trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
LINK: Ralph Merkle lecture, 'Introduction to Molecular Nanotechnology'
by lukeprog — 2011-05-22T03:38:49.592Z

Ralph Merkle at Singularity University gives a contemporary introduction to molecular nanotechnology in this video (1hr, 13min). Great way to be introduced to the subject, especially if your eyes get tired from too much reading.

From 2009, but as far as I can tell, not yet linked from Less Wrong.
ANKI flashcard deck: Cognitive Biases and Related Terms
by Duke — 2011-05-22T01:33:21.487Z

I have shared an ANKI flashcard deck called "Cognitive Biases and Related Terms," which is an upgrade of another shared deck. The deck is composed of most cognitive biases listed on Wikipedia, and a few other related terms, with links embedded in the cards for easy reference to articles. Including the links is both time-consuming and a major improvement in usability from the original deck, as thoroughly defining many of these concepts cannot be done on a single card. I also improved the formatting and fixed a bunch of definitions.

I have been devoting ~20 minutes/day to memorizing this deck with positive results.

To download the deck, open ANKI and then select File>Download>Shared Deck. Search for "Cognitive Biases and Related Terms." You are able to modify the deck through ANKI and share your own updated version.
Social Proficiency of a Rationalist and a Scholar
by Raw_Power — 2011-05-21T23:55:30.228Z

Followup to Recovering Insufferable Genius

So, we've been talking a mighty amount on avoiding and understanding the common pitfalls and mistakes that plague most human minds for various biological, evolutionary and social reasons. This knowledge is supposed to be used for the sake of learning how to think proprely and clearly about the world, and for the sake of making the right choices, and making them quickly. Both blades of the weapon can have a dramatic effect on how we interact with people. Behaviors that would appear absurd and annoying to us would suddenly gain a history, reasons for their existence until now and even for their continued existence. The incomprehensible people around us suddenly become fairly simple and predictable, to the point that you might, every now and then, understand them better than they do themselves. They also become all that much more interesting. You find yourself observing them, gently pushing their buttons as you eagerly wait for what they are going to do next. Of course, this applies just as much to you yourself. You see your own past in a very different light, and Akrasia remains difficult to escape. But at least now you know what you're doing wrong.

Anyway, you've discovered the pleasures of socializing, and you've even acquired an "edge" over those who relied on intuition ever since they were young. What I want us to discuss here is how to reach not just some "proficiency" in social navigation, but actual social excellence. We've collected research on how to be happy, on how to confront organizational problems, etc. I think it would be nice if we also collected data on how to be polite. How to make one's company agreeable and interesting. How to make oneself elegant and glamorous. How to get people to do what you want, and then thank you for it.

Some slight bits of this are approached by PUA methods, but those are very specific in goal and scope, and require a set of skills that can be far from adequate in other contexts (that, and flirting with any and everybody all the time is just creepy and makes you look like a supervillain).

Of course, at its core, social grace is nothing but "intelligent application of the Golden Rule". So, with insight and purpose, everything should be possible... But that's a pretty huge ideaspace, and in day-to-day interaction you often don't have that much time to figure our what to do. Of cou...
Dirty old men and greedy young women
by KatjaGrace — 2011-05-21T22:14:20.000Z

When people see relationships where the man is much older than the woman, they often suspect that both partners are there for superficial and unseemly benefits; money for the woman and a sexual object for the man. If a young man was with the same young woman, why does it reflect less badly on his motives? If an older woman marries an older man, why is it less plausible that she is just after his money? Why does trading one of two superficial motives for a relationship – the man’s youth or the woman’s money – and replacing it with a different superficial motive – the man’s money or the woman’s youth – make the relationship more likely to be superficially motivated? If people really fell in love for non-superficial reasons, shouldn’t we expect to see more couples who don’t match on superficial criteria such as age?
Not a Meetup May 22 in Cambridge, MA
by paulfchristiano — 2011-05-21T19:48:02.460Z

I enjoyed some of the conversations at the last Cambridge (MA) meetup, particularly towards the end, but I will be in California for the next couple of Cambridge meetups (though I hope to meet some of the LW community there).

I spend a lot of my time sitting and working on my laptop; there is nothing particularly important about where I'm sitting, and being in an unfamiliar environment seems to make me more productive if anything.

Putting two and two together: I'm going to commit to being at Cosi's in Kendall square between 1pm and 3pm on May 22. Feel free to come by and talk; I'll stay longer if there is interesting conversation. If no one shows up, nothing lost.

I feel like it should be possible to share this sort of information (not just here, but in general) without adding formality. For example, the act of posting such an event to meetup.com feels like it adds some unwarranted legitimacy / officialness: no one showing up would feel like a loss, and it would feel like undermining the regular meetups. On the other hand, though I'm more comfortable posting to LW discussion, posting it here inconveniences more people than it should. Deliberating at length doesn't seem worth it, so I'll just ask: what would others do?
Biases to watch out for while job hunting?
by malthrin — 2011-05-21T19:28:03.877Z

I'm in the process of searching for a new job. I'm currently employed, but I'm dissatisfied with my salary and career growth options. I've done a couple of phone interviews and one face-to-face interview already, with several others lined up next week. The face-to-face interview went well, and I'm anticipating an offer from them next week. However, while considering how I would evaluate that offer, I caught myself awarding them points in reciprocation for their implicit praise in singling me out as a worthy candidate. Now I'm wondering what other biases I might be falling prey to in this process. Thoughts?
Toronto Meetup, May 24th
by Spencer_Sleep — 2011-05-21T18:16:14.211Z

When: Tuesday, May 24th, 20:00

Where: The Duke of York, 39 Prince Arthur Avenue

Hi everyone,

The Toronto meetup group is having one of our bi-weekly meetings this Tuesday at the Duke of York. The reservation is under the name Spencer Sleep. I have requested a table on the patio. The reason for the move from the Bedford Academy (albeit by less than 10 metres) is that we are looking for somewhere quieter, thus more conducive to discussion. Now that it is warmer, one of our best bets is most likely patios, so we are going to try the patio at the Duke of York. Those of you who have been attending since the start may remember that we started out there. The reason we moved was the existence of live music every Thursday. Now that we are meeting on Tuesdays, that shouldn't be a problem.

As always, newcomers are extremely welcome.

If you want to hear about upcoming LessWrong events in Toronto, or have ideas about how or when those events should be run, join the Toronto LessWrong Google Group!

See you on Tuesday
[SEQ RERUN] Useful Statistical Biases
by badger — 2011-05-21T14:14:10.756Z

Today's post, Useful Statistical Biases was originally published on April 1, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

If you know an estimator has high variance, you can intentionally introduce bias by choosing a simpler hypothesis, and thereby lower expected variance while raising expected bias; sometimes total error is lower, hence the "bias-variance tradeoff". Keep in mind that while statistic bias might be useful, cognitive biases are not.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments of the original post).
This post is part of a series rerunning Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts so those interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Statistical Bias, 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, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki, or creating exercises. Go here for more details, or to discuss the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Irish Less Wrong meetup Sunday 29 May?
by Scott Alexander — 2011-05-21T12:24:47.103Z

Louie's LW-visits-per-city statistics put Dublin at number 18 in the world, so there have got to be some Irish LWers lurking about. I'd like to have a meetup at...let's say 2 PM on Sunday 29 May at the Starbucks at 20 College Green near Trinity College in Dublin.

I am from Cork, and I'd like to convince some people from Limerick and further afield to come out, but it's a long trip to make without any reason to believe there will be more people than just myself there. So if you're interested in coming, please either post here or send me an email.

Discussion will probably be about organizing future meetups, availability of rationalist/transhumanist networks and activities in Ireland, and other rationality and random chit-chat.

I'm not too attached to the date, time, or location, so we can change it if it conflicts with anything.
Auckland meetup, Thrusday May 26th
by AndrewH — 2011-05-21T05:22:05.418Z

Time for another Auckland meetup! Same place as the last one a few years back, at the Messe bar at 2pm on the 26th of May (Thursday).

Write a comment and/or please contact me on my cell: 021 039 8554, if you are interested in coming.
Upcoming meet-ups: Auckland, Bangalore, Houston, Toronto, Minneapolis, Ottawa, DC, North Carolina, BC...
by John_Maxwell — 2011-05-21T05:06:08.824Z

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Auckland: Thursday May 26, 2 pm

Bangalore: Saturday May 28, 4 pm

Houston: Sunday May 22, 5 pm

Ottawa: Thursday May 26, 7 pm (regular meetup)

Ottawa: Thursday May 26, 9 am (Bayes study group; note that this is in the MORNING)

DC: Sunday May 22, 1 pm

Triangle NC: Friday May 20, 6 pm (NOTE: meetup location has changed since last week);

Victoria, British Columbia: Monday May 23, 5 pm;

Toronto: Tuesday May 24, 8 pm

Minneapolis: Saturday May 28, 3 pm

Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: New York, Berkeley, Mountain View, Cambridge, MA, Toronto, Seattle, San Francisco, Irvine.

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

If you missed the deadline and wish to have your meetup featured, my username is dreamalgebra on google's webmail service.

To reduce front page clutter, the new plan is for meetups to be initially posted in the Discussion section, and for Anna Salamon to make a promoted post "upcoming meetups" post every Friday that links to every meet-up that has been planned for the next two weeks. [HT: Carl Shulman.] Please let her know if your meetup is omitted. (I'm filling in for Anna this week.)

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post about 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: London, Chicago, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Ottawa, Helsinki, Melbourne.
The Joys of Conjugate Priors
by TCB — 2011-05-21T02:41:22.206Z

(Warning: this post is a bit technical.)
Suppose you are a Bayesian reasoning agent. While going about your daily activities, you observe an event of type . Because you're a good Bayesian, you have some internal parameter which represents your belief that will occur.
Now, you're familiar with the Ways of Bayes, and therefore you know that your beliefs must be updated with every new datapoint you perceive. Your observation of is a datapoint, and thus you'll want to modify . But how much should this datapoint influence ? Well, that will depend on how sure you are of in the first place. If you calculated based on a careful experiment involving hundreds of thousands of observations, then you're probably pretty confident in its value, and this single observation of shouldn't have much impact. But if your estimate of is just a wild guess based on something your unreliable friend told you, then this datapoint is important and should be weighted much more heavily in your reestimation of .
Of course, when you reestimate , you'll also have to reestimate how confident you are in its value. Or, to put it a different way, you'll want to compute a new probability distribution over possible values of . This new distribution will be , and it can be computed using Bayes' rule:
Here, since is a parameter used to specify the distribution from which is drawn, it can be assumed that computing is straightforward. is your old distribution over , which you already have; it says how accurate you think different settings of the parameters are, and allows you to compute your confidence in any given value of . So the numerator should be straightforward to compute; it's the denominator which might give you trouble, since for an arbitrary distribution, computing the integral is likely to be intractable.
But you're probably not really looking for a distribution over different parameter settings; you're looking for a single best setting of the parameters that you can use for making predictions. If this is your goal, then once you've computed the distribution , you can pick the value of that maximizes it. This will be your new parameter, and because you have the formula , you'll know exactly how confident you are in this parameter.
In practice, pic...
Ontological Crises in Artificial Agents' Value Systems by Peter de Blanc
by jimrandomh — 2011-05-21T01:05:12.613Z

I saw this go by on arXiv, and thought it deserved a discussion here.

Decision-theoretic agents predict and evaluate the results of their actions using a model, or ontology, of their environment. An agent's goal, or utility function, may also be specified in terms of the states of, or entities within, its ontology. If the agent may upgrade or replace its ontology, it faces a crisis: the agent's original goal may not be well-defined with respect to its new ontology. This crisis must be resolved before the agent can make plans towards achieving its goals. We discuss in this paper which sorts of agents will undergo ontological crises and why we may want to create such agents. We present some concrete examples, and argue that a well-defined procedure for resolving ontological crises is needed. We point to some possible approaches to solving this problem, and evaluate these methods on our examples.

I'll post my analysis and opinion of this paper in a comment after I've taken some time to digest it.
[HPMoR Podcast] A Musical Help Request
by Eneasz — 2011-05-20T16:18:59.694Z

I am quickly approaching Self-Awareness Part 1, which readers may remember as the chapter with the Ghostbusters song. Anyone who's listened to the audio of Chapter 6a knows that I have no singing talent whatsoever. :) I'm panicked at having to try to sing an actual song that many people love. So I'm asking for help.

Those familiar with the chapter know that a number of students all sing altered lyrics together over the Ghostbusters Theme music. If a number of people could sing these lyrics into a microphone and send me the file I could mix them all together and overlay them on the original music. I think/hope that would sound rather cool, and I'd mention everyone who contributed by name (either real or online, your choice) in the credits (unless they'd rather not be named of course).

If you know other HPMoR fans IRL and can get a number of them in the same room to all sing at once into a microphone, even better! It could even be fun!

I'm terrified of doing this solo, please help! The sound files can be sent to HPMoRPodcast AT gmail.com and I'd need them by midnight on Monday, June 6th. Thanks!

The original song can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCHFVTQKqdQ

The alternate lyrics are below:

To the tune of "Ghostbusters"

(As performed on the kazoo by Fred and George Weasley,
and sung by Lee Jordan.)

.

There's a Dark Lord near?
Got no need to fear
Who you gonna call?

"HARRY POTTER!" shouted Lee Jordan, and the Weasley twins performed a triumphant chorus.

With a Killing Curse?
Well it could be worse.
Who you gonna call?

"HARRY POTTER!" There were a lot more voices shouting it this time.

I ain't afraid of Dark Lords!

I ain't afraid of Dark Lords!

Dark robes and a mask?
Impossible task?
Who you gonna call?
HARRY POTTER!

Giant Fire-Ape?
Old bat in a cape?
Who you gonna call?
HARRY POTTER!

:

I ain't afraid of Dark Lords!
I ain't afraid of Dark Lords!
Seeking suggestions: Less Wrong Biology 101
by virtualAdept — 2011-05-20T15:28:03.283Z

I’ve been a reader and occasional commenter here for a while now, but previously have not had a solid idea of what I could or wanted to contribute to the community in posting. In light of recent comments stating an interest in more posts that offer concrete, factual information as well as remembering lukeprog’s call for such things in his Back to the Basics of Rationality post, I am considering a series of condensed posts about biology. As someone who has spent my formal education on biologically-focused engineering (bioengineering BS, now studying bioinformatics under a chemical engineering department for my PhD) but has always had the bulk of my friends in electrical engineering, computer science, and more traditional chemical engineering, I’ve gotten used to offering such condensed explanations whenever biology works its way into a discussion. From what I’ve seen on LW thus far, the community educational base leans more in those (non-biology) directions, so I believe this is a niche that could use filling.

Since biology is a rather broad subject, and you could all go read Wikipedia or a textbook if you wanted a very detailed survey course, my intent is to pick targeted topics that are relevant to current events and scientific developments. Each post would focus on one such event/Awesome New Study, discussing the biological background and potential implications, including either short explanations or links to the basics needed to understand the subject. If there are any political ties to the subject, I will withhold my explicit opinions on those aspects unless asked in the comments.

My questions, then, are the following:

Is this something that people here would find interesting/useful in the general sense? (While I do enjoy talking to myself, doing so on this topic has gotten a bit old, so I really do want to know if no one really thinks this will be helpful.)

How long/in-depth would you like? This question is intended to gauge what my background explanation: background links ratio should be.

And most importantly, what are some topics you would like to see discussed?

UPDATE: Having followed the comments so far and done some preliminary outlining, I'm leaning toward a more organized progression of topics that will still tie into current interests and developments, but ...
[SEQ RERUN] Statistical Bias
by badger — 2011-05-20T14:19:23.356Z

Today's post, Statistical Bias was originally published on March 30, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

There are two types of error, systematic error, and random variance error; by repeating experiments you can average out and drive down the variance error.

This post is part of a series rerunning Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts so those interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Tsuyoku vs. the Egalitarian Instinct, 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, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to discuss the Rerunning the Sequences series.
General Bitcoin discussion thread (May 2011)
by Kaj_Sotala — 2011-05-20T14:03:30.150Z

There seems to be quite a bit of a Bitcoin interest around here, with several articles about it already: [1 2 3 4 5 6 7]

I propose that links and generic Bitcoin comments should be posted here, instead of making a new discussion thread for each interesting article about the subject.
I want to save myself
by DanArmak — 2011-05-20T10:27:25.788Z

Related to: People who want to save the world

I have recently been diagnosed with cancer, for which I am currently being treated with good prognosis. I've been reevaluating my life plans and priorities in response. To be clear, I estimate that the cancer is responsible for much less than half the total danger to my life. The universals - X-risks, diseases I don't have yet, traffic accidents, etc. - are worse.

I would like to affirm my desire to Save Myself (and Save The World For Myself). Saving the world is a prerequisite simply because the world is in danger. I believe my values are well aligned with those of the LW community; wanting to Save The World is a good applause light but I believe most people want to do so for selfish reasons.

I would also like to ask LW members: why do you prefer to contribute (in part) towards humankind-wide X-risk problems rather than more narrow but personally important issues? How do you determine the time- and risk- tradeoffs between things like saving money for healthcare, and investing money in preventing an unfriendly AI FOOM?

It is common advice here to focus on earning money and donating it to research, rather than donating in kind. How do you decide what portion of income to donate to SIAI, which to SENS, and which to keep as money for purely personal problems that others won't invest in? There's no conceptual difficulty here, but I have no idea how to quantify the risks involved.
Official Less Wrong Redesign: Special pages
by matt — 2011-05-20T07:19:05.875Z

Following along from Louie's post and the discussion around it…

User:orthonormal suggested (and many seconded) a better Welcome section and improvements to the About page.
User:bentarm suggested doing something with the comment help link, User:jimrandomh suggested making it a wiki page, and User:Alicorn requested that it be more extensive.

Responding to the above suggestions, we propose adding functionality to Less Wrong. We'll add a special page type that collects its content from the wiki. We propose that /about, the home page, the comment help text, and each user's user page be of this type (I imagine that this change to the homepage may be controversial).

We propose that those pages link to:

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Lesswrong:Homepage

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Lesswrong:Aboutpage

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Lesswrong:Commentmarkuphelp

and each user's wiki userpage if an exact name match exists.

I've very clumsily populated those pages with starting content but hope that we can test the idea by inviting you wonderful people to make those pages be good before we develop the feature. (Which is an invitation - if you don't hate this idea, go, edit, and make good.)

Detail:
These pages would cache wiki content for at least several hours, so would be fast to render. They would include a publicly usable "refetch content from the wiki" button (detailed placement, wording and design to follow) so that if the source page was spammed anyone could fix it on the wiki then clear the cache. If abuse became a problem we could easily "protect" those pages.