trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Weekly LW Meetups: Austin; Atlanta; Cleveland; Montreal; Sofia, Bulgaria; Toronto; Vancouver; Washington DC
by FrankAdamek — 2012-12-14T15:49:51.580Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on Dec 7th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

Moscow: Applied Rationality and Cognitive Biases: 08 December 2012 04:00PM
Vancouver!: 09 December 2012 01:00PM
Sofia, Bulgaria Meetup: 09 December 2012 05:00PM
Atlanta LessWrong Meetups REBOOT: 09 December 2012 07:00PM
Washington DC meetup- new sequence?: 09 December 2012 11:55PM
Montreal LessWrong Meetup - More Biases and Biased Board Gaming: 10 December 2012 06:30PM
Brussels meetup: 15 December 2012 01:00PM
16/12 London Meetup: 16 December 2012 02:00PM
First Purdue Meetup: 11 January 2013 06:50PM

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: 08 December 2018 01:30PM
Less Wrong: Cleveland: 09 December 2012 03:00PM
Toronto THINK: 12 December 2012 07:00PM
Winter Solstice Megameetup - NYC: 15 December 2012 05:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

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

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Mari...
[SEQ RERUN] Is That Your True Rejection?
by MinibearRex — 2012-12-14T04:03:23.595Z

Today's post, Is That Your True Rejection? was originally published on 06 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

People's stated reason for a rejection may not be the same as the actual reason for that rejection.

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 Friendly Projects vs. Products, 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.
Bad news for uploading
by PhilGoetz — 2012-12-13T23:32:45.555Z

Recently, the Blue Brain Project published a paper arguing that human neurons don't form synapses at locations determined by learning, but just wherever they bump into each other. See video and article here.

For those people hoping to upload their brains by mapping out and virtually duplicating all the synapses—this means that won't work. The synapse locations do not differ from human to human in any useful way. Learning must be encoded in some modulation of each synapse's function.
Meetup : Durham HPMoR Discussion, chapters 21-23
by evand — 2012-12-13T20:25:40.330Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham HPMoR Discussion, chapters 21-23

WHEN:
15 December 2012 11:00:00AM (-0500)

WHERE:
Foster's Market, 2694 Durham-Chapel Hill Blvd., Durham, NC

We'll meet and discuss Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, chapters 21-23 (about 53 pages). There will likely be Zendo and/or continued off-topic discussion afterwards.

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham HPMoR Discussion, chapters 21-23
Meetup :  Paderborn Meetup, December 19th
by Just_existing — 2012-12-13T20:10:33.800Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Paderborn Meetup, December 19th

WHEN:
19 December 2012 07:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
Gownsmen's Pub, Uni Paderborn, Warburger Straße 100, Paderborn

Another meetup of this group. We are meeting once every two weeks. The location switches between Bielefeld and Paderborn.

The topics of this evening will be the current series "Highly Advanced
Epistemology 101 for Beginners", how to beat psychological reactance, and bioethics.

Everybody is welcome!

Discussion article for the meetup : Paderborn Meetup, December 19th
Meetup : Cleveland Ohio Meetup
by Raelifin — 2012-12-13T19:52:53.861Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Cleveland Ohio Meetup

WHEN:
23 December 2012 02:52:45PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Cleveland

The LW group for Cleveland Ohio will be meeting at Gypsy Bean Coffee (65th and Detroit) on the 22nd or 23rd. (Probably the 23rd, but it's still up in the air.)

If you're interested in coming, or just interested in our discussion, please subscribe to the mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!forum/less-wrong-cleveland

Discussion article for the meetup : Cleveland Ohio Meetup
Why (anthropic) probability isn't enough
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2012-12-13T16:09:58.698Z

A technical report of the Future of Humanity Institute (authored by me), on why anthropic probability isn't enough to reach decisions in anthropic situations. You also have to choose your decision theory, and take into account your altruism towards your copies. And these components can co-vary while leaving your ultimate decision the same - typically, EDT agents using SSA will reach the same decisions as CDT agents using SIA, and altruistic causal agents may decide the same way as selfish evidential agents.

Anthropics: why probability isn't enough

This paper argues that the current treatment of anthropic and self-locating problems over-emphasises the importance of anthropic probabilities, and ignores other relevant and important factors, such as whether the various copies of the agents in question consider that they are acting in a linked fashion and whether they are mutually altruistic towards each other. These issues, generally irrelevant for non-anthropic problems, come to the forefront in anthropic situations and are at least as important as the anthropic probabilities: indeed they can erase the difference between different theories of anthropic probability, or increase their divergence. These help to reinterpret the decisions, rather than probabilities, as the fundamental objects of interest in anthropic problems.
Negative karma is a bad design
by sanxiyn — 2012-12-13T11:27:35.739Z

It came to my attention that when you receive downvotes for your comments, your karma goes negative and you need to "pay back" to be able to post to Discussion or to Main.

Since new users start with zero karma, having negative karma seems to just encourage those with negative karma to create a new account. We don't want to encourage people to create superfluous accounts, do we? Therefore I think LessWrong codebase should be patched so that karma does not go below zero even with lots of downvotes.

What do you think?
[SEQ RERUN] Friendly Projects vs. Products
by MinibearRex — 2012-12-13T09:00:48.804Z

Today's post, Friendly Projects vs. Products was originally published on December 5, 2008. A summary:

Friendliness can take two forms. Friendliness can refer to whether or not your project will only benefit its creators, or whether that project will benefit competitors as well, or it can refer to how the project will treat its creators.

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 Sustained Strong Recursion, 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.
Noisy Reasoners
by lukeprog — 2012-12-13T07:53:29.193Z

One of the more interesting papers at this year's AGI-12 conference was Finton Costello's Noisy Reasoners. I think it will be of interest to Less Wrong:

This paper examines reasoning under uncertainty in the case where the AI reasoning mechanism is itself subject to random error or noise in its own processes. The main result is a demonstration that systematic, directed biases naturally arise if there is random noise in a reasoning process that follows the normative rules of probability theory. A number of reliable errors in human reasoning under uncertainty can be explained as the consequence of these systematic biases due to noise. Since AI systems are subject to noise, we should expect to see the same biases and errors in AI reasoning systems based on probability theory.
Math appendix for: "Why you must maximize expected utility"
by Benya — 2012-12-13T01:11:20.015Z

This is a mathematical appendix to my post "Why you must maximize expected utility", giving precise statements and proofs of some results about von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theory without the Axiom of Continuity. I wish I had the time to make this post more easily readable, giving more intuition; the ideas are rather straight-forward and I hope they won't get lost in the line noise!

The work here is my own (though closely based on the standard proof of the VNM theorem), but I don't expect the results to be new.

*

I represent preference relations as total preorders on a simplex ; define , , and in the obvious ways (e.g., iff both and , and iff but not ). Write for the 'th unit vector in .

In the following, I will always assume that satisfies the independence axiom: that is, for all and , we have if and only if . Note that the analogous statement with weak preferences follows from this: holds iff , which by independence is equivalent to , which is just .

Lemma 1 (more of a good thing is always better). If and , then .

Proof. Let . Then, and . Thus, the result follows from independence applied to , , , and .

Lemma 2. If and , then there is a unique such that for and for .

Proof. Let be the supremum of all such that (note that by assumption, this condition holds for ). Suppose that . Then there is an such that . By Lemma 1, we have , and the first assertion follows.

Suppose now that . Then by definition of , we do not have , which means that we have , which was the second assertion.

Finally, uniqueness is obvious, because if both and satisfied the condition, we would have .

Definition 3. is much better than , notation or , if there are neighbourhoods of and of (in the relative topology of ) such that we have for all and . (In other words, the graph of is the interior of the graph of .) Write or when ( is not much better than ), and ( is about as good as ) when both and .

Theorem 4 (existence of a utility function). There is a such that for all ,

Unless for all and , there are such that .

Proof. Let be a worst and a best outcome, i.e. let be such that for all . If , then for all , and by repeated applications of independence we get for all , and therefore again for all , and we can simply choose .

Thus, suppose that . In this case, let be such that for every , equals the uniqu...
Why you must maximize expected utility
by Benya — 2012-12-13T01:11:13.339Z

This post explains von Neumann-Morgenstern (VNM) axioms for decision theory, and what follows from them: that if you have a consistent direction in which you are trying to steer the future, you must be an expected utility maximizer. I'm writing this post in preparation for a sequence on updateless anthropics, but I'm hoping that it will also be independently useful.

The theorems of decision theory say that if you follow certain axioms, then your behavior is described by a utility function. (If you don't know what that means, I'll explain below.) So you should have a utility function! Except, why should you want to follow these axioms in the first place?

A couple of years ago, Eliezer explained how violating one of them can turn you into a money pump — how, at time 11:59, you will want to pay a penny to get option B instead of option A, and then at 12:01, you will want to pay a penny to switch back. Either that, or the game will have ended and the option won't have made a difference.

When I read that post, I was suitably impressed, but not completely convinced: I would certainly not want to behave one way if behaving differently always gave better results. But couldn't you avoid the problem by violating the axiom only in situations where it doesn't give anyone an opportunity to money-pump you? I'm not saying that would be elegant, but is there a reason it would be irrational?

It took me a while, but I have since come around to the view that you really must have a utility function, and really must behave in a way that maximizes the expectation of this function, on pain of stupidity (or at least that there are strong arguments in this direction). But I don't know any source that comes close to explaining the reason, the way I see it; hence, this post.

I'll use the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms, which assume probability theory as a foundation (unlike the Savage axioms, which actually imply that anyone following them has not only a utility function but also a probability distribution). I will assume that you already accept Bayesianism.

*

Epistemic rationality is about figuring out what's true; instrumental rationality is about steering the future where you want it to go. The way I see it, the axioms of decision theory tell you how to have a consistent direction in which you are trying to steer the future. If my choice at 12:01 depends on whether at 11:59 I had a...
Meetup : Vancouver Last call for 2012
by  — 2012-12-12T13:54:55.114Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Last call for 2012

WHEN:
16 December 2012 01:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
2150 macdonald st

With crazy tree-killing, litany-chanting, fat-red-man worshiping solstice/Christmas coming up, this may be the last meetup in Vancouver for 2012.

As usual, we'll meet up and mingle with other of our kind and talk about interesting things and have all sorts of fun.

Location is 2150 Macdonald street. Big brown house on corner.

See you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Last call for 2012
Replaceability as a virtue
by chaosmage — 2012-12-12T07:53:48.868Z

I propose it is altruistic to be replaceable and therefore, those who strive to be altruistic should strive to be replaceable.

As far as I can Google, this does not seem to have been proposed before. LW should be a good place to discuss it. A community interested in rational and ethical behavior, and in how superintelligent machines may decide to replace mankind, should at least bother to refute the following argument.

Replaceability

Replaceability is "the state of being replaceable". It isn't binary. The price of the replacement matters: so a cookie is more replaceable than a big wedding cake. Adequacy of the replacement also makes a difference: a piston for an ancient Rolls Royce is less replaceable than one in a modern car, because it has to be hand-crafted and will be distinguishable. So something is more or less replaceable depending on the price and quality of its replacement.

Replaceability could be thought of as the inverse of the cost of having to replace something. Something that's very replaceable has a low cost of replacement, while something that lacks replaceability has a high (up to unfeasible) cost of replacement. The cost of replacement plays into Total Cost of Ownership, and everything economists know about that applies. It seems pretty obvious that replaceability of possessions is good, much like cheap availability is good.

Some things (historical artifacts, art pieces) are valued highly precisely because of their irreplacability. Although a few things could be said about the resale value of such objects, I'll simplify and contend these valuations are not rational.

The practical example

Anne manages the central database of Beth's company. She's the only one who has access to that database, the skillset required for managing it, and an understanding of how it all works; she has a monopoly to that combination.

This monopoly gives Anne control over her own replacement cost. If she works according to the state of the art, writes extensive and up-to-date documentation, makes proper backups etc she can be very replaceable, because her monopoly will be easily broken. If she refuses to explain what she's doing, creates weird and fragile workarounds and documents the database badly she can reduce her replaceability and defend her monopoly. (A well-obfuscated database can take months for a replacement database manager to handle confidently.)

So Beth may ...
Buffalo Meetup: Survey of Interest
by StonesOnCanvas — 2012-12-12T03:19:24.588Z

I'd like to start a LW meetup group in Buffalo, NY and would like to get an idea of how many people may be interested in attending. I'm hoping to get meetups started sometime in January. If you're interested, email me at BuffaloLW@gmail.com (and comment below). Anyone who sends me an email will receive a link to the event on Doodle.com to try and work out a time and day of the week that works for most people.

Also, where would you like the first meeting to be held?

1. Private Residence (my house, or you can offer yours if you like)

2. Public Space (like Spot Coffee?)

3. Don't Care

Edit: I realized based on Alicorn's interest that there may be decent amount of people traveling to the area for the holidays who are interested in meeting during the holiday break. If you are one of these people, comment below because I would love to host you.
[LINK] 23andme is 99$ now
by Jabberslythe — 2012-12-12T02:31:44.996Z

It's been reduced to 99$ and it seems like it is a permanent reduction. I was thinking of buying it at 299$ because it had not been on sale for a while, so I'm very pleased this happened.

Their press release on it:

http://blog.23andme.com/news/one-million-strong-a-note-from-23andmes-anne-wojcicki/
[SEQ RERUN] Sustained Strong Recursion
by MinibearRex — 2012-12-12T00:30:57.342Z

Today's post, Sustained Strong Recursion was originally published on 05 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Sustained strong recursion has a much larger effect on growth than other possible mechanisms for growth.

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 Evolved Desires, 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 : Melbourne social meetup
by toner — 2012-12-11T23:35:48.192Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne social meetup

WHEN: 21 December 2012 07:00:00PM (+1100)

WHERE: See mailing list, Carlton VIC 3053

Melbourne's next social meetup is on Friday 21 December, 6:30 for 7pm, at my house. If you have any trouble working out the location or getting in, you can message me or call me on 0412 996 288.

We'll get some snacks and organise some form of take-away for dinner. BYO drinks and games.

We always look forward to meeting new people!

This meetup is usually on the third Friday of the month. We also have a regular meetup about practical rationality on the first Friday of each month.

Discussion article for the meetup : Melbourne social meetup
[LINK] Should we live to 1,000?
by XFrequentist — 2012-12-11T16:59:19.755Z

Peter Singer, makes a (refreshingly simple) ethical case for anti-aging research, and endorses increased funding.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-ethics-of-anti-aging-by-peter-singer

On which problems should we focus research in medicine and the biological sciences? There is a strong argument for tackling the diseases that kill the most people –diseases like malaria, measles, and diarrhea, which kill millions in developing countries, but very few in the developed world.

Developed countries, however, devote most of their research funds to the diseases from which their citizens suffer, and that seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Given that constraint, which medical breakthrough would do the most to improve our lives?

If your first thought is “a cure for cancer” or “a cure for heart disease,” think again. Aubrey de Grey, Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation and the world’s most prominent advocate of anti-aging research, argues that it makes no sense to spend the vast majority of our medical resources on trying to combat the diseases of aging without tackling aging itself. If we cure one of these diseases, those who would have died from it can expect to succumb to another in a few years. The benefit is therefore modest.

[...]

De Grey has set up SENS Foundation to promote research into anti-aging. By most standards, his fundraising efforts have been successful, for the foundation now has an annual budget of around $4 million. But that is still pitifully small by the standards of medical research foundations. De Grey might be mistaken, but if there is only a small chance that he is right, the huge pay-offs make anti-aging research a better bet than areas of medical research that are currently far better funded.