trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Saint Petersburg, Russia
by efim — 2013-10-08T20:46:25.568Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg, Russia

WHEN:
27 October 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)

WHERE:
Санкт-Петербург, м. Технологический Институт, ул.1-я Красноармейская, дом 15

Come to the (probably) first in a long time meetup in St.Petersburg!

It will be located in cafe "PMG" - for detailed description please read mailing list announcement. At least for the first time there will be no or little moderation - just socialising, getting to know each other, unstructured discussion.
We will be looking at our interests and how meetups can meet them.

Please look in mailing list for more information:https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/less-wrong-saint-petersburg

Or contact me on 8 911 843 56 44. Every day from 18-00 to 00-00.

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg, Russia
Meetup : Less Wrong Israel Meetup (Tel Aviv): Dealing with Emotional Vampires
by SoftFlare — 2013-10-08T10:21:45.178Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Israel Meetup (Tel Aviv): Dealing with Emotional Vampires

WHEN:
17 October 2013 08:00:00PM (+0300)

WHERE:
7 Menachem Begin st., Ramat-Gan

We're going to have a meetup on Thursday, October 17th at VisionMap's offices, Gibor Sport House, 15th floor, 7 Menachem Begin st., Ramat-Gan.

Our program is:

20:00-20:15: Assembly

20:15-21:00: Main Talk

21:00-22:00: Dinner & Discussion

22:00-23:00: Rump Session (minitalks)

23:00-: End of official programming

Main Talk: Mirrors and Sunlight: Dealing with Emotional Vampires / Guy Banay

We will learn how to recognize the Dramatic Personality Disorders (antisocial, borderline, narcissistic and histrionic) and some strategies to minimize the damage they can do.

Backup Talk: TBA

Rump Session: each participant will give a 4-minute talk (+3 minute encore if we applaud hard enough). Giving a talk isn't mandatory, but it's highly recommended. Not confident that what you have to say is relevant to our interests? Unsure about your public speaking skills? Doesn't matter - in the rump session, anything goes.

Feel free to contact me (Gal Hochberg) at hochbergg@gmail.com or at 0545330678 for any further information

Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Israel Meetup (Tel Aviv): Dealing with Emotional Vampires
CFAR is looking for a videographer for next Wednesday
by Academian — 2013-10-08T05:16:14.292Z

Hi all, CFAR is looking for a videographer in the Bay Area to shoot and edit a 1-minute video introducing us. Do you know anyone?

If so, please send an email to them and me (critch@rationality.org) that introduces us!

We'll need to shoot the video on Wednesday, Oct 16, or possibly Thursday, Oct 17, and have it edited within about 24 hours.

Thanks for any help tracking someone down!

Sincerely,

--

Critch
Rewiring my Brain: (gentle) Help Appreciated
by JMiller — 2013-10-07T16:13:57.950Z

Hi everyone,

I am graduating as a philosophy student shortly, and want to pursue computer science / programming/ something-of-that-sort.

I am currently taking some basic math (calculus) and physics (mechanics) courses in order to obtain pre-requesits, and to develop a basic framework. My problem is that I can grasp concepts and ideas, but when it comes to solving specific problems with actual numbers, I seem to shut down. Specifically, it takes me much more time (read "hours") to solve problems that ought to take 10 minutes. This is a particularly bad thing on tests and exams.

I believe that the difficulty I am having stems from so little exposure to symbolic reasoning in the past 5-6 years. I am looking for resources, techniques and advice to "turbocharge" (to use CFAR terminology) my ability to absorb and deeply comprehend technical material, so that solving problems becomes second nature.

Thank you so much for your time,

Jeremy
Requesting clarification- On the Metaethics
by Carinthium — 2013-10-07T13:00:44.353Z

My apologies if this doesn't deserve a Discussion post, but if this hasn't been addresed anywhere than it's clearly an important issue.

There have been many defences of consequentialism against deontology, including quite a few on this site. What I haven't seen, however, is any demonstration of how deontology is incompatible with the ideas in Elizier's Metaethics sequence- as far as I can tell, a deontologist could agree with just about everything in the Sequences.

Said deontologist would argue that, to the extent a human universial morality can exist through generalised moral instincts, said instincts tend to be deontological (as supported through scientific studies- a study of the trolley dilemna v.s the 'fat man' variant showed that people would divert the trolley but not push the fat man). This would be their argument against the consequentialist, who they could accuse of wanting a consequentialist system and ignoring the moral instincts at the basis of their own speculations.

I'm not completely sure about this, but figure it an important enough misunderstanding if I indeed misunderstood to deserve clearing up.
Meetup : London social
by Paul Crowley — 2013-10-07T11:45:57.286Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London social

WHEN:
13 October 2013 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Shakespeare's Head, 64-68 Kingsway, London WC2B 6BG

Come and hang out with the lovely people of London Less Wrong. No agenda, just whatever's interesting!

Discussion article for the meetup : London social
Superintelligence fiction - "Understand", by Ted Chiang
by D_Alex — 2013-10-07T03:03:20.587Z

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm?2. 15-30 min read time, rated "pretty good" by me.

There are a couple of interesting features of this story that I would like to discuss - but I don't want to introduce any spoilers, so I'll just leave this here for now.
Under the eyes of your betters
by Voltairina — 2013-10-06T19:25:09.321Z

There is some research that claims the feeling of being watched motivates you to engage in more prosocial behavior. Our gaze recognition ability is apparently hard for us to suppress even when we try to intentionally. When I think about times when I've been around friends, however, I usually feel the pressure to act in a way I feel will impress that specific friend, which is not necessarily pro-social. I imagine the disembodied eyes are not registered as "friends" and heighten our anxiety about who might be looking at us. I wonder whether having pictures of your role models in your workspace and people in your life who encourage you to do well when you talk to them might encourage you to engage in behavior more in line with those virtues you'd like to cultivate. Especially if you intentionally go for pictures where the people in them are looking at the camera directly.
Your role models are watching you...
by Voltairina — 2013-10-06T19:09:51.044Z

I was just thinking about the possible benefits of visualizing your role models watching you. There's apparently some good research about just putting up posters of human eyes having a positive influence on behavior. But when I think about my behavior around people, I notice that I feel pressured to act in a way that I think they would like, not necessarily the best way I could imagine. Maybe by putting up their pictures in your room or at your desk, you could benefit from the values of your role models by imagining them actually being able to see you. For instance, if you wanted to learn Martial Arts, maybe putting up a poster of Bruce Lee could remind you to train.
Why would evolution favor more bad?
by KatjaGrace — 2013-10-06T18:26:45.000Z

Sometimes people argue that pain and suffering should be expected to overwhelm the world because bad experiences are ‘stronger’ in some sense than good ones. People generally wouldn’t take five minutes of the worst suffering they have ever had for five minutes of the best pleasure (or so I’m told). An evolutionary explanation sometimes given is that the things that happen to animals tend to be mildly beneficial for them most of the time, then occasionally very bad. For instance, eating food is a bit good, but one meal won’t guarantee you evolutionary success. If on the other hand someone else eats you, you have lost pretty badly.

This seems intuitively plausible. Many processes have the characteristic that you can add more bricks and gradually reach your goal, but taking away a brick causes the whole thing to crumble. However good and bad outcomes are relative. If you see a snake and are deciding whether to go near it or not, there is a worse outcome of it biting you, and a better outcome of it not biting you. The good outcome here is super valuable, even if it doesn’t buy you immediate evolutionary success. It is just as important for you to get the good outcome as for you to not get the bad outcome. So what exactly do we mean by bad outcomes being worse than good outcomes are good? It seems we are judging outcomes relative to some default. So we need an explanation for why the default is where it is.

I think the most obvious guess is that the default is something like expectations, or ‘business as usual’. If you generally expect to go through your morning not being killed, then the avoiding being bitten by the snake option is close to neutral, whereas the being bitten option is very bad. But if the default is expectations, then the expected badness and the expected goodness should roughly cancel out – if suffering just tends to be stronger, then it should also tend to be rare enough to cancel. So on this model you shouldn’t expect life to be net bad especially.

At least on this model the badness and goodness should have cancelled out in the evolutionary environment. Our responses to good and bad situations don’t seem to change with our own expectations that much – even if you have been planning to go to the dentist for months, and it isn’t as bad as you thought, it can still be pre...
Meetup : Urbana Champaign: Metaethics, Normative Ethics, Applied Ethics
by Mestroyer — 2013-10-06T01:39:06.416Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana Champaign: Metaethics, Normative Ethics, Applied Ethics

WHEN:
06 October 2013 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
1308 W Green St Urbana, IL 61801 ‎ 173 ft SE

This will be held at the same benches as the Löbstacle meetup, here:
https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=40.111220,+-88.227363

Topics we might discuss:
What is the correct metaethics? (Or what is a useful metaethics)? Moral realism, moral antirealism, Eliezer Yudkowsky's metaethics.
Population ethics: the repugnant conclusion, average vs aggregate utilitarianism, spheres of infinite utility
How to do good in the world: effective altruism, how can you pick the best charity?

If we get bored of that, I will have games as a backup.

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana Champaign: Metaethics, Normative Ethics, Applied Ethics
Megameetup on December 13-15th, NYC
by Raemon — 2013-10-05T21:56:05.012Z

This winter, we'll be hosting a megameetup on December 13th-15th. This is the weekend of the Winter Solstice, a big event we're putting together the rationality, humanist and transhumanist communities of the area. (The Solstice celebration is on Saturday evening - if you'd like to attend, you should check out the kickstarter and back it. Seating is limited and tickets are sold in advance are $25).

Eight members of the New York Rationality community recently moved into a gorgeous house in Brooklyn. It's got 5500 square feet. The first floor, approximately 1800 square feet, has four areas that with sliding doors that can either be treated as a single, huge meetup space, or broken into smaller areas.

Also it has secret doors.

We have named it "Highgarden."

We're really looking forward to turning this into a genuine rationality community center. We have self improvement meetups every other Sunday (the next one is on the October 13th), and have other one-off events in the works.

Friday night and Saturday afternoon will primarily casual hangouts, before most of us head over to the Solstice event. On Sunday there will be a presentation on the current state of Effective Altruism. We're aiming to have other presentations as well but details are not finalized yet.

We have a large (but not unlimited) array of crash space, so if you'd like to spend Friday and/or Saturday night at Highgarden, you should let us know in advance.
Looking forward to seeing many of you there!
When + Where

Highgarden House -851 Park Place Brooklyn NY, 11261

Friday, December 13th, 7:00 PM - Saturday, December 15th, 7:00 PM
Rationality Quotes October 2013
by A1987dM — 2013-10-05T21:02:36.127Z

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.
Meetup : Brussels monthly meetup: games!
by Roxolan — 2013-10-05T16:47:40.041Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels monthly meetup: games!

WHEN:
12 October 2013 01:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Rue des Alexiens 55 1000 Bruxelles

Second Saturday of the month is coming up. As usual, we will meet at 1 pm at La Fleur en papier doré, close to the Brussels Central station. If you feel like an intelligent discussion and are in the neighborhood, consider dropping by. The meeting will be in English to facilitate both French and Dutch speaking members.

There's an interest in games and game design in the group, so I thought we might make this the official topic for this meetup. Have you read anything about it lately? Is there an interesting game you think we should try out? Any game idea you've been sitting on?

(I don't expect we'll only talk about games though.)

If you are coming for the first time, please consider filling out this one minute form, to share your contact information:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1qSvI1NWkFSsfIJhUMORb_Wd8fdJTVPhdw49grDQwRTI/viewform

The Brussels meetups use a Google Group:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lesswrong-brussels

Discussion article for the meetup : Brussels monthly meetup: games!
The Cause of Time
by johnswentworth — 2013-10-05T02:56:46.150Z

In a recent comment, I suggested that correlations between seemingly unrelated periodic time series share a common cause: time. However, the math disagrees... and suggests a surprising alternative.

Imagine that we took measurements from a thermometer on my window and a ridiculously large tuning fork over several years. The first set of data is temperature T over time t, so it looks like a list of data points [(t0, T0), (t1, T1), ...]. The second set of data is mechanical strain e in the tuning fork over time, so it looks like a list of data points [(t0, e0), (t1, e1), ...]. We line up the temperature and strain data according to time, yielding [(T0, e0), (T1, e1), ...] and find a significant correlation between the two, since they happen to have similar periodicity.

Recalling Judea Pearl, we suggest that there is almost certainly some causal relationship between the temperature outside the window and the strain in the ridiculously large tuning fork. Common sense suggests that neither causes the other, so perhaps they have some common cause? The only other variable in the problem is time, so perhaps time is the common cause. This sort of makes sense, since changes in time intuitively seem to cause the changes in temperature and strain.

Let's check that intuition with some math. First, imagine that we ignore the time data. Now we just have a bunch of temperature data points [T0, T1, ...] and strain data points [e0, e1, ...]. In fact, in order to truly ignore time data, we cannot even order the points according to time! But that means that we no longer have any way to line up the points T0 with e0, T1 with e1, etc. Without any way to match up temperature points to corresponding strain points, the temperature and strain data are randomly ordered, and the correlation disappears!

We have just performed a d-separation. When time t was known (i.e., controlled for), the variables T and e were correlated. But when t was unknown, the variables were uncorrelated. Now, let's wave our hands a little and equate correlation with dependence. If time were a common cause of temperature and strain, then we should see that T and e are correlated without knowledge of time, but the correlation disappears when controlling for time. However, we see exactly the opposite structure: controlling for t induces the correlation. This pattern is called a "collider", and it implies tha...
Choosing universities based on their major-specific strengths for undergraduate education
by VipulNaik — 2013-10-05T00:44:57.951Z

Prospective undergraduates generally choose universities based on their overall reputation along dimensions such as academics, grading standards, social life, cost, peer group, etc. In the United States, there's a small list of top universities that appear across different rankings. Typical, for instance, is the US News ranking, one for national universities and one for national liberal arts colleges.

A strong overall program is most relevant to undergraduates who care more about their overall educational experience, and/or are undecided about their major. For people who are keen on a specific major, however, the overall ranking may not be that helpful. Rather, the quality of the department that they are majoring with may matter more. For people who want to use their undergraduate years to accumulate domain-specific research experience, , and the opportunities for undergraduate research, whether it's supervised reading or lab work, may also matter.

My questions:

In general, are liberal arts colleges less likely to be good than research institutions for students who want research experience while they are undergraduates?

Do certain kinds of universities tend to be better at encouraging independent study, lab research, or other forms of relevant academic and work experience, after controlling for overall ranking?

Alex K. Chen writes in his review of the University of Washington that the University offers excellent resources for research in the sciences, on account of the sheer size of its research programs, particularly its interdisciplinary programs.

I've been told by some people that the Massachussetts Institute of Technology does a good job of encouraging faculty-guided reading and research, but this may be specific to the mathematics department.

What are some examples of, or links to lists of, colleges and universities that have extremely strong faculty, and correspondingly strong opportunities for learning inside and outside the classroom, in a particular department, relative to their formal ranking? Some possible examples:

A number of people I know directly and indirectly have been involved with the George Mason University Department of Economics, and I'm very favorably impressed by the quality of GMU bloggers, including Bryan Caplan at EconLog, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, Donald Boudreaux and Russ Roberts (formerly at G

...
Ganesalingam and Gowers on automated theorem-proving
by VipulNaik — 2013-10-05T00:04:45.177Z

Ganesalingam and Gowers recently released an ArXiV preprint of their article "A fully automatic problem solver with human-style output" about a theorem-proving program they have written that generates human-readable output. Gowers had blogged about the program in April 2013, after soliciting responses from readers regarding answers generated by the program and by humans (without explicitly revealing that one of the answerers was a machine) in March 2013.

There do exist theorem-proving systems such as Coq. In fact, it was announced about a year ago that the proof of the Feit-Thompson odd-order theorem, which originally appeared in a 255-page journal article in 1963, had been completely verified using Coq. But the Gowers-Ganesalingam program differs in that the output of this program is a human-style proof (for better or worse) whereas Coq uses a formal language syntax (see here for a small part of the proof of the Feit-Thompson theorem using Coq).

The ArXiV preprint contains details of the program and how the authors believe it improves on existing programs. One of the ways they believe they are better than past provers is their ability to more explicitly code for picking promising lines of reasoning.

I'd appreciate comments from LessWrong readers about the specifics of the Ganesalingam-Gowers program, and any broader ramifications of their ability to create this program for predictions related to artificial intelligence.
How to Learn from Experts
by SatvikBeri — 2013-10-04T17:02:01.502Z

The key difference between experts and beginners is the quality of their abstractions. Masters of a field mentally organize information in a way that's relevant to the tasks at hand. Amateurs may know as many facts and details as experts but group them in haphazard or irrelevant ways.

For example, experienced Bridge players group cards by suit, then number. They place the most importance on the face cards and work down. Bridge amateurs group solely by number and place equal importance on all numbers. Professional firemen group fires by how the fire was started and how fast it’s spreading-features they use to contain the fire. Novices group fires by brightness and color. Both have the same information, but the firemen hone in on the useful details faster.1

Learn abstractions from masters. If you ask a Software Architect which database technology you should use, circumstances will eventually change and you'll need to ask them again and pay them again. But if you ask the Architect to teach you how to choose a database then you can adapt to changing circumstances. Ideally you should emerge with a clear set of rules-something like a flow-chart for that decision. A good example is this article on whether you should use hadoop. Clear criteria let you make a high-quality decision by focusing on the relevant details.

After talking to the expert you can write up the flow-chart or criteria and send it to them to get their opinion. This ensures you understood what the expert was trying to say, and lets you get additional details they might add. Most importantly it gives them something valuable to share with people seeking similar advice, so you're able to add value to their lives as a thank you for their advice.

Caveats to this method:

In some domains there are details only professionals know. Academic research has a secret paper-passing network with ideas known to top researchers 1-2 years before they’re published. So you need to be in constant contact with these experts and hear the details from them. However, this typically only matters if you’re aiming to become a top-class expert yourself.

Experts aren’t always conscious of the abstractions they use. They’ll say one thing and do another. So you should ask them to guide you through a specific situation and ask them several questions about how their decision would change if

...