdown for December 2008: $250.00 from real estate, $1,260.40 from his blog/book about how to make passive income, $129.20 from his new tutor matching site UniversityTutor.com (best tutor matching site I've found, BTW)

In this September 2010 post, he reports UniversityTutor is making over $2,000 a month and set to keep growing.

So first, it looks like selling people the dream of passive income is a very profitable business to be in, and actually having passive income is not a requirement for entering it.

But is that even true? Brian reports that his high ...
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Bratislava, Cambridge MA, Durham NC (2), Salt Lake City, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2012-10-27T03:56:08.441Z

This meetup summary was posted to LW main on October 19th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Durham HPMoR Discussion group: 20 October 2012 11:00AM
Bratislava meetup: 20 October 2012 05:30PM
DC Meetup: Games and Conversation: 21 October 2012 03:00PM
Durham Meetup: Article discussions: 25 October 2012 07:00PM
Moscow: Biases, Applied Rationality, Visual Thinking: 27 October 2012 04:00PM
Munich Meetup, EDIT: October 28th: 28 October 2012 03:00PM
Sofia, Bulgaria Meetup: 09 December 2012 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: 20 October 2018 01:30PM
SLC Meetup: Free Will, Minicamp Braindump, and Group Goals: 20 October 2012 03:00PM
Cambridge (MA) third-Sundays Meetup: 21 October 2012 02:00PM
Winter Solstice Megameetup - NYC: 15 December 2012 05:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, 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, 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 Califor...
Meetup : Pittsburgh: Belief as attire
by KatjaGrace — 2012-10-26T23:24:45.272Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh: Belief as attire

WHEN:
30 October 2012 06:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Eatunique, Craig St, Pittsburgh

Related:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/i7/belief_as_attire/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/i6/professing_and_cheering/egb

Call 412-304-6258 if you can't find us.

Discussion article for the meetup : Pittsburgh: Belief as attire
[LINK] Breaking the illusion of understanding
by gjm — 2012-10-26T23:09:25.790Z

This writeup at Ars Technica about a recently published paper in the Journal of Consumer Research may be of interest. Super-brief summary:

Consumers with higher scores on a cognitive reflection test are more inclined to buy products when told more about them; for consumers with lower CRT scores it's the reverse.

Consumers with higher CRT scores felt that they understood the products better after being told more; consumers with lower CRT scores felt that they understood them worse.

If subjects are asked to give an explanation of how products work and then asked how well they understand and how willing they'd be to pay, high-CR subjects don't change much in either but low-CR subjects report feeling that they understand worse and that they're willing to pay less.

Conclusion: it looks as if when you give low-CR subjects more information about a product, they feel they understand it less, don't like that feeling, and become less willing to pay.

If this is right (which seems plausible enough) then it presumably applies more broadly: e.g., to what tactics are most effective in political debate. Though it's hardly news in that area that making people feel stupid isn't the best way to persuade them of things.

Abstract of the paper:

People differ in their threshold for satisfactory causal understanding and therefore in the type of explanation that will engender understanding and maximize the appeal of a novel product. Explanation fiends are dissatisfied with surface understanding and desire detailed mechanistic explanations of how products work. In contrast, explanation foes derive less understanding from detailed than coarse explanations and downgrade products that are explained in detail. Consumers’ attitude toward explanation is predicted by their tendency to deliberate, as measured by the cognitive reflection test. Cognitive reflection also predicts susceptibility to the illusion of explanatory depth, the unjustified belief that one understands how things work. When explanation foes attempt to explain, it exposes the illusion, which leads to a decrease in willingness to pay. In contrast, explanation fiends are willing to pay more after generating explanations. We hypothesize that those low in cognitive reflection are explanation foes because explanatory detail shatters their illusion of understanding.
How to Deal with Depression - The Meta Layers
by ShannonFriedman — 2012-10-26T18:44:24.902Z

I wrote this for the Positive Vector website awhile back and lots of people have found it valuable, so I want to share it with the Less Wrong community as well. I think this applies to most people - meta suffering thing is something I see everywhere, even though it is most prominent with people who have depression. This is based on my experience with working with depressed people and with studying Buddhism, especially Big Mind. Enjoy!

---

The roots of suffering are often deep. But not all of the suffering happens at the root. A lot of the suffering that people experience is “meta” suffering. Meta suffering is when you suffer because you are distressed that you are suffering. You are feeling depressed and hopeless, and there is a part of you that genuinely fears that it will never end. That you will feel this way forever. This fear of the suffering persisting can cause you much more suffering than whatever started your suffering. And it can last much longer. At some point days later, you might think to yourself about how terrible that initial suffering was, and feel fear and suffering about the possibility of it coming back.

Many people suffer as much or more from meta-suffering than suffering that comes from physical or situational sources!

The good news is that meta suffering is much easier to fix than deeper forms of suffering.

One thing you can do is to collect data* in order to develop an accurate model of how often you actually feel bad. Try monitoring your moods for awhile and get a baseline for what your moods actually are. At least half of the people who have suffered from major depression who have done this and spoken with me about it have been surprised to find that they often feel better than their self-perception when they assess their mood at random points throughout the day.

Regardless of what your default mood state or range is, once you know what it is, you are likely to feel less fear. You can look at what your mood historically does over time, and feel more confidence that this is what it will do in the future. When you are in the state of despair and wondering if it will last forever, odds are that it won’t.

Another extremely powerful technique for dealing with meta-suffering is accept...
[LINK] Mastering Linear Algebra in 10 Days: Astounding Experiments in Ultra-Learning
by David_Gerard — 2012-10-26T14:11:07.760Z

Scott Young completed the four-year MIT computer science degree curriculum in less than one year. This is a post about how he did it.

During the yearlong pursuit, I perfected a method for peeling those layers of deep understanding faster. I’ve since used it on topics in math, biology, physics, economics and engineering. With just a few modifications, it also works well for practical skills such as programming, design or languages.

Here’s the basic structure of the method:

Coverage

Practice

Insight