trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Open Thread, May 5 - 11, 2014
by Tenoke — 2014-05-05T10:35:45.563Z

Previous Open Thread

You know the drill - If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one.

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
2014 Survey of Effective Altruists
by tog — 2014-05-05T02:32:28.735Z

I'm pleased to announce the first annual survey of effective altruists. This is a short survey of around 40 questions (generally multiple choice), which several collaborators and I have put a great deal of work into and would be very grateful if you took. I'll offer $250 of my own money to one participant.

Take the survey at http://survey.effectivealtruismhub.com/

The survey should yield some interesting results such as EAs' political and religious views, what actions they take, and the causes they favour and donate to. It will also enable useful applications which will be launched immediately afterwards, such as a map of EAs with contact details and a cause-neutral register of planned donations or pledges which can be verified each year. I'll also provide an open platform for followup surveys and other actions people can take. If you'd like to suggest questions, email me or comment.

Anonymised results will be shared publicly and not belong to any individual or organisation. The most robust privacy practices will be followed, with clear opt-ins and opt-outs.

I'd like to thank Jacy Anthis, Ben Landau-Taylor, David Moss and Peter Hurford for their help.

Other surveys' results, and predictions for this one

Other surveys have had intriguing results. For example, Joey Savoie and Xio Kikauka's interviewed 42 often highly active EAs over Skype, and found that they generally had left-leaning parents, donated on average 10%, and were altruistic before becoming EAs. The time they spent on EA activities was correlated with the percentage they donated (0.4), the time their parents spend volunteering (0.3), and the percentage of their friends who were EAs (0.3).

80,000 Hours also released a questionnaire and, while this was mainly focused on their impact, it yielded a list of which careers people plan to pursue: 16% for academia, 9% for both finance and software engineering, and 8% for both medicine and non-profits.

I'd be curious to hear people's predictions as to what the results of this survey will be. You might enjoy reading or sharing them here. For my part, I'd imagine we have few conservatives or even libertarians, are over 70% male, and have directed most of our donations to poverty charities.
Does increasing peak typing speed help?
by KatjaGrace — 2014-05-05T01:07:03.000Z

Is it worth learning to type faster? If – like me – basically what you do is type, this seems likely to be a pretty clear win, if you have any interventions that would improve it at all. Ryan Carey suggested a painful sounding intervention which improves maximum typing speed a lot, but said that since he usually types substantially below his maximum typing speed, this would not help. His model seems to be that typing speed is basically either bottlenecked by physical typing ability or something else (like thinking speed), and it is not much worth trying to speed up the one that is not bottlenecking the process. This sounds pretty reasonable, but did not match my intuitions, and seemed extremely cheap to test, so I decided to test it.

I tried a number of ways of reducing my typing speed, and chose three that were reasonably spaced across the spectrum (~90wpm, ~60wpm, ~30wpm) on a typing speed test. These were (respectively) Dvorak keyboard layout, Dvorak with my left pinky finger tied up with a rubber band or tape, and Qwerty keyboard layout. I measured each one three times on that test, and three times on longer (3-5m) journaling activities, mostly writing about issues in my life that I wanted to think about anyway. These journaling bouts tended to be faster than I would usually casually write I think, so this does not really test how much peak typing speed improves combination writing/staring into space speed. But they were slow enough to be real journaling, with some real insights, and were substantially slower than peak typing speed.

My results are below. They are a bit dubious, but I think are good enough for the purpose. Moving from the middle method to the top method improved my real speed in proportion to my peak speed. Between the bottom two, it made little difference. Further details are more confusing – that there is no difference between peak and real speed for Qwerty suggests that physical typing is a big bottleneck there, however improving the typing method to handicapped Dvorak – which has a higher peak speed – doesn’t improve real speed much either, suggesting inconsistently that thinking is a huge bottleneck, which also seems implausible if thinking is not such a big bottleneck for higher speeds (implied by the fact that real speeds get a lot higher with better typing methods). But if I wanted to think more a...
Calling all MIRI supporters for unique May 6 giving opportunity!
by lukeprog — 2014-05-04T23:45:25.469Z

(Cross-posted from MIRI's blog. MIRI maintains Less Wrong, with generous help from Trike Apps, and much of the core content is written by salaried MIRI staff members.)

Update: I'm liveblogging the fundraiser here.

Read our strategy below, then give here!

As previously announced, MIRI is participating in a massive 24-hour fundraiser on May 6th, called SV Gives. This is a unique opportunity for all MIRI supporters to increase the impact of their donations. To be successful we'll need to pre-commit to a strategy and see it through. If you plan to give at least $10 to MIRI sometime this year, during this event would be the best time to do it!

The plan

We need all hands on deck to help us win the following prize as many times as possible:

$2,000 prize for the nonprofit that has the most individual donors in an hour, every hour for 24 hours.

To paraphrase, every hour, there is a $2,000 prize for the organization that has the most individual donors during that hour. That's a total of $48,000 in prizes, from sources that wouldn't normally give to MIRI. The minimum donation is $10, and an individual donor can give as many times as they want. Therefore we ask our supporters to:

give $10 an hour, during every hour of the fundraiser that they are awake (I'll be up and donating for all 24 hours!);

for those whose giving budgets won't cover all those hours, see below for list of which hours you should privilege; and

publicize this effort as widely as possible.

International donors, we especially need your help!

MIRI has a strong community of international supporters, and this gives us a distinct advantage! While North America sleeps, you'll be awake, ready to target all of the overnight $2,000 hourly prizes.

Hours to target in order of importance

To increase our chances of winning these prizes we want to preferentially target the hours that will see the least donation traffic from donors of other participating organizations. Below are the top 12 hours we'd like to target in order of importance. Remember that all times are in Pacific Time. (Click on an hour to see what time it is in your timezone.)

1 am hour (01:00–01:59 PT)

2 am hour (02:00–02:59 PT)

3 am hour (03:00–03:59 PT)

4 am hour (04:00–04:59 PT)

5 am hour (05:00–05:59 PT)

6 am hour (06:00–06:59 PT)

11 pm hour (23:00–23

...
Truth: It's Not That Great
by ChrisHallquist — 2014-05-04T22:07:54.354Z

Rationality is pretty great. Just not quite as great as everyone here seems to think it is.

-Yvain, "Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great"

The folks most vocal about loving "truth" are usually selling something. For preachers, demagogues, and salesmen of all sorts, the wilder their story, the more they go on about how they love truth...

The people who just want to know things because they need to make important decisions, in contrast, usually say little about their love of truth; they are too busy trying to figure stuff out.

-Robin Hanson, "Who Loves Truth Most?"

A couple weeks ago, Brienne made a post on Facebook that included this remark: "I've also gained a lot of reverence for the truth, in virtue of the centrality of truth-seeking to the fate of the galaxy." But then she edited to add a footnote to this sentence: "That was the justification my brain originally threw at me, but it doesn't actually quite feel true. There's something more directly responsible for the motivation that I haven't yet identified."

I saw this, and commented:

<puts rubber Robin Hanson mask on>

What we have here is a case of subcultural in-group signaling masquerading as something else. In this case, proclaiming how vitally important truth-seeking is is a mark of your subculture. In reality, the truth is sometimes really important, but sometimes it isn't.

</rubber Robin Hanson mask>

In spite of the distancing pseudo-HTML tags, I actually believe this. When I read some of the more extreme proclamations of the value of truth that float around the rationalist community, I suspect people are doing in-group signaling—or perhaps conflating their own idiosyncratic preferences with rationality. As a mild antidote to this, when you hear someone talking about the value of the truth, try seeing if the statement still makes sense if you replace "truth" with "information."

This standard gives many statements about the value of truth its stamp of approval. After all, information is pretty damn valuable. But statements like "truth seeking is central to the fate of the galaxy" look a bit suspicious. Is information-gathering central to the fate of the galaxy? You could argue that statement is kinda true if you squint at it right, but really it's too general. Surely it's not just any information that's central to shaping the fate of the galaxy, but information about specific su...
Meetup : Frankfurt: Presentation about Operant Conditioning
by Kendra — 2014-05-04T19:52:33.779Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Frankfurt: Presentation about Operant Conditioning

WHEN:
11 May 2014 02:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Frankfurt

We are meeting again and you are welcome to join! Please contact me under 0176 34 095 760 to get the precise location.
If you have any special needs for attending, please tell us in advance, we'll try at best to accommodate your needs.

Discussion article for the meetup : Frankfurt: Presentation about Operant Conditioning
May Monthly Bragging Thread
by philh — 2014-05-04T08:21:17.681Z

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.

Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.

So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?

(I think this is the most recent thread, so anything since January is fair game, assuming you haven't already mentioned it.)
Email tone and status: !s, friendliness, 'please', etc.
by tog — 2014-05-03T19:05:43.491Z

Do the following things in email tone lower status?:

Exclamation marks

Friendliness

Saying 'please', or 'it'd be great if'

Saying 'you don't have to do this, but...'

Saying 'sorry' (e.g. 'sorry to bother you')

Signing of with 'Thanks!'

My impression is that they don't, because I haven't seen people who do this as low status. But they've all been people who are clearly high status anyway, due to their professional positions.

It'd be great to get any pointers on this, as I worry I do all these things. Sorry if there's already a discussion of this, I did try looking! Thanks!
Incentive compatibility and the Revelation Principle
by badger — 2014-05-03T13:38:48.134Z

In which the Revelation Principle is introduced, showing all mechanisms can be reduced to incentive compatible mechanisms. With this insight, a solution (of sorts) is given to the public good problem in the last post. Limitations of the Revelation Principle are also discussed.

The formalism I introduced last time will now start paying off. We were left with the question of how to check whether a mechanism exists that satisfies some particular goal, naively requiring us to search over all possible procedures. Luckily though, the space of all possible mechanisms can be reduced to something manageable.

Observe the following: suppose through divine intervention we were granted a mechanism (M, g) that implements a social choice function f. In other words, the outcome when agents of types θ1, …, θn interact with the mechanism is exactly the outcome prescribed by the function f for those types. Since a person’s type encodes all relevant variation in their characteristics, preferences, or beliefs, we’d know what that person wants to do if we knew their type. In particular, when agent i is type θi, we expect her choice of message to be mi(θi). Once all the messages are sent, the function g translates the agents’ choices into an outcome so that g(m1(θ1), …, mn(θn)) = f(θ1, …, θn).

But wait! Since we expect a type θi agent to send message mi(θi), why don’t we just package that inside the mechanism? Each agent will tell us their type and the mechanism designer will play in proxy for the agent according to the original mechanism. We’ll call this the direct mechanism for f since all we need to know is that agents tell us their types and then are assigned outcome f(θ), no matter what we’ve blackboxed in the middle.

Why did we expect an agent of type θi to send message mi(θi)? Presumably because that message maximized her utility. In particular, it had to be at least as good as the message mi(θʹi) she’s send when her type is different, giving us:

Since the outcomes of the mechanism coincide with f, we can conclude

Even though we started off with some mechanism, this last statement doesn't say anything about the mechanism itself, only the social choice function it implements. Let's call any social choice function f th...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-05-02T16:09:12.436Z

This summary was posted to LW main on April 25th. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

Christchurch, NZ Inaugural Meetup: 27 April 2014 04:30PM
Las Vegas/Henderson, NV: 01 May 2014 06:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Australia Mega-Meetup: 09 May 2014 05:00PM
Bratislava Meetup XII.: 28 April 2014 06:00PM
(Buffalo NY) Sunday Meetup: 04 May 2014 04:00PM
Hamburg - Report from Berlin: 26 April 2014 05:00PM
Montreal - Easy Lifehacks: 28 April 2014 07:00PM
Munich Meetup: 11 May 2014 02:00PM
Ottawa - How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup Group: 30 April 2014 07:30PM
Urbana-Champaign, Consciousness: 27 April 2014 12:00PM
Utrecht: 03 May 2014 05:00PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 26 April 2025 01:30PM
(NYC) Effective Altruism 102 (NYC): 26 April 2014 05:00PM
Washington DC Singing Meetup: 27 April 2014 03:00PM
West LA—Honor and Glory: 30 April 2014 06:59PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, 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 is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are 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!

I...
The Extended Living-Forever Strategy-Space
by Froolow — 2014-05-02T14:15:49.787Z

I wanted to try and write this like a sequence post with a little story at the beginning because the style is hard to beat if you can pull it off. For those that want to skip to the meat of the argument, scroll down to the section titled ‘The Jealous God of Cryonics’

Bizzaro-Pascal

The year is 1600BC and Moses is scrambling down the slopes of Mount Sinai under the blazing Egyptian sun, with two stone tablets tucked under his arms - strangely small for the enduring impact they will have on the world. Pausing a moment to take a sip of water from his waterskin, he decided to double-check the words on the tablet were the same as those God had dictated to him before reading them to the Israelites – it wouldn’t do to have a typo encouraging adultery! Suddenly, a great shockwave bowled Moses onto the ground. It was simultaneously as loud as the universe tearing itself into two nearly identical copies, but as quiet as the difference between a coin landing on heads rather than tails. Moses - trembling with shock - picked himself up, dusted off the tablets and scratched his beard. He was sure that the Second Commandment looked a bit different, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it...

More than three thousand years later, Blaise Pascal is about to formulate the Wager that would make him infamous. “You see,” he says, “If God exists then the payoff is infinitely positive for believing in Him and infinitely negative for not, therefore whatever the cost of believing you should do it”.

“Well I’m sceptical,” says his friend, “It seems to me that the idea of an infinite payoff is incoherent to begin with, plus you have no particular reason to privilege the hypothesis that the Christian God should and wants to be worshipped, and not to mention the fact that if I were God I’d be pretty irritated that people pretended believe in Me because of some probabilistic argument rather than by observing all of My great works”

“But don’t you see?” Pascal rejoins, “God in His infinite goodness foresaw your objections and wrote the Second Commandment specifically to take that into account; ‘Thou shall have no other God but me, unless thou feels that thy can maximise thine’s utility by ignoring this Commandment and worshipping multiple Gods. Seriously, I don’t...
May 2014 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2014-05-01T21:49:20.584Z

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.

If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.

Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.

If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.
Meetup : Canberra: Rationalist Fun and Games!
by DanielFilan — 2014-05-01T12:44:58.481Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Rationalist Fun and Games!

WHEN:
24 May 2014 06:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
108 North Road, Acton, ACT

Note the change in location: we will now be meeting in room N101 of the CSIT building.

Also note the different date than normal: Friday the 23rd is the CSSA's Epic Games Night, so we will be meeting on Saturday the 24th instead.

This meetup, we will be having rationalist fun and games! We will start off with 5-minute debiasing, where we will break up into groups and think of ways to attack the scourge of evil biases. Then, we will move on to a game of Liar's Dice, described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_dice , which will teach us about probability and bluffing. As always, vegan snacks will be provided.

General meetup info:

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

Structured meetups are held on the second Saturday and fourth Friday of each month from 6 pm until late in the CSIT building, room N101.

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

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Rationalist Fun and Games!
Rationality Quotes May 2014
by elharo — 2014-05-01T09:45:45.166Z

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

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, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Group Rationality Diary, May 1-15 
by therufs — 2014-05-01T02:42:01.079Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for May 1-15.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Previous diary: April 16-30

Next diary: May 16-31

Rationality diaries archive
Meetup : Washington DC Games meetup
by rocurley — 2014-05-01T01:50:11.633Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Games meetup

WHEN:
06 May 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400)

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

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

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Games meetup