trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2013-08-09T15:46:24.673Z

This meetup summary was posted to LW Main on August 2nd. The following week's meetup is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta LessWrong: August Meetup : 04 August 2013 06:00PM
Brussels meetup: 17 August 2013 01:00PM
Chicago: Discuss Thinking, Fast and Slow: 03 August 2013 03:00PM
Helsinki Practical Meetup: 04 August 2013 03:00PM
[Lyon] Picnic au Parc de la Tête d'Or: 17 August 2013 12:30PM
Moscow: Miscellaneous Rationality: 04 August 2013 04:00PM
Vancouver Open Discussion: 03 August 2013 02:34AM

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:

[Boston] Goal Factoring: 04 August 2013 02:00PM
Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 79-81: 10 August 2013 12:00PM
London Meetup - Achieving Better Goals: 04 August 2013 02:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Columbus, Research Triangle NC, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, 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 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, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portla...
Greatest Philosopher in History
by Carinthium — 2013-08-09T12:50:44.199Z

Since LessWrong is a major congregation point for certain philosophical ideas, and because people here tend to be more objective (in the sense of not being self-deluded) than elsewhere, I thought I'd ask people's views.

To be clear, by "Greatest Philosopher" I am referring not to the most correct philosopher in human history but the one who deserves the most credit for advancing human philosophy towards being more true.

Off the top of my head I would say that a prime candidate would be Hume- amongst other things he rejected the idea of a soul, realised to a much greater extent than his predecessors the limits of human knowledge, and opposed the idea that reason is somehow an objective force that can make priorities independent of emotions.

Aristotle deserves considerable credit relative for his time but doesn't make the list because although it wasn't his fault his ideas were dogmatically accepted and held back both science and philosophy later on.

Your thoughts?
Meetup : West LA Meetup—Confess Your Unpopular Opinion
by OpenThreadGuy — 2013-08-09T06:07:27.370Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA Meetup—Confess Your Unpopular Opinion

WHEN:
14 August 2013 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064, USA

How to get in: Go to the Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".

Parking is free for 3 hours, or for longer if you apply some chicanery.

Discussion:

Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.—Eliezer Yudkowsky

Sometimes it feels more like going to clown school wearing a suit.—Catharine G. Evans

On August 7, #confessyourunpopularopinion made the rounds as a (perhaps ironically, very popular) Twitter hashtag.

Examples:

"Someone who has not directly experienced a form of oppression can have useful knowledge about it "

"Abortion is often morally the best choice"

"objects are syllables in a message/one aspect of god's lonely edge"

"Inheritance should be illegal. You deserve nothing from your parents' deaths."

"hypocrisy is what makes us human and sincere "people" are monsters who should walk to the bottom of a lake "

"What we call "art" is just proof-of-work, no more transcendent or special than hashing random bitstrings. "

"If you vote, you're the one who doesn't have a right to complain."

"Most of the time the faceless soulless bureaucracy is right"

"no matter how I look at it it's your fault my opinion is unpopular"

This is an inherently LessWrongish thing to do, so this is what we will be doing. I don't expect it to be a problem, but just in case, I will be enforcing (with my fists) a rule: No one's opinions are to be ridiculed or mocked. The point is to profess unpopular opinions.

Recommended reading:

Lonely Dissent and its prerequisites

What You Can't Say

I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions

No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible. Because a few people didn't get the joke last time, I have been instructed not to pretend that you have to h

...
Meetup : Atlanta LessWrong: Games Night
by Nova_Division — 2013-08-09T03:19:58.218Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta LessWrong: Games Night

WHEN:
24 August 2013 06:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
2388 Lawrenceville Hwy. Apt L. Decatur, GA 30033

Come be social and enjoy the fun and games with your fellow rationalists!

If you've not yet attended, this is an excellent time to come to the ATLesswrong for low-stress introductions and high-fun getting to know everyone.

We'll get to know each other, have snacks, play games (some may have to do with rationality, but only tangentially, we swear), and have weird discussions on everything from how exactly you do an EEG on a dolphin, to what your favorite type of pie is and why.

Bring your favorite games! Bring your favorite snacks and drinks! Bring your swimsuit, in case part of the party moves to the pool! (But you are in no way required to swim!)

Those of us who are up-to-date on HPMOR are certain to grab a corner and promote our pet theories while gesturing erratically at the ceiling. The rest of us who are not up-to-date are certain to frantically yell "no spoilers!" while gesturing erratically at that corner of the room.

Come one, come all. Bring your friend who likes games but who has never heard of utilitarianism or epistemology. Bring kittens you need to get adopted and force them on unsuspecting guests. Come hang out!

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta LessWrong: Games Night
Random variables and Evidential Decision Theory
by twanvl — 2013-08-08T21:48:24.987Z

This post is inspired by the recent discussion I had with IlyaShpitser and Vaniver on EDT.

A random variable only ever has one value

In probability theory, statistics and so on, we often use the notion of a random variable (RV). If you go look at the definition, you will see that a RV is a function of the sample space. What that means is that a RV assigns a value to each possible outcome of a system. In reality, where there are no closed systems, this means that a RV assigns a value to each possible universe.

For example, a random variable X representing the outcome a die roll is a function of type "Universe → {1..6}". The value of X in a particular universe u is then X(u). Uncertainty in X corresponds to uncertainty about the universe we are in. Since X is a pure mathematical function, its value is fixed for each input. That means that in a fixed universe, say our universe, such a random variable only ever takes on one value.

So, before the die roll, the value of X is undefined1, and after the roll X is forever fixed. X is the outcome of a certain particular roll. If I roll the same die again, that doesn't change the value of X. If you want to talk about multiple rolls, you have to use different variables. The usual solution is to use indices, X1, X2, etc.

This also means that the nodes in a causal model, are not random variables. For example in the causal model "Smoking → Cancer", there is no single RV for smoking. Rather, the model is implicitly a generalized to mean "Smokingi → Canceri" for all persons i.

What this means for EDT

It is sometimes claimed that Evidential Decision Theory (EDT) can not deal with causal structure. But I would disagree. To avoid confusion, I will refer to my interpretation as Estimated Evidential Decision Theory (EEDT).

Decision theories such as (E)EDT rely on the following formula to make decisions:

where oj are the possible outcomes, U(oj) is the utility of an outcome, O is a random variable that represents the actual outcome, and a is an action. The (E)EDT policy is to take the action that maximizes V(a), the value of that action.

How would you evaluate this formula in practice? To do that, you need to know P(O=oj | a). I.e. the probability of a certain outcome given that you take a certain action. But keep in mind the previous section! There is only one random variable O, which is the outcome of this action. With...
[LINK] Bitcoins, "Investment of Money," and Law
by TimS — 2013-08-08T19:33:07.461Z

A federal magistrate judge in Texas issue a decision on Tuesday that "Bitcoin is a currency or form of money, and investors wishing to invest in BTCST provided an investment of money." More discussion on the legal reasoning is here.

Some context from reading the decision: A promoter offered a profit if investors gave him Bitcoins. The Securities and Exchange Commission asserts that the promoter made false or misleading statements as part of this scheme (which is illegal).

The promoter asserted the scheme was not within the authority of the SEC because it was not a "security." (Everyone agrees that the SEC can only regulate securities). To the surprise of (hopefully) no one, the judge ruled that the promoter's conduct was covered by the SEC. Specifically, the court found that the scheme was an "investment contract." One of the elements of an investment contract is that there is an "investment of money."

Thus, the case is potentially interesting to BitCoiners because of the judge's reasoning about why Bitcoins can be characterized as an investment of money.
New article on in vitro iterated embryo selection
by CarlShulman — 2013-08-08T19:28:16.758Z

The article by Robert Sparrow:

A series of recent scientific results suggest that, in the not-too-distant future, it will be possible to create viable human gametes from human stem cells. This paper discusses the potential of this technology to make possible what I call ‘in vitro eugenics’: the deliberate breeding of human beings in vitro by fusing sperm and egg derived from different stem-cell lines to create an embryo and then deriving new gametes from stem cells derived from that embryo. Repeated iterations of this process would allow scientists to proceed through multiple human generations in the laboratory. In vitro eugenics might be used to study the heredity of genetic disorders and to produce cell lines of a desired character for medical applications. More controversially, it might also function as a powerful technology of ‘human enhancement’ by allowing researchers to use all the techniques of selective breeding to produce individuals with a desired genotype.

Quote:

However, to my knowledge, the current paper is the first to explicitly discuss the possibility of the iterative use of this technology for reproductive purposes

The possibility was discussed in MIRI's "Uncertain Future" toy forecasting model back in 2009, and the analysis formulated a few years before that.
ETA: And further discussed in James Miller's recent book, "Singularity Rising."
Meetup : London Social - The Unwelcome but Probable Decline and Fall of Direct Sunlight
by philh — 2013-08-08T14:08:17.043Z

Discussion article for the meetup : London Social - The Unwelcome but Probable Decline and Fall of Direct Sunlight

WHEN:
18 August 2013 02:00:00PM (+0100)

WHERE:
St James Park, London, SW1H

Our next social meetup will be on Sunday 18th August. Its measure will be split mostly between: a day of nice weather spent in St James' Park, approximately here; and a wet or cold day spent in The Old Star.

I intend to update by 1pm on the day, to report on which branch of the wavefunction we find ourselves in, but if you have difficulty finding us, my number is 0779 200 9646.

Please join us, and feel free to bring friends, enemies, and long-lost relations.

Update: Looks like we have warm and reasonably-sunny, so we'll head to the park.

Discussion article for the meetup : London Social - The Unwelcome but Probable Decline and Fall of Direct Sunlight
Should you work at 80,000 Hours?
by Jess_Whittlestone — 2013-08-08T14:04:27.531Z

The purpose of this post is to discuss some considerations relevant to whether it is high impact for you as an individual to work for 80,000 Hours.

Disclaimer: I am an employee at 80,000 Hours (from here on 80k). We are currently recruiting, and want to attract people to work for us who are likely to add the most value to 80k so that we can increase our impact. It seems likely that some such people might be found on LessWrong, so we want to encourage critical discussion on here about who should work at 80k.

This post will be in the format of an interview with Ben Todd, co-founder and executive director of 80,000 Hours, and thus best placed to begin a discussion about who should work for 80k. In what follows, we’ll cover:

If you want to support 80k, whether you should work for 80k or fund 80k. This involves some discussion of whether to earn to give or to work directly, adding to the discussion elsewhere on LW.

What skills and characteristics are most valuable to 80k

Whether working at 80k is likely to help your future career prospects

How working at 80k might compare to some alternatives: other EA organisations and professional jobs

Who probably shouldn’t work for 80k

What this post won’t cover:

Whether 80k itself is high impact. This has already been discussed at length on LW here and here.

Whether you’d enjoy working at 80k. We’ve already posted on our blog about why we think it’s good to work at 80k.

Summary

If you fit the profile we’re looking for in terms of skills and experience (see below or our job descriptions linked to on the blog), think that meta-charity is potentially very high impact and want to innovate in this area, then you should consider applying to work for 80k.

Even if you’re not entirely convinced that 80k is currently high impact but have ideas of how we could improve so that we are, we’d be very interested to hear them.

If you don’t believe that meta-charity in general or 80k specifically is potentially high impact, believe strongly that a certain narrow cause area is most important, or have a strong desire to work in a specific professional career area, then you may be better working elsewhere.

Thanks to Ben Todd and Roman Duda for their help with conducting the discussion that follows.

A big question for effective altruists is whethe

...
Motivation and Merciless Commitment Contracts
by peirce — 2013-08-08T00:27:43.472Z

Commitment contracts

I have been using commitment contracts (eg. Via Stickk and Beeminder) for a while now with quite a high degree of success. The basic idea is that you precommit to reward or punish yourself for anything that you know you should do. Example: You want to lose weight. You define a certain amount of weight that you want to lose over a certain time period (like a pound a week). If you fail to do this, you lose a certain amount of money - pay it to a charity, pay it to a commitment contract company etc.. If you do lose the weight, you gain a predefined reward - eg. You buy yourself a nice hat or something. Fairly simple.

Howfar should/ can commitment contracts be taken?

It seems that for everything that anyone wants to do, but lacks the motivation, there is always something that would motivate you to do it. Everything has a price right? And by making use of commitment contracts you can force yourself to choose between paying a huge price (financial or otherwise) or doing whatever you know you should do but don't really want to do, you can ultimately make yourself do that thing that you don't want to do. Whatever it is. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, but it seems like from that perspective, akrasia is a pretty solved problem?

Personal Example

My situation is this. I could do with a little bit more social confidence. I don't think I'm underconfident really, but more confidence would be good, which I think is probably the same for most people. So I figured, it would probably be a lot better to solve this problem soon. The sooner the better.

I also figured there is a process I could go through to make this happen. Lets say I make a list of all the things that cause me the most social anxiety, and also that wouldn't be too damaging for my social life afterwards (for example, starting fights with random strangers or walking round my local city naked would be pretty high on the list, but I don't want to be arrested or be known as "that crazy streaker" for the rest of my life. Of the top of my head, some ideas would be: going to a city far away from my home and walking up to people and pretending to be crazy (knocking on people's doors and asking "have you seen my pet fish?" until I get the door shut in my face), going to clubs and sitting in the middle of the dance floor, or anything else which would be very socially painful to do.

Contract

So I co...
What Would it Take to "Prove" a Speculative Cause?
by Peter Wildeford — 2013-08-07T20:59:40.037Z

Follow up to: Why I'm Skeptical About Unproven Causes (And You Should Be Too)

-

My previous essay Why I'm Skeptical About Unproven Causes (And You Should Be Too) generated a lot of discussion here and on the Effective Altruist blog. Some related questions that came up a lot was: what does it take to prove a cause? What separates "proven" from "speculative" causes? And how do you get a "speculative" cause to move into the "proven" column? I've decided that this discussion is important enough that it merits a bit of elaboration at length, so I'm going to do that in this essay.

Proven Cause vs. Speculative Cause

My prime example of proven causes are GiveWell's top charities. These organizations -- The Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), GiveDirectly, and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI) -- are rolling out programs that have been the target of significant scientific scrutiny. For example, delivering long-lasting insecticide-treated anti-malaria nets (what AMF does) has been studied by 23 different randomized, controlled trials (RCTs). GiveWell has also published thorough reviews of all three organizations (see reviews for AMF, GiveDirectly, and SCI).

On the other hand, a speculative cause is a cause where the case is made entirely by intuition and speculation, with zero scientific study. For some of these causes, scientific study may even be impossible.

Now, I think 23 RCTs is a very high burden to meet. Instead, we should recognize that being "proven" is not a binary yes or no, but rather a sliding scale. Even AMF isn't proven -- there still are some areas of concern or potential weaknesses in the case for AMF. Likewise, other organizations working in the area, like Nothing But Nets, also are nearly as proven, but don't have key elements of transparency and track record to make myself confident enough. And AMF is a lot more proven that GiveDirectly, which is potentially more proven than SCI given recent developments in deworming research.

Ideally, we'd take a Bayesian approach, where we have a certain prior estimate about how cost-effective the organization is, and then update our cost-effectiveness estimate based on additional evidence as it comes in. For reasons I argued earlier and GiveWell has argued in "Why We Can't Take Expected Value Estimates Literal...
Meetup : Vancouver!
by  — 2013-08-07T19:56:56.207Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver!

WHEN:
11 August 2013 03:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
2505 west broadway, vancouver, bc

The usual, come chat and hang out with cool smart people who are into LW.

15:30 on Sunday at Benny's

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver!
Improving Enjoyment and Retention Reading Technical Literature
by sentientplatypus — 2013-08-07T06:29:56.266Z

A little background on myself first – I am currently studying to become involved with aging rejuvenation therapies like SENS.

This requires learning quite a lot about molecular biology. Which is fine, because I find cell biology quite interesting. The problem is naturally that textbooks and technical literature on the subject often make very little effort to be interesting.

Many of the books I’ve been reading lately are largely lacking in energy. And I was finding my mind was often drifting away from what I was reading and generally just not enjoying the process. Which was bad, because I need to spend a lot of time doing it.

I asked myself, do I hate learning about molecular biology and engineering? Should I shift my goals to something I’m more interested in? But, I didn’t seem to actually be disinterested in the subject. I loved talking about what I’d learned. And I frequently thought about it with interest. I was passionate about the goal of defeating aging. So the problem then was probably the books themselves.

So then the question was: how do I make boringly written biology books fun to read? Find better books? Well unfortunately, based on my research, the only biology books written to be interesting tend to be focusing on on other sects of the science; most good molecular biology books are boring. If anyone knows of any books on the subject that are unusually well written, please let me know. But I couldn't find any.

So I looked for the bright spots: where reading was fun. What makes reading a novel fun? I asked. Interesting story, character interactions, suspense, humor, dramatic scenes.

None of these are incorporated in molecular biology books and publications that I can find. But the answer was still there: visualize what I read. But not just visualize like the little diagrams of cellular interactions books usually give you – like stupid, over-the-top, Hollywood-status visualization. I had to make it dramatic. I had to mentally reconstruct the biology of a cell in massive, fast, and explosive terms.

Suddenly, I was reading about genetic engineering with a grin on my face; because I was visualizing a cackling mad scientist taking a jackhammer to a gene sequence.

Which, yes, is totally not what is happening in any way, but I remember what I read better because the unusual things are what stick in human memories; just reading...