trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Melbourne social meetup
by toner — 2013-02-11T16:01:17.129Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne social meetup

WHEN:
15 February 2013 06:45:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
see mailing list, Carlton VIC 3053

Melbourne's next regular social meetup will be held on Friday 15th February at the usual venue in Carlton. All are welcome from 6:30pm for a 7:00pm official start, but don't stress about being on time.

Our social meetups are informal events held on the third Friday of each month, where we lounge about playing boardgames and chatting, with occasional group parlour games such as Mafia/Werewolf or Resistance if people are interested. If you haven't been to a Melbourne meetup before/recently, the social meetup can be less intimidating way to meet us as it's very informal.

Some snacks will be provided and we'll probably arrange some form of delivered food for dinner. BYO drinks and games.

For the location/any questions, please see the Melbourne Less Wrong google group, or feel free to SMS Richard on 0421 231 789 or contact me on 0412 996 288.

Thanks again to Richard (Maelin) for being able to host.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne social meetup
Meetup : Durham: Status Quo Bias
by evand — 2013-02-11T04:32:36.747Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham: Status Quo Bias

WHEN:
14 February 2013 07:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Francesca's, 706 9th Street, Durham, NC

We'll discuss the status quo bias and debiasing techniques. Suggested readings include Bostrom's paper, and other things TBD. Suggestions for additional reading are welcome. Post them here, or on the mailing list.

I'll summarize a bit about the status quo bias and Bostrom's paper, so please don't feel like you can't come if you haven't done the reading, but we do encourage reading in advance!

We'll do introductions and low-key discussion from 7:00-7:30, and status quo bias discussion from 7:30-9:00.

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham: Status Quo Bias
[SEQ RERUN] 31 Laws of Fun
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-11T03:51:26.553Z

Today's post, 31 Laws of Fun was originally published on 26 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A brief summary of principles for writing fiction set in a eutopia.

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 Higher Purpose, 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.
Meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup
by rocurley — 2013-02-11T02:31:25.908Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup

WHEN:
17 February 2013 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery , Washington, DC 20001, USA

We'll be meeting to play games and hang out.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC fun and games meetup
Meetup : Toronto - Rational Debate: Will Rationality Make You Rich? ... and other topics
by Giles — 2013-02-11T01:12:08.680Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rational Debate: Will Rationality Make You Rich? ... and other topics

WHEN: 12 February 2013 08:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE: 54 Dundas St E, Toronto, ON

Place: Upstairs at The Imperial Public Library 54 Dundas St. E, near Dundas Station. Enter at the door on the right marked "library", go upstairs and look for the paperclip sign.

We'll kick the meeting off with ASK LESS WRONG. Think of something in your everyday life that's bothering you and we'll help you smooth it out. Purpose: increase the fun in each others' lives through the magic of friendship. Secondary purpose: train ourselves to notice things that are suboptimal and view them as problems that can be solved.

The main part of the meeting will be a RATIONAL DEBATE. We'll start with "will rationality make you rich", then move on to "is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe" and "should you vote". That's probably all we'll have time for before the beer kicks in, but we do have backup topics.

If you want to read up on any of these topics, that's great - but not strictly necessary.

Rational debating is far from a solved problem, so we'll be learning how to do it as we go along. I'll be chairing, so don't worry about keeping track of this vast list of meta stuff - that's my job. It'll go something like this:

In a conventional debate, you win by sounding more plausible than the other person. In a rational debate, you win if and only if you end up believing the truth. This makes it a cooperative game - it's possible for everyone to win or for everyone to lose. (Incidentally it also means you don't actually know whether you've won or not).

Initially, each person answers the question separately, choosing how they wish to frame their answer. If people come up with very different ways of framing the question, we will take each one in turn and try to approach the question from that direction. (The point of this is to avoid fighting over the framing of the discussion and instead address the issues directly).

I'll keep track of structural stuff - different ways of framing the question, agreed subtopics of discussion, and binary chopping to find points of disagreement (which involves lists of statements and verbally how plausible we each think they are).

When arguing against something, construct a steel man first - rephrase the opposing argument in your own words, maki

...
[Link] Detachment
by John_Maxwell — 2013-02-10T23:05:57.168Z

http://www.urticator.net/essay/0/48.html

Might be a useful read apropos of Wei Dai's recent question:

Why are we causing [people] to think of LW in terms of identity in the first place, instead of, say, a place to learn about and discuss some interesting ideas?
[Link] False memories of fabricated political events
by gjm — 2013-02-10T22:25:15.535Z

Another one for the memory-is-really-unreliable file. Some researchers at UC Irvine (one of them is Elizabeth Loftus, whose name I've seen attached to other fake-memory studies) asked about 5000 subjects about their recollection of four political events. One of the political events never actually happened. About half the subjects said they remembered the fake event. Subjects were more likely to pseudo-remember events congruent with their political preferences (e.g., Bush or Obama doing something embarrassing).

Link to papers.ssrn.com (paper is freely downloadable).

The subjects were recruited from the readership of Slate, which unsurprisingly means they aren't a very representative sample of the US population (never mind the rest of the world). In particular, about 5% identified as conservative and about 60% as progressive.

Each real event was remembered by 90-98% of subjects. Self-identified conservatives remembered the real events a little less well. Self-identified progressives were much more likely to "remember" a fake event in which G W Bush took a vacation in Texas while Hurricane Katrina was devastating New Orleans. Self-identified conservatives were somewhat more likely to "remember" a fake event in which Barack Obama shook the hand of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

About half of the subjects who "remembered" fake events were unable to identify the fake event correctly when they were told that one of the events in the study was fake.
LW Women- Crowdsourced research on Cognitive biases and gender
by daenerys — 2013-02-10T22:01:14.177Z

In the last LW Women post, it was mentioned, and I agree, that a two-way conversation is more productive, and presents varied viewpoints better than a one-way lecture. To that end, I am making this post an experiment in crowdsourcing research to LW. Instead of writing this topic up myself (more talking AT you), I want to see what happens if instead I leave a good prompt, along with some paths (search terms, journal articles) to start down for discussion. What information will a collectivist research project yield? In other words, instead of reading what I write below as the article, pretend you are helping to collaborate on an article.

The next post in the series will go back to LW Women's submissions.

Recommended Rules (because last LW Women post reached 1000+ comments, and we want to keep that as navigable as possible)

When possible, make/use parent comments when you are discussing a specific bias, so that multiple studies or lines of reasoning on the same bias can be grouped together.

When you post a summary of a study, make sure to read it first and give a decent rundown. If a study says "X sometimes, Y sometimes," do not just say "This study proves X!"

Put meta discussion HERE (e.g.- What do you think about crowdsourcing research on LW? What do you think about the LW Women series, etc.)

Prompt

What cognitive biases might effect various gender stereotypes and how people think about gender? Below are some starting points. The links are to the wikipedia articles. This list isn't the be-all, end-all. It's just somewhere to get started. Use it to get ideas, or not.

Fundamental Attribution Error- aka Correspondence Bias- Tendency to draw inferences about a person's unique and enduring dispositions from behaviors that can be entirely explained by the situations in which they occur.

Actor-Observer Bias - People are more likely to see their own behavior as affected by the situation they are in, or the sequence of occurrences that have happened to them throughout their day. But, they see other people’s actions as solely a product of their overall personality, and they do not afford them the chance to explain their behavior as exclusively a result of a situational effect.

Just World Fallacy- human actions eventually yield morally fair and fitting consequences

System Justification- People have a motivation to d...
[SEQ RERUN] Higher Purpose
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-10T03:58:04.851Z

Today's post, Higher Purpose was originally published on 23 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Having a Purpose in Life consistently shows up as something that increases stated well-being. Of course, the problem with trying to pick out "a Purpose in Life" in order to make yourself happier, is that this doesn't take you outside yourself; it's still all about you. To find purpose, you need to turn your eyes outward to look at the world and find things there that you care about - rather than obsessing about the wonderful spiritual benefits you're getting from helping others. In today's world, most of the highest-priority legitimate Causes consist of large groups of people in extreme jeopardy: Aging threatens the old, starvation threatens the poor, extinction risks threaten humanity as a whole. If the future goes right, many and perhaps all such problems will be solved - depleting the stream of victims to be helped. Will the future therefore consist of self-obsessed individuals, with nothing to take them outside themselves? I suggest, though, that even if there were no large groups of people in extreme jeopardy, we would still, looking around, find things outside ourselves that we cared about - friends, family; truth, freedom... Nonetheless, if the Future goes sufficiently well, there will come a time when you could search the whole of civilization, and never find a single person so much in need of help, as dozens you now pass on the street. If you do want to save someone from death, or help a great many people, then act now; your opportunity may not last, one way or another.

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 Investing for the Long Slump, 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.
Meetup : Washington DC HPMOR Discussion
by rocurley — 2013-02-09T17:06:14.891Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC HPMOR Discussion

WHEN:
10 February 2013 03:00:53AM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We'll be talking about methods!
(This has changed, so you're not crazy if you think it's a TED talks meetup.)

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC HPMOR Discussion
MLP: The Next Level Of Your Studies
by Vaniver — 2013-02-09T07:19:43.789Z

The first four chapters of my MLP fanfiction are now online on fimfiction.net. Unlike Friendship Is Optimal (fim link), which focuses on how MLP might impact the trajectory of AI, or Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me (fim link), which focuses on how a rationalist might impact the trajectory of Equestria, I wanted to ask: what would the MLP Way look like? How would MLP impact rationality, and what would rationalist MLP look like?
This has been over a year in the making, off and on, and I've received significant help in writing it. In particular, I'd like to thank the pre-readers and editors who have helped polish it, and everyone who's shown interest; that has been a great help in motivating me to work on this rather than other projects.

There's much more to come; I should be able to maintain at least a chapter a week for the medium term, and hope to post more frequently than that. If you're interested in pre-reading / editing chapters to come, let me know!
A brief history of ethically concerned scientists
by Kaj_Sotala — 2013-02-09T05:50:00.045Z

For the first time in history, it has become possible for a limited group of a few thousand people to threaten the absolute destruction of millions.

-- Norbert Wiener (1956),

Moral Reflections of a Mathematician

.

Today, the general attitude towards scientific discovery is that scientists are not themselves responsible for how their work is used. For someone who is interested in science for its own sake, or even for someone who mostly considers research to be a way to pay the bills, this is a tempting attitude. It would be easy to only focus on one’s work, and leave it up to others to decide what to do with it.
But this is not necessarily the attitude that we should encourage. As technology becomes more powerful, it also becomes more dangerous. Throughout history, many scientists and inventors have recognized this, and taken different kinds of action to help ensure that their work will have beneficial consequences. Here are some of them.

This post is not arguing that any specific approach for taking responsibility for one's actions is the correct one. Some researchers hid their work, others refocused on other fields, still others began active campaigns to change the way their work was being used. It is up to the reader to decide which of these approaches were successful and worth emulating, and which ones were not.

Pre-industrial inventors

… I do not publish nor divulge [methods of building submarines] by reason of the evil nature of men who would use them as means of destruction at the bottom of the sea, by sending ships to the bottom, and sinking them together with the men in them.

--

Leonardo da Vinci

People did not always think that the benefits of freely disseminating knowledge outweighed the harms. O.T. Benfey,

writing in

a 1956 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, cites F.S. Taylor’s book on early alchemists:

Alchemy was certainly intended to be useful .... But [the alchemist] never proposes the public use of such things, the disclosing of his knowledge for the benefit of man. …. Any disclosure of the alchemical secret was felt to be profoundly wrong, and likely to bring immediate punishment from on high. The reason generally given for such secrecy was the probable abuse by wicked men of the power that the alchemical would give …. The alchemists, indeed, felt a strong moral responsibility that is not always acknowledged by the scientists of to

...
Meetup : Durham HPMoR Discussion, chapters 34-38
by evand — 2013-02-09T03:59:45.544Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham HPMoR Discussion, chapters 34-38

WHEN:
09 February 2013 11:00:00AM (-0500)

WHERE:
Parker and Otis, 112 S Duke St, Durham NC

The next in our regularly scheduled HPMoR discussions.

Please feel free to join in, even if you haven't done all the reading; we try to summarize the chapters as we discuss them. (Of course, reading them in advance is encouraged!)

It looks like Parker and Otis is open again, so we'll head there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham HPMoR Discussion, chapters 34-38
[SEQ RERUN] Investing for the Long Slump
by MinibearRex — 2013-02-09T01:30:02.321Z

Today's post, Investing for the Long Slump was originally published on 22 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

What should you do if you think that the world's economy is going to stay bad for a very long time? How could such a scenario happen?

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 Failed Utopia #4-2, 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.
Philosophical Landmines
by  — 2013-02-08T21:22:43.647Z

Related: Cached Thoughts

Last summer I was talking to my sister about something. I don't remember the details, but I invoked the concept of "truth", or "reality" or some such. She immediately spit out a cached reply along the lines of "But how can you really say what's true?".

Of course I'd learned some great replies to that sort of question right here on LW, so I did my best to sort her out, but everything I said invoked more confused slogans and cached thoughts. I realized the battle was lost. Worse, I realized she'd stopped thinking. Later, I realized I'd stopped thinking too.

I went away and formulated the concept of a "Philosophical Landmine".

I used to occasionally remark that if you care about what happens, you should think about what will happen as a result of possible actions. This is basically a slam dunk in everyday practical rationality, except that I would sometimes describe it as "consequentialism".

The predictable consequence of this sort of statement is that someone starts going off about hospitals and terrorists and organs and moral philosophy and consent and rights and so on. This may be controversial, but I would say that causing this tangent constitutes a failure to communicate the point. Instead of prompting someone to think, I invoked some irrelevant philosophical cruft. The discussion is now about Consequentialism, the Capitalized Moral Theory, instead of the simple idea of thinking through consequences as an everyday heuristic.

It's not even that my statement relied on a misused term or something; it's that an unimportant choice of terminology dragged the whole conversation in an irrelevant and useless direction.

That is, "consequentialism" was a Philosophical Landmine.

In the course of normal conversation, you passed through an ordinary spot that happened to conceal the dangerous leftovers of past memetic wars. As a result, an intelligent and reasonable human was reduced to a mindless zombie chanting prerecorded slogans. If you're lucky, that's all. If not, you start chanting counter-slogans and the whole thing goes supercritical.

It's usually not so bad, and no one is literally "chanting slogans". There may even be some original phrasings involved. But the conversation has been derailed.

So how do these "philosophical landmine" things work?

It looks like when a lot has been said on a confusing topic, usually something in philosophy, ...
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin, Buffalo, Cambridge MA, Dublin, Moscow, Ohio, Paderborn, Purdue, Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2013-02-08T16:25:21.679Z

This summary was posted to LW main on February 1st. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Fourth Purdue Meetup: 01 February 2013 06:50PM
Less Wrong Dublin: 02 February 2013 04:30PM
Moscow: Reality and Us: 03 February 2013 04:00PM
Washington DC fun and games meetup: 03 February 2013 03:00PM
Paderborn Meetup Frebruary 6th : 06 February 2013 07:00PM
LW Buffalo Meetup at Buffalo Labs: 07 February 2013 07:00PM
Brussels meetup: 16 February 2013 01:00PM
Tokyo Meetup: 01 March 2013 07:00PM

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: 02 February 2019 01:30PM
Cambridge First-Sunday Meetup: 04 February 2013 02:00PM
Columbus, Ohio; Self-Skepticism: 04 February 2013 07:00PM
Love and Sex in Salt Lake City: 16 February 2014 01:00PM

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 California (Los Angeles/Orange County area...