trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
I notice that I am confused about Identity and Resurrection
by ialdabaoth — 2013-11-14T20:38:22.845Z

I've spent quite a bit of time trying to work out how to explain the roots of my confusion. I think, in the great LW tradition, I'll start with a story.

[Editor's note: The original story was in 16th century Mandarin, and used peculiar and esoteric terms for concepts that are just now being re-discovered. Where possible, I have translated these terms into their modern mathematical and philosophical equivalents. Such terms are denoted with curly braces, {like so}.]

Once upon a time there was a man by the name of Shen Chun-lieh, and he had a beautiful young daughter named Ah-Chen. She died.

Shen Chun-lieh was heartbroken, moreso he thought than any man who had lost a daughter, and so he struggled and scraped and misered until he had amassed a great fortune, and brought that fortune before me - for he had heard it told that I was could resurrect the dead.

I frowned when he told me his story, for many things are true after a fashion, but wisdom is in understanding the nature of that truth - and he did not bear the face of a wise man.

"Tell me about your daughter, Ah-Chen.", I commanded.

And so he told me.

I frowned, for my suspicions were confirmed.

"You wish for me to give you this back?", I asked.

He nodded and dried his tears. "More than anything in the world."

"Then come back tomorrow, and I will have for you a beautiful daughter who will do all the things you described."

His face showed a sudden flash of understanding. Perhaps, I thought, this one might see after all.

"But", he said, "will it be Ah-Chen?"

I smiled sagely. "What do you mean by that, Shen Chun-lieh?"

"I mean, you said that you would give me 'a' daughter. I wish for MY daughter."

I bowed to his small wisdom. "Indeed I did. If you wish for YOUR daughter, then you must be much, much more precise with me."

He frowned, and I saw in his face that he did not have the words.

"You are wise in the way of the Tao", he said, "surely you can find the words in my heart, so that even such as me could say them?"

I nodded. "I can. But it will take a great amount of time, and much courage from you. Shall we proceed?"

He nodded.

I am wise enough in the way of the Tao. The Tao whispers things that have been discovered and forgotten, and things that have yet to be discovered, and things that may never be discovered. And while Shen Chun-lieh was neither wise nor particularly courageous, his overwhelming desire to see his daught...
The future of values 2: explicit vs. implicit
by KatjaGrace — 2013-11-14T20:28:53.000Z

Relatively minor technological change can move the balance of power between values that already fight within each human. Beeminder empowers a person’s explicit, considered values over their visceral urges, in much the same way that the development of better sling shots empowers one tribe over another.

In the arms race of slingshots, the other tribe may soon develop their own weaponry. In the spontaneous urges vs. explicit values conflict though, I think technology should generally tend to push in one direction. I’m not completely sure which direction that is however.

At first glance, it seems to me that explicit values will tend to have a much better weapons research program. This is because they have the ear of explicit reasoning, which is fairly central to conscious research efforts. It seems hard to intentionally optimize something without admitting at some point in the process that you want it.

When I want to better achieve my explicit goal of eating healthy and cheap food for instance, I can sit down and come up with novel ways to achieve this. Sometimes such schemes even involving trickery of the parts of myself that don’t agree with this goal, so divorced they are from this process. When I want to fulfill my urge to eat cookie dough on the other hand, I less commonly deal with this by strategizing to make cookie dough easier to eat in the future, or to trick other parts of myself into thinking eating cookie dough is a prudent plan.

However this is probably at least partly due to the cookie dough eating values being shortsighted. I’m having trouble thinking of longer term values I have that aren’t explicit on which to test this theory, or at least having trouble admitting to them. This is not very surprising; if they are not explicit, presumably I’m either unaware of them or don’t endorse them.

This model in which explicit values win out could be doubted for other reasons. Perhaps it’s pretty easy to determine unconsciously that you want to live in another suburb because someone you like lives there, and then after you have justified it by saying it will be good for your commute, then all the logistics that you need to be conscious for can still be carried out. In this case it’s easy to almost-optimize something consciously without admitting that you want it. Maybe most cases are like this.

Also note that...
Meetup : West LA—In Apprehending Hard Stuff
by OpenThreadGuy — 2013-11-14T16:17:21.558Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—In Apprehending Hard Stuff

WHEN:
20 November 2013 07:00:00PM (-0800)

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 three hours, or for longer if you worked long and hard to figure out how to get it for free for longer.

Discussion:

So8res's excellent post On Learning Difficult Things has inspired this meetup. Less Wrong is about learning brutal and unforgiving topics like what your brain is actually doing and what the objectively correct way to interpret evidence is and how to reason about reason

Since this is post is so great, you are all going to read it, and since not all of you are going to read it, I'm going to summarize it for you, and then we'll talk about maybe actually doing something involving the learning.

Recommended reading:

On Learning Difficult Things

How habits work and how you may control them

shev's comment on learning to program

Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., and Clark, R. E. (2006) Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: an analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching.

Non-recommended reading:

I don't know, you can read The Art of Learning if you want, but be warned it's much more a book about how great it is to be Josh Waitzkin than it is a book designed to teach you how to learn.

No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible. Do note that if you show up without exposure to Less Wrong, you will leave with exposure to Less Wrong. For this reason, do not show up if you do not wish to be exposed to Less Wrong. However, if you are reading this, you probably have been exposed to Less Wrong, and as such, it is too late for you, so you might as well show up.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—In Apprehending Hard Stuff
Meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 97-98
by therufs — 2013-11-14T03:54:55.400Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 97-98

WHEN:
16 November 2013 12:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
726 Rigsbee Avenue, Durham, NC 27701

It might be our last HPMoR meeting for a while! Bring a question, a reflection, or an epic tale of HPMoR-enabled conversions to rationality.

12:00 gather at Fullsteam

12:30 discuss

2:00 wrap up formal discussion

Tentative plans exist to hang out awhile at Fullsteam after formal discussion concludes. There might be games and there will definitely be beers.

Discussion article for the meetup : Durham/RTLW HPMoR discussion, ch. 97-98
To like, or not to like?
by PhilGoetz — 2013-11-14T02:26:59.072Z

Do you like Shakespeare?

I've been reading the Paris Review interviews with famous authors of the 20th century. Famous authors don't always like other famous authors. Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, Fitzgerald — for all of them, you could find some famous author who found them unreadable. (Especially Joyce and Faulkner.)

Except Shakespeare. Everyone loved Shakespeare. In fact, those who mentioned Shakespeare sometimes said he was the best author who has ever lived.

How likely is this?

I have a divergent opinion. I realized this during a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I've seen the play three or four times. Every year, people perform it at Renaissance festivals, in Central Park, and in at least one high school within 5 miles of my house. I was sitting in the audience as they got into the part where Bottom acts like an ass and this is supposed to be funny. I was just waiting for them to get it over with, and then remembered that there was nothing after it in the play that I looked forward to anyway. I suddenly realized, "This... is a bad play." Up until that moment, I had somehow believed that it was one of my favorite plays without actually liking almost anything in it.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is supposed to be a magical romantic comedy. It contains nothing of the magic one finds in a Peter Beagle or Charles de Lint fantasy, less-stirring romances than the average fan-fiction, and less humor than one would find in a randomly-chosen paragraph of Terry Pratchett. It has never made me laugh or cry once. Yet even having read it, and having watched it at least twice, I somehow voluntarily paid to sit and suffer through it again when I still had unread stories by Chekov, Borges, Katherine Anne Porter, and a hundred other worthies whose work seldom failed to move me at least as much as Shakespeare's best.

I have two competing hypotheses. Hypothesis #1 is that Shakespeare was the greatest author who ever lived, or at least in the top 10, whatever that means. You would be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of literary critics who would dispute this. Hypothesis #2 is that something about the time that Shakespeare wrote in made it very likely that we would elevate some writer from that time period to "Greatest Writer Ever". For instance:

It was at the start of commercial English literature and of English military, economic, and cultural dominance,

...
Help the Brain Preservation Foundation
by aurellem — 2013-11-13T21:18:32.474Z

(First time poster, long time reader)
I'm currently volunteering for the Brain Preservation Foundation (http://www.brainpreservation.org/), and I'd like to ask for your help.
The purpose of the BPF is to incentivize and evaluate the development of technology which can preserve a human brain in such intricate detail that all of the brain's cells and connections are preserved. It's the only prize of its kind for a relatively endangered, yet essential type of research.
We run a cash prize ($100,000 USD) called the "Brain Preservation Technology Prize" for the first team that can preserve a large mammal's brain to our high standards. The first $25,000 of that prize goes to the first team that can preserve the ultrastructure of a mouse brain.
Steve Aoki (http://steveaoki.com/), a musician that you might have heard of, is currently planning to give around $50,000 to one of four brain-related charities. One of these charities is the Brain Preservation Foundation! Whichever charity gets the most votes will win all the money.
This money is critically important to us to get the necessary supplies and lab time to administer the brain preservation technology prize. Evaluating brains that people send us involves electron microscopy, which is quite expensive (around $8,000 to evaluate a brain!) We are currently getting submissions and this extra money will give us the funds we need to run the prize.
To vote, just visit http://on.fb.me/15XFdTG, and click the "like" button by the "Brain Preservation Foundation" comment. You can see a graph of the votes at http://aurellem.org/bpf/votes.png (updates every 15 minutes). Thanks for taking the time to read
and vote!
More about the Brain Preservation Foundation :
http://www.brainpreservation.org/
More about the charity:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151608608587461
Votes graph:
http://aurellem.org/bpf/votes.png
I'd also love to hear your own opinions on the BPF and your assessment of its effectiveness, as well as your thoughts on chemopreservation vs cryopreservation.
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Thinking Fast and Slow Discussion November 17
by Mestroyer — 2013-11-13T20:47:20.587Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Thinking Fast and Slow Discussion November 17

WHEN:
17 November 2013 02:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
40.109545,-88.227318

Coordinates are: 40.109545,-88.227318 Meetup will be held in the Courtyard Cafe in the Illini Union, on the ground floor, at 2PM.

Discussion will be on pages 140-210 of Thinking Fast and Slow.

Cross posted on the mailing list.

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Thinking Fast and Slow Discussion November 17
Am I Understanding Bayes Right?
by CyrilDan — 2013-11-13T20:40:43.402Z

Hello, everyone.

I'm relatively new here as a user rather than as a lurker, but even after trying to read ever tutorial on Bayes' Theorem I could get my hands on, I'm still not sure I understand it. So I was hoping that I could explain Bayesianism as I understand it, and some more experienced Bayesians could tell me where I'm going wrong (or maybe if I'm not going wrong and it's a confidence issue rather than an actual knowledge issue). If this doesn't interest you at all, then feel free to tap out now, because here we go!

Abstraction

Bayes' Theorem is an application of probability. Probability is an abstraction based on logic, which is in turn based on possible worlds. By this I mean that they are both maps that refer to multiple territories: whereas a map of Cincinatti (or a "map" of what my brother is like, for instance), abstractions are good for more than one thing. Trigonometry is a map of not just this triangle here, but of all triangles everywhere, to the extent that they are triangular. Because of this it is useful even for triangular objects that one has never encountered before, but only tells you about it partially (e.g. it won't tell you the lengths of the sides, because that wouldn't be part of the definition of a triangle; also, it only works at scales at which the object in question approximates a triangle (i.e. the "triangle" map is probably useful at macroscopic scales, but breaks down as you get smaller).

Logic and Possible Worlds

Logic is an attempt to construct a map that covers as much territory as possible, ideally all of it. Thus when people say that logic is true at all times, at all places, and with all things, they aren't really telling you about the territory, they're telling you about the purpose of logic (in the same way that the "triangle" map is ideally useful for triangles at all times, at all places).

One form of logic is Propositional Logic. In propositional logic, all the possible worlds are imagined as points. Each point is exactly one possible world: a logically-possible arrangement that gives a value to all the different variables in the universe. Ergo no two possible universes are exactly the same (though they will share elements).

These possible universes are then joined together in sets called "propositions". These "sets" are Venn diagrams, or what George Lakoff refers to as "container schemas"...
LessWrong Study Hall will be password-protected
by tkadlubo — 2013-11-13T20:38:54.068Z

The community of the LessWrong Study Hall decided to protect access to the chatroom with a password. The password is: "lw".

Rationale: the LessWrong Study Hall started to have a serious trolling problem recently. As it grew in popularity it started to be automatically advertised on the tinychat.com main page, which attracts a demographics that has no idea about the goals of the Study Hall. We have no business dealing with those who seek online company to smoke weed and/or masturbate.

The password should be publicly available, and shown in plain text whenever the URL to the Study Hall is mentioned. The only users we want to exclude are the internet passers-by, who have literally no idea what that chatroom is about.

The password will be introduced in a day or two, after we inform all the regulars about the change.
Meetup : New Meetup: Milwaukee
by CyrilDan — 2013-11-13T19:36:40.270Z

Discussion article for the meetup : New Meetup: Milwaukee

WHEN:
19 November 2013 06:30:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
Starbucks, 920 N Water St, Milwaukee, WI

Hoping to start a Milwaukee LW chapter. Come on in and meet some new people!

Discussion article for the meetup : New Meetup: Milwaukee
Wolfram's new "Cloud" initiative
by Gvaerg — 2013-11-13T18:02:39.641Z

I was reading through this:

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/11/something-very-big-is-coming-our-most-important-technology-project-yet/

which announces the new "Wolfram Cloud" project of Stephen Wolfram and I noticed how much this sounds like "Flare" and EY's old "Plan to Singularity" document (linking from archive.org because the site seems to not show that particular page right now).

Only this time it's for real.

What do you think?
Buying Debt as Effective Altruism?
by aarongertler — 2013-11-13T06:09:53.715Z

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/12/occupy-wall-street-activists-15m-personal-debt

A collection of Occupy activists recently bought over $14,000,000 in personal debt for $400,000.

Normally, debt-buying companies do this with the intention of collecting the money from the debtors--Occupy did not, and I was struck by the lopsidedness of the figures.

A number I see often in the high-impact philanthropy world is $2300 to save a life (with plenty of caveats). At Occupy's rates, that would buy roughly $80,000 in debt--enough to get two or three families out of a hole that would otherwise render them bankrupt.

By itself, this isn't enough to be better than mosquito nets or deworming. But the thing about personal debt is that, thanks to interest payments and stress, it prevents people with high earning potential (compared to an average African) from making decisions that would optimal were they debt-free--like finishing college or buying a used car so they can take on a higher-paying job.

My idea, though it's a tentative, spur-of-the-moment thing:

Why not found a charity that acts like a combination of Vittana and Giving What We Can, freeing people with good prospects from debt in exchange for their signing a contract to donate a small portion of their future salary to charity?

A few issues that come to mind:

1) Occupy bought a lot of medical debt, which this company wouldn't, and other types of debt might be harder to buy.

2) People who have decent earning potential have more valuable debt, since they're more likely to pay it off later. (On the other hand, freeing them of interest payments might help them get into a better position for repayment.)

3) The idea is a lot like micro-lending, and organizations that offer that service don't have a great track record (though some have been successful).

4) People just freed from debt might not be in a position to donate much salary/might be unreliable. (Deferred payments until college is finished/the new job is had could be helpful here.)

5) There might be (well, almost certainly are) difficult legal issues with finding information on people in debt before you actually own their debt.

Are there any other obstacles you all can think of? Other features of the charity that might make it more effective? How does it sound as an intervention that increases the world's productivity in the long run, stacked up against other such inter...
How to have high-value conversations
by Vika — 2013-11-13T03:39:47.861Z

Since I moved into the Boston rationalist house, I've found myself having an overwhelming amount of conversation compared to my previous baseline. The conversations at Citadel tend to be fairly intellectual and interesting, but there is a lot of topic drift and tendency for entertainment over depth, which seems to be a fairly common pitfall. How can we optimize conversations and direct them towards areas of usefulness and insight?

There have been some previous discussions on this topic on LW, e.g. on useful ways to avoid low-value conversations or steer out of them. I would like to focus on the complementary skill of stimulating high-value directions in a conversation.

First of all, what makes a conversation high-value? There are several possible metrics:

people learning from each other’s expertise and experience

people getting to know each other better

exchange of advice and feedback

generating ideas and insights

All of these involve increasing the total amount of information available to the participants, either through revealing information that is already there, or through creating new information. This is more likely to happen in a topic area where someone has strong opinions or expertise, or, on the other hand, an area that someone finds challenging where they stand to learn a lot.

One effective way to steer a conversation is through asking purposeful questions. The questions should have sufficient depth to lead to interesting answers, but not be vague or put the other person on the spot. In that sense, a question like “What have you been thinking about lately?” is better than “What do you care about?” or “What are you terminal goals?”. It is better if the question leaves a line of retreat and doesn’t make the person feel low status if they don’t have an answer.

The types of questions that are productive and comfortable are generally different for group and one-on-one conversations. Two-person conversations are more conducive to openness, so one would be able to ask personal questions like

what memes have affected you strongly in the past or shaped your beliefs?

what has been important to you lately?

what has been difficult for you lately?

what eccentric things have you done?

Some questions are likely to lead to interesting topics in an N-person conversation for any N:

what have you learned recentl

...
Meetup : Montreal Meetup: Long-term decision-making
by Oriane — 2013-11-12T19:01:50.622Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal Meetup: Long-term decision-making

WHEN:
14 November 2013 06:30:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
McGill University

The meetup will take place in the Cyberthèque Pod 1 in Redpath Library Building.

The idea would be to find common patterns in our ways to make important long-term decisions, for example when choosing a university degree or a job, which is a problem that concerns a majority of us.
We will try to find tools to help us break or reinforce those patterns depending on what we think the major problems for us are (ex: aversion, sense of being overwhelmed, procrastination, difficulty to create subgoals, difficulty to narrow down choices, etc.)

If you cannot find the library pod, feel free to call/text at: 514 582 1052.

Another Montreal meetup will take place on Tuesday November 19th in Pod 3 at 6pm

Discussion article for the meetup : Montreal Meetup: Long-term decision-making