trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
July 2014 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2014-07-01T22:50:33.330Z

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.
Group Rationality Diary, July 1-15
by therufs — 2014-07-01T15:46:04.065Z

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

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

Established a useful new habit

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

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

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

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

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

Tried doing any of the above and failed

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

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

Previous diary: June 16-30

Next diary: July 16-31

Rationality diaries archive
Meetup : Canberra: Paranoid Debating
by DanielFilan — 2014-07-01T09:52:26.939Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Paranoid Debating

WHEN:
12 July 2014 06:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
108 North Road, Acton, ACT

We didn't get around to paranoid debating in the last meetup, so I thought that we might do it at this one. So that the 'mole' knows the answer to the question, we will ask that everyone come up with two questions before the event that they know the answer to - one place to find questions would be digging through Wikipedia's list of lists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists - and write them down, putting all the questions into the hat. If your question comes up, you will be the mole.

As always, vegan snacks will be provided.

General meetup info:

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

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

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

Discussion article for the meetup : Canberra: Paranoid Debating
An answer to a possible objection to cash-transfer charities
by B_For_Bandana — 2014-07-01T00:49:10.904Z

This is an answer to a possible objection to cash-transfer charities like GiveDirectly. I remember reading about this on LessWrong a while ago, but I can't find the discussion now. I was planning on asking about this on an Open Thread, but I got curious, did my own research, and answered my own question, so now it gets its own Discussion post.

Cash-transfer charities do something very simple: they take money given by donors, find very poor people, and give them the money, in instalments. A prominent example is GiveWell's current top charity, GiveDirectly, which gives yearly gifts on the order of $1000 to very poor people in Kenya and Uganda. There is a lot of convincing research that cash-transfer charities are very effective at helping poor people.

There is a complicated debate about whether cash transfers are actually the very best way of helping poor people, or if there are in-kind charities that do the job a little better. This post is not about that. Instead, this post is just about a possible problem with the mechanics of cash transfers. The problem is this: say a donor in (say) the US gives money to GiveDirectly, and they send that money to a person in (say) Kenya. The recipient in Kenya now has a larger bank balance. But this doesn't actually create any wealth in Kenya; it just increases the amount of currency chasing the same pile of goods there. The person getting the transfer gains a positional advantage over her neighbors, but the total wealth there stays exactly the same, which of course is no good. What we as donors would really like to do is make sure that we are in some sense donating real wealth; that we are giving up a claim on some of the world's resources in such a way that other, poorer people then get to claim those resources themselves. But if just money, but no, like, actual stuff, is transferred, then giving to charity just amounts to a bookkeeping trick.
The way out of this, of course, is global trade. Dollars in the US aren't separate from dollars in Kenya; they both participate in the same global market. If global trade is efficient enough, then Kenya as a whole gains dollars relative to the US, and the buying power of their whole economy increases relative to the US economy. So Kenya does really get a bigger pile of goods for their higher number of dollars to chase, so I can transfer real, actual wealth just by changing numbers on a...
A Parable of Elites and Takeoffs
by gwern — 2014-06-30T23:04:35.372Z

Let me tell you a parable of the future. Let’s say, 70 years from now, in a large Western country we’ll call Nacirema.

One day far from now: scientific development has continued apace, and a large government project (with, unsurprisingly, a lot of military funding) has taken the scattered pieces of cutting-edge research and put them together into a single awesome technology, which could revolutionize (or at least, vastly improve) all sectors of the economy. Leading thinkers had long forecast that this area of science’s mysteries would eventually yield to progress, despite theoretical confusion and perhaps-disappointing initial results and the scorn of more conservative types and the incomprehension (or outright disgust, for ‘playing god’) of the general population, and at last - it had! The future was bright.

Unfortunately, it was hurriedly decided to use an early prototype outside the lab in an impoverished foreign country. Whether out of arrogance, bureaucratic inertia, overconfidence on the part of the involved researchers, condescending racism, the need to justify the billions of grant-dollars that cumulative went into the project over the years by showing some use of it - whatever, the reasons no longer mattered after the final order was signed. The technology was used, but the consequences turned out to be horrific: over a brief period of what seemed like mere days, entire cities collapsed and scores - hundreds - of thousands of people died. (Modern economies are extremely interdependent and fragile, and small disruptions can have large consequences; more people died in the chaos of the evacuation of the areas around Fukushima than will die of the radiation.)

An unmitigated disaster. Worse, the technology didn’t even accomplish the assigned goal - that was thanks to a third party’s actions! Ironic. But that’s how life goes: ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’.

So, what to do with the tech? The positive potential was still there, but no one could doubt anymore that there was a horrific dark side: they had just seen what it could do if misused, even if the authorities (as usual) were spinning the events as furiously as possible to avoid frightening the public. You could put it under heavy government control, and they did.

But what was to stop Nacirema’s rivals from copying the technology and using it ...
Meetup : LW Sydney Rationality Dojo - Agency
by luminosity — 2014-06-30T11:28:52.467Z

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Sydney Rationality Dojo - Agency

WHEN:
06 July 2014 04:00:00PM (+1000)

WHERE:
Humanist House%2C 10 Shepherd St Chippendale

To add to our monthly discussion dinner meetups, and the social meetups, we're now trialling a rationality dojo meetup. This will be different from the existing meetup in that it will have a stronger focus on one person leading a discussion and exercises related to a particular rationality skill, and less on group discussions.

We'll be finishing up at 6 on the Sunday. Those who need to go home afterwards are welcome to leave then, but I'd love it if people wanted to go get dinner together afterwards.

Discussion article for the meetup : LW Sydney Rationality Dojo - Agency
Open thread, 30 June 2014- 6 July 2014
by DanielDeRossi — 2014-06-30T10:58:22.110Z

Previous thread

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

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

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

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
An Attempt at Logical Uncertainty
by BenjaminFox — 2014-06-30T06:59:10.850Z

At the recent Tel Aviv meetup, after a discussion of the open problems in the field of FAI, we reached the conclusion that the problem of logical uncertainty is one of the most major of the problems open today. In this post I will try to give a few insights I had on this problem, which can be thought of as the problem of constructing a (non-degenerate) probability measure over the set of the statements of an arbitrary logical system.

To clarify my goal: I'm trying to make a Solomonoff-like system for assigning probabilities to logical statements. For reasons much like the reasons that Solomonoff Induction is uncomputable, this system will be uncomputable as well. This puts certain limits to it's usefulness, but it's certainly a start. Solomonoff Induction is very useful, if only as a limiting case of computable processes. I believe the system I present here has some of that same value when it comes to the problem of logical uncertainty.

The obvious tack to take is one involving proof-lengths: It is reasonable to say that a sentence that is harder to prove should have a lower measure.

Let's start with a definition:
For each provably true statement φ , let ProofLength(φ) be the length of φ's shortest proof. For all unprovable yet true statements, let ProofLength(φ) be ∞.

Therefore, if we have some probability measure P over true statements in our system, we want P to be monotonic decreasing in regards to proof length. (e.g. P(φ1)<P(φ2) ⇔ ProofLength(φ1)>ProofLength(φ2))

For obvious reasons, we want to assign probability 1 to our axioms. As an axiom always has a proof of length one (the mere statement of the axiom itself, without any previous statements that it is derived from), we want the property P(φ) = 1 ⇔ ProofLength(φ) = 1.

Lastly, for statements that are unprovable, we have to assign a probability of ½. Why? Let φ be an unprovable statement. Because P is a probability measure, P(φ)+P(~φ) = 1. Exactly one of φ or ~φ is true, but as they are unprovable, we have no way of knowing, even in theory, which is which. Thus, by symmetry, P(φ)=P(~φ)=½.

Given these desiderata, we will see what measure P we can construct that follows them.

For each true statement φ I will define P(φ) to be 2-ProofLength(φ)+2-1. This seems at first rather arbitrary, but it match...
Meetup : Upper Canada LW Megameetup: Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Waterloo, London
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2014-06-28T22:48:51.107Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Upper Canada LW Megameetup: Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Waterloo, London

WHEN:
18 July 2014 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Ottawa, Canada

Hi all LWers and CFAR alumni in the eastern Canada region! We'll be hosting a megameetup in Ottawa, Canada, running from 7:00 pm on Friday, July 18th, until early afternoon on Sunday, July 20th. We have a house available and enough space for everyone to sleep on site for the duration. We'll be eating communally, and there will be lots of snacks stocked up at the house, but please plan on contributing some money to cover food costs.

Friday night will be a fun social. Saturday will have a schedule of talks, activities, and CFAR-style classes. Sunday, we will most likely have an outing to a park or beach, depending on weather.

If you would like to come to this meetup, please fill out the following Google Form for logistics purposes: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1zAFz-2nFUfQ31aVW6nFl61gsmnsER7PVCSvlJjwU__E/viewform?usp=send_form

If you have any questions, you can message Swimmer963 and I will try to answer them.

Discussion article for the meetup : Upper Canada LW Megameetup: Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Waterloo, London
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-06-27T16:48:44.396Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on June 20th. The following week's summary is here.

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

Bangalore meetup: 29 June 2014 04:40PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Atlanta Movie Night: Introduction to Machine Learning: 22 June 2014 07:00PM

Bratislava Meetup XIV.: 30 June 2014 06:00PM

Houston, TX: 12 July 2014 02:00PM

Moscow meet up: 22 June 2014 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:

Austin, TX: 21 June 2025 01:30PM
Canberra: Many Worlds + Paranoid Debating: 27 June 2014 06:00PM

[Melbourne] July Rationality Dojo: Disagreement: 06 July 2014 03:00PM

Salt Lake City, UT: Summer Solstice 2014: 22 June 2014 02:00PM
Sydney Meetup - June: 25 June 2014 07:00PM
Washington D.C.: Seeing Off: 22 June 2014 03:00PM

West LA: 25 June 2025 07:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Sydney, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

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

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

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

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular m...
[LINK] Neuroeconomics course on coursera started just this week
by IsTheLittleLion — 2014-06-26T18:38:33.792Z

Introduction to Neuroeconomics: how the brain makes decisions

Info from the link:

About the Course

Economics, psychology, and neuroscience are converging today into a unified discipline of Neuroeconomics with the ultimate aim of providing a single, general theory of human behaviour.

Neuroeconomics can provide economists and social scientists with a deeper understanding of how they make their own decisions, and how others decide. Are we hard-wired to be risk-adverse or risk-takers? How is a “fair decision” evaluated by the brain? Is it possible today to predict the purchasing intentions of a consumer? Can we modulate economic behaviour affecting the brain?

Neuroscience allied to psychology and economics have powerful models and evidence to explain why we make a decision… and whether it is rational or not. Decision-making in financial markets, trust and cooperation in teams, consumer persuasion, will be central issues in this course in neuroeconomics. You will be provided with the most recent evidence from brain-imaging techniques (PET, fMRI and TMS), and you will be introduced to the explanatory models behind them.

The course will start by discussing the foundations of neuroeconomics and the neuroanatomy of the brain (Module I: “How the brain works”).

Module II (“How the brain decides”) then focuses on the core building block of neuroeconomics: decision theory. In a simple way, you will be presented with the main theories accounting for how individuals decide, supported by key empirical studies.

The next module will study the balance between rationality and emotions (Module III: “How the brain feels”): how our emotions interfere with our so-called rational judgments.

Module IV (“Society of brains”) focuses on society: how groups and the social environment interact with individual decision-making. This module will have strong implications for marketing, public policy and public education.

Course Syllabus

Module I: “How the Brain works”

Week 1. Introduction. Introduction to the course, historical overview of the field.

Week 2. Brain anatomy and functions. Introduction to neuroscience, brain anatomy and brain functions. Measuring brain activity: Brain-imaging (EEG, MEG, fMRI), brain stimulation (TMS), cell recording, data visualization, interpretation of the results.

...
Meetup : Rationality Practice - Be Specific
by Benquo — 2014-06-26T14:14:17.888Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Practice - Be Specific

WHEN:
29 June 2014 03:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
Kogod Courtyard, National Portrait Gallery, 8th and F Sts NW, Washington, DC 20001

Being specific can help you notice when you don't know what you're talking about, and avoid unnecessary miscommunication and arguments over definitions.

Let's come up with some ways to teach ourselves the habit of being specific, and giving and thinking through concrete examples.
Related: http://lesswrong.com/lw/bc3/sotw_be_specific/

Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Practice - Be Specific
R support group and the benefits of applied statistics
by sixes_and_sevens — 2014-06-26T14:11:07.888Z

Following the interest in this proposal a couple of weeks ago, I've set up a Google Group for the purpose of giving people a venue to discuss R, talk about their projects, seek advice, share resources, and provide a social motivator to hone their skills. Having done this, I'd now like to bullet-point a few reasons for learning applied statistical skills in general, and R in particular:

The General Case:

- Statistics seems to be a subject where it's easy to delude yourself into thinking you know a lot about it. This is visibly apparent on Less Wrong. Although there are many subject experts on here, there are also a lot of people making bold pronouncements about Bayesian inference who wouldn't recognise a beta distribution if it sat on them. Don't be that person! It's hard to fool yourself into thinking you know something when you have to practically apply it.

- Whenever you think "I wonder what kind of relationship exists between [x] and [y]", it's within your power to investigate this.

- Statistics has a rich conceptual vocabulary for reasoning about how observations generalise, and how useful those generalisations might be when making inferences about future observations. These are the sorts of skills we want to be practising as aspiring rationalists.

- Scientific literature becomes a lot more readable when you appreciate the methods behind them. You'll have a much greater understanding of scientific findings if you appreciate what the finding means in the context of statistical inference, rather than going off whatever paraphrased upshot is given in the abstract.

- Statistical techniques make use of fundamental mathematical methods in an applicable way. If you're learning linear algebra, for example, and you want an intuitive understanding of eigenvectors, you could do a lot worse than learning about principal component analysis.

R in particular:

- It's non-proprietary, (read "free"). Many competitive products are ridiculously expensive to license.

- Since it's common in academia, newer or more exotic statistical tools and procedures are more likely to have been implemented and made available in R than proprietary statistical packages or other software libraries.

- R skills are a strong signal of technical competence that will distinguish you from SPSS mouse-jockeys.

- There are many out-of-the-box packages for carrying out statistical procedures that you'd...
The silos of expertise: beyond heuristics and biases
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2014-06-26T13:13:45.385Z

Separate silos of expertise

I've been doing a lot of work on expertise recently, on the issue of measuring it and assessing it. The academic research out there is fascinating, though rather messy. Like many areas in the social sciences, it often suffers from small samples and overgeneralising from narrow examples. More disturbingly, the research projects seems to be grouped into various "silos" that don't communicate much with each other, each silo continuing on their own pet projects.

The main four silos I've identified are:

There may be more silos than this - many people working in expertise studies haven't heard of all of these (for instance, I was ignorant of Cooke's research until it was pointed out to me by someone who hadn't heard of Shanteau or Klein). The division into silos isn't perfect; Shanteau, for instance, has addressed the biases literature at least once (Shanteau, James. "Decision making by experts: The GNAHM effect." Decision Science and Technology. Springer US, 1999. 105-130), Kahneman and Klein have authored a paper together (Kahneman, Daniel, and Gary Klein. "Conditions for intuitive expertise: a failure to disagree." American Psychologist 64.6 (2009): 515). But in general the mutual ignoring (or mutual ignorance) seems pretty strong between the silos.

Less Wrongers are probably very familiar with the heuristics and biases approach, so that doesn't need to be rehashed here. Shanteau's silo mainly revolves around estimating when experts are true experts, concluding that the nature of the task attempted is key (see this table for the characteristics of tasks conducive to genuine expertise), and coming up with some indirect measures of expert performance in fields where an objective standard isn't available (Shanteau, James, et al. "Performance-based assessment of expertise: How to decide if someone is an expert or not." European Journal of Operational Research 136.2 (2002): 253-263).

This post will therefore be looking at the last two silos, first at combining expert opinions, and then at the methods that some true experts use to reach decisions. That last silo is of particular interest to Less Wrong, as it contradicts many of the common "biases must be bad" ideas.

Combining expert opinion

Suppose you have a population potentially at risk from an erupting volcano (Aspinall W. & Cooke R.M. 1998. Expert judgement and the Montserrat Vo...