trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Saint Petersburg. Why rationality?
by efim — 2013-11-03T13:30:45.766Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Saint Petersburg. Why rationality?

WHEN:
10 November 2013 04:00:00PM (+0400)

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

From 16:00 till 21:30.
We will be located in cafe "PMG" - for detailed description please read mailing list announcement.

Come to our meet up! Whether you liked first one or missed it we would be very happy to see you.
On this one we plan to discuss why we personally learned and want to learn rational methods of thinking, thru this we will refine our picture of Rationality and bond.
There also will be a little report on logarithmic probabilities, fair scoring rules and exercise on calibration.

There will be required reading
(not exactly required, but if at all possible - please get acquainted - to get everyone on fairly equal groud).

This three on first topic:
1)http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/
2)http://lesswrong.com/lw/nb/something_to_protect/
3)http://lesswrong.com/lw/h8/tsuyoku_naritai_i_want_to_become_stronger/
Also I personally recommend to read at least original letter:
4)http://yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda/

On the second topic it would be better to read these:
1)http://lesswrong.com/lw/mp/0_and_1_are_not_probabilities/
2)http://lesswrong.com/lw/jn/how_much_evidence_does_it_take/
(or\and maybe http://lesswrong.com/lw/jn/how_much_evidence_does_it_take/)

Subscribe to mailing list for notifications and possibly 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. Why rationality?
The Witching Hour
by Scott Alexander — 2013-11-03T07:07:34.000Z

On an ordinary evening, Tal Aivon was lively and pleasant. The collection of longhouses and yurts within its tall brick walls shone bright with kerosene – not just torches, real kerosene – and its communal meeting area was noisy with conversation and song. The children would be playing their games, and on the eves of holy days the Lorekeepers would chant their stories of the Lost World, accompanied by lyres and the town’s one decaying gyitar.

Tonight, though, a pall lay on Tal Aivon. The six gates of its tall brick walls were barred and shut, and foreboding warriors dressed in odd combinations of Kevlar and steel armor stood just within them, brandishing their swords. Families locked themselves in their yurts and longhouses, huddled around little kerosene lanterns. In the temple, the priests knelt before the stone idols of St. Christ and St. Mahomet, chanting plaintive prayers for protection.

“I still don’t understand,” Meical Dorn complained, from inside the longest longhouse “what this is all about. “None of the wildlings are anywhere nearby – I should know, I’ve came through two hundred miles of forest to get here – and the only three towns in this area are at peace with you. In Great Rabda, even an impending attack couldn’t make us cower inside like this. I have half a mind to think there’s something you’re not telling me, Fin. Something that might…threaten our deal.”

Fin Lerisas, Chief Lorekeeper for Tal Aivon, sighed. “Nothing that would threaten our deal, Meical. Great Rabda has gold. We have sunblessings. Just stay here long enough for our bankers to figure out the price, and you’ll have timers and mathers and lighters of your very own.”

Meical glanced longingly at the Chief Lorekeeper’s own sunblessing, a timer that stood on the shelf of his private room. 1:52 AM gleamed on its face, with an maddeningly smooth red glow unlike sunlight or moonlight or firelight. Yet Meical knew it was sunlight, or something like. He was the Lorekeeper of Great Rabda. The Lorekeepers of Tal Aivon were far wiser than he – how could they not be with the town’s close proximity to ruined Diteroi and its trove of artifacts from the Lost World – but even he knew how sunblessings worked. You took them outside and the blue tiles on their surfac...
Kidnapping and the game of Chicken
by Manfred — 2013-11-03T06:29:09.725Z

Observe the payoff matrix at right (the unit of reward? Cookies.). Each player wants to play 'A', but only so long as the two players play different moves.

Suppose that Red got to move first. There are some games where moving first is terrible - take Rock Paper Scissors for example. But in this game, moving first is great, because you get to narrow down your opponent's options! If Red goes first, Red picks 'A', and then Blue has to pick 'B' to get a cookie.

This is basically kidnapping. Red has taken all three cookies hostage, and nobody gets any cookies unless Blue agrees to Red's demands for two cookies. Whoever gets to move first plays the kidnapper, and the other player has to decide whether to accede to their ransom demand in exchange for a cookie.

What if neither player gets to move before the other, but instead they have their moves revealed at the same time?

Pre-Move Chat:

Red: "I'm going to pick A, you'd better pick B."

Blue: "I don't care what you pick, I'm picking A. You can pick A too if you really want to get 0 cookies."

Red: "Okay I'm really seriously going to pick A. Please pick B."

Blue: "Nah, don't think so. I'll just pick A. You should just pick B."

And so on. They are now playing a game of Chicken. Whoever swerves first is worse off, but if neither of them give in, they crash into each other and die and get no cookies.

So, The Question: is it better to play A, or to play B?

This is definitely a trick question, but it can't be too trickish because at some point Red and Blue will have to figure out what to do. So why is it a trick question?

Because this is a two-player game, and whether it's good to play A or not depends on what your opponent will do.

A thought experiment: suppose we threw a party where you could only get dessert (cookies!) by playing this game. At the start, people are unfamiliar with the game, but they recognize that A has higher payoffs than B, so they all pick A all the time. But alas! When both people pick A, neither get anything, so no cookies are distributed. We decide that everyone can play as much as they want until we run out of cookies.

Quite soon, one kind soul decides that they will play B, even though it has a lower payoff. A new round of games is begun, and each person gets a turn to play against our kind altruist. Soon, each other person has won their game, and they have 2 cookies each, while our s

...
Rationality Quotes November 2013
by MalcolmOcean — 2013-11-02T20:35:55.780Z

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.
How to choose a country/city?
by joaolkf — 2013-11-02T01:48:02.502Z

EDIT: I've found a very relevant indicator for my question, see "Quality of life" criteria below.

My main question is: which non-academic factors should I consider when moving to another country/city for a PhD? Further, I would also like to evaluate each country/city1 according to those criteria, but first I need to know which are the relevant criteria. If you know any (any at all) scientific literature on moving to another country and well being, let me know.

I've lived in Brazil all my life, I really like it here for many reasons. Mostly, by how personal relationships are established and maintained. However, Brazil's inability to construct a stable well developed society have crippled my intellectual development, and I simply cannot take it anymore - my brain will die here. Moreover, I feel like most of my high level desires(values) are much more in line with countries on the other end of the World Values Survey graphic. I have rational/secular and self-expressing values, instead of traditional-survival oriented ones. For all those reasons, I will be applying for my PhD aboard. I have pondered many of the career and academic factors involved, and I've had the help of many good and objective indexes available (e.g.: here and here). I've mapped most of the Departments of Philosophy in which I could research my topic (moral enhancement), and I believe these are the major factors. However, there is one other important factor I'm a bit clueless about: which country/city is better in all other aspects already not accounted by academic criteria?

My main options are2:

1st: Oxford (no need to explain)

2nd: Manchester (it's near Oxford, John Harris is there, one of the foremost researchers on moral enhancement)

3rd: Stockholm (where everyone is born a transhumanist)

3rd: Wellington, New Zealand (Nicholas Agar is there, one of the foremost researchers on moral enhancement)

4th: Some places in continental Europe I'm still investigating (e.g.: Zurich , Munich)

4th: Brazil (bioethics program in Rio de Janeiro)

However, this list is solely based on academic criteria. I need to factor in non-academic criteria. In fact, I do not even know which are the relevant non-academic criteria. That would be my first question. I got fixated on the World Values Survey factors, but I might be wrong. I would gather the happiness index is important, but it might not vary for the ...
Halloween thread - rationalist's horrors.
by wwa — 2013-11-01T22:07:56.442Z

This is a kind of "X files" thread.

Post experiences which spooked you, which made you doubt reality, mathematical or physical laws, your sanity, memory or perception. The more improbable the better, but no second-hand legends please, share only what you personally experienced. If you had the event later explained rationally please use rot13 to avoid spoilers.
"Singularity or Bust" full documentary 
by Torello — 2013-11-01T20:48:13.857Z

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/11/singularity-or-bust-.html

I've never heard of this before, and have only watched 7 minutes so far, but I'd imagine many people here would be interested in this video.
Group Rationality Diary, November 1-15
by therufs — 2013-11-01T20:37:18.265Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for November 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.

The poll earlier this month seems to be sufficiently in favor of maintaining the current schedule that extra votes are unlikely to change things much, but if you'd really like to register your opinion, you are welcome to do so here.

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

Immediate past diary: October 16-31

Rationality diaries archive
November 2013 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2013-11-01T20:31:47.702Z

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 : Tempe, AZ: How to Measure Anything II
by Jayson_Virissimo — 2013-11-01T16:24:55.602Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Tempe, AZ: How to Measure Anything II

WHEN:
01 November 2013 03:00:00AM (-0700)

WHERE:
300 E Orange Mall, Tempe, AZ

We are meeting near the entrance to Hayden Library. This week, we will play a round of Zendo and discuss Section II of How to Measure Anything. Bring something you may want to measure but aren't sure how.

Discussion article for the meetup : Tempe, AZ: How to Measure Anything II
New LW Meetup: Princeton NJ
by FrankAdamek — 2013-11-01T16:05:11.207Z

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

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

Princeton NJ Meetup: 09 November 2013 02:00PM

Other irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta: Rationalist Movie Night!: 26 October 2013 07:00PM
Cologne (Köln): 10 November 2013 04:00PM
Frankfurt (including effective altruism presentation): 27 October 2013 02:00PM
Moscow, BeliefBusters: 27 October 2013 04:00PM
Saint Petersburg, Russia: 27 October 2013 04:00PM
Saskatoon - Rhetorical Fallacies!: 26 October 2013 01:00PM
Tempe, AZ: How to Measure Anything I: 25 October 2013 02:00PM
Urbana-Champaign: Dark Arts Meetup Sunday October 27, Illini Union Courtyard Cafe (Ground Floor), 2PM: 27 October 2013 02:00PM

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:

London Social Meetup (and AskMeAnything about the CFAR workshop): 27 October 2013 02:00PM
Washington DC: Anthropics with Robin Hanson: 27 October 2013 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, 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 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...
[Link] Lost and Found 
by  — 2013-11-01T14:26:49.443Z

Related: Son of Low Hanging Fruit, Low Hanging Poop

A post by Gregory Cochran's and Henry Harpending's blog West Hunter.

Marcus Terentius Varro was called the most learned of the Romans. But what did he know, and how did he know it? I ask because of this quote, from Rerum rusticarum libri III (Agricultural Topics in Three Books):

“Especial care should be taken, in locating the steading, to place it at the foot of a wooded hill, where there are broad pastures, and so as to be exposed to the most healthful winds that blow in the region. A steading facing the east has the best situation, as it has the shade in summer and the sun in winter. If you are forced to build on the bank of a river, be careful not to let the steading face the river, as it will be extremely cold in winter, and unwholesome in summer. 2 Precautions must also be taken in the neighbourhood of swamps, both for the reasons given, and because there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases.” “What can I do,” asked Fundanius, “to prevent disease if I should inherit a farm of that kind?” “Even I can answer that question,” replied Agrius; “sell it for the highest cash price; or if you can’t sell it, abandon it.”

I get the distinct impression that someone (probably someone other than Varro) came up with an approximation of germ theory 1500 years before Girolamo Fracastoro. But his work was lost.

Everybody knows, or should know, that the vast majority of Classical literature has not been preserved. Those lost works contained facts and ideas that might have value today – certainly there are topics that we understand much better because of insights from Classical literature. For example, Reich and Patterson find that some of the Indian castes have existed for something like three thousand years: this is easier to believe when you consider that Megasthenes wrote about the caste system as early as 300 BC.

We don’t put much effort into recovering lost Classical literature. But there are ways in which we could push harder – by increased funding for work on the Herculaneum scrolls, or the Oxyrhynchus papyri collection

...
Change the labels, undo infinitely good improvements
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2013-11-01T12:51:39.673Z

Infinity is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to infinity.

And there are a lot of paradoxes connected with infinity. Here we'll be looking at a small selection of them, connected with infinite ethics.

Suppose that you had some ethical principles that you would want to spread to infinitely many different agents - maybe through acausal decision making, maybe through some sort of Kantian categorical imperative. So even if the universe is infinite, filled with infinitely many agents, you have potentially infinite influence (which is more than most of us have most days). What would you do with this influence - what kind of decisions would you like to impose across the universe(s)'s population? What would count as an improvement?

There are many different ethical theories you could use - but one thing you'd want is that your improvements are actual improvements. You wouldn't want to implement improvements that turn out to be illusionary. And you certainly wouldn't want to implement improvements that could be undone by relabeling people.

How so? Well, imagine that you have a countable infinity of agents, with utilities (..., -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, ...). Then suppose everyone gets +1 utility. You'd think that giving an infinity of agents one extra utility each would be fabulous - but the utilities are exactly the same as before. The current -1 utility belongs to the person who had -2 before, but there's still currently someone with -1, just as there was someone with -1 before the change. And this holds for every utility value: an infinity of improvements has accomplished... nothing. As soon as you relabel who is who, you're in exactly the same position as before.

But things can get worse. Subtracting one utility from everyone also leaves the outcome the same, after relabeling everyone. So this universal improvement is completely indistinguishable from a universal regression.

Conditions for improvement

So the question is, under what conditions can we be sure that an improvement is genuine?

We'll assume that we have a countable infinity of agents, and we'll make a few highly non-trivial assumptions (the only real justification being that these assumptions are traditional). First, we'll assume that everyone's personal preferences/welfare/...
Lone Genius Bias and Returns on Additional Researchers
by ChrisHallquist — 2013-11-01T00:38:40.868Z

One thing that most puzzles me about Eliezer's writings on AI is his apparent belief that a small organization like MIRI is likely to be able to beat larger organizations like Google or the US Department of Defense to building human-level AI. In fact, he seems to believe such larger organizations may have no advantage at all over a smaller one, and perhaps will even be at a disadvantage. In his 2011 debate with Robin Hanson, he said:

As far as I can tell what happens when the government tries to develop AI is nothing. But that could just be an artifact of our local technological level and it might change over the next few decades. To me it seems like a deeply confusing issue whose answer is probably not very complicated in an absolute sense. Like we know why it’s difficult to build a star. You’ve got to gather a very large amount of interstellar hydrogen in one place. So we understand what sort of labor goes into a star and we know why a star is difficult to build. When it comes to building a mind, we don’t know how to do it so it seems very hard. We like query our brains to say “map us a strategy to build this thing” and it returns null so it feels like it’s a very difficult problem. But in point of fact we don’t actually know that the problem is difficult apart from being confusing. We understand the star-building problem so we know it’s difficult. This one we don’t know how difficult it’s going to be after it’s no longer confusing.

So to me the AI problem looks like a—it looks to me more like the sort of thing that the problem is finding bright enough researchers, bringing them together, letting them work on that problem instead of demanding that they work on something where they’re going to produce a progress report in two years which will validate the person who approved the grant and advance their career. And so the government has historically been tremendously bad at producing basic research progress in AI, in part because the most senior people in AI are often people who got to be very senior by having failed to build it for the longest period of time. (This is not a universal statement. I’ve met smart senior people in AI.)

But nonetheless, basically I’m not very afraid of the government because I don’t think it’s a throw warm bodies at the problem

...
PSA for LW futurists/academics
by Dr_Manhattan — 2013-10-31T15:54:39.861Z

Rutgers was planning to offer a "Future of Humankind" course via Coursera, but I received this announcement today:

"Hello Future of Humankind registrants,

It is with great sadness, that we must inform you that due to the untimely death of James Martin, we will be unable to offer the Future of Humankind course as had originally been planned. Rutgers University is interested in developing similar course material, and we will keep you abreast of any updates with developments in our courses.

Thank you for your understanding,

The Future of Humankind Course Staff"

Average Coursera offerings are in tens of thousands, and this might be a chance to make a large impact. Proper contacts with Rutgers could be easily established, I also have some direct contacts at Coursera.
(I'm specifically thinking about you http://lesswrong.com/user/James_Miller)