trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Promoting Effective Giving Using List-Style Articles 
by Gleb_Tsipursky — 2015-12-16T20:08:06.105Z

This is mainly of interest to Effective Altruists and Cross-posted on the EA forum

Wanted to get community feedback and optimization suggestions on promoting effective giving using list-style articles.

The purpose for list-style articles would be similar to other types of effective giving content, namely to lead people to shift their giving toward more effective charities from less effective ones. To be clear, it is not to get people to join the Effective Altruism movement, to avoid the danger of rapid movement growth (see this video and paper). It is also not to get people to go down the Earning To Give path, as most likely only a small portion of people should go down that road, and moreover the EA movement as such faces a higher talent gap than funding gap. Instead, the goal is to redirect some of the hundreds of billions spent per year on charitable giving toward effective causes.

Now, getting to why use list-style articles as such. On the one hand, most list-style articles pattern-match with shallow content, not something that Less Wrongers typically appreciate - in fact, there has been some intense debate about this topic. On the other hand, list-style articles are one of the most widely read and shared types of content on the web, and there are specific strategies for doing high-quality list-style articles.

One concern is that these articles might be a turn-off for people who are oriented toward more high-brow content, and would not be inclined to learn about effective giving and especially effective altruism due to it being presented in a list-style article form. To address this concern, I think we should aim to avoid using the term "Effective Giving" and certainly "Effective Altruism" in the title of a list-style article. Thus, anyone just glancing at the headline would not be turned off by seeing this term in association with a list-style article. Only the people who click on the article and read it would learn about this term and the organizations associated with it. Since the readers of a list-style article are the ones who would enjoy list-style articles and not be put off by them, they would be highly unlikely to be negatively impacted by this type of article and the message of effective giving as conveyed by it, and instead would be impacted positively, on a weak to strong range.

To practice an expe...
European Community Weekend 2016
by nino — 2015-12-16T18:25:36.912Z

We are happy to announce the LessWrong Community Weekend 2016! From September 2 to September 4 awesome people from all across Europe are coming to Berlin to meet, exchange ideas, and start projects together.

The event will happen at Jugendherberge Wannsee which features several seminar rooms for talks, workshops, and discussions, as well as comfortable open spaces to socialize and relax. It also provides on-site accommodation (shared rooms, 4 beds) for everyone.

Costs are €150. This includes accommodation for two nights, meals and snacks, and a welcome lunch on Friday.

Like the last two years the event will have some long-form talks, workshops and group activities. However, the weekend is largely participant-driven: There’ll be lots of free space for offering talks and activities of your own. (examples from last year: lightning talks, workouts before meals, improv singing, acrobatics, swimming in the lake, stargazing, …) Providing a space that’s suitable for forming bonds between people and reconnecting with friends is a major focus.

You don’t need to be able to speak German to attend. Nearly all talks and discussions will be in English.

Last time a number of people stayed a couple of days longer to explore Berlin, go bouldering etc. That was super fun and we invite you to plan for it. We will coordinate couch-surfing opportunities to avoid the need for boring hotels.

To sign up, fill out this form.

tl;dr

When: Friday September 2, 12:00 – Sunday September 4, 18:00, 2016
Where: Jugendherberge Am Wannsee, Berlin
Price: €150
Sign-up: here

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask us at lwcw.europe@gmail.com.

Looking forward to seeing you there,
Nino, Christian, Marcel, Daniel, J*, Alexander, Irina
LessWrong Deutschland e.V.
[LINK] "The current state of machine intelligence"
by gjm — 2015-12-16T15:22:26.596Z

This article by Shivon Zilis on O'Reilly's website may be of interest. There's essentially no technical content (I think the author is a finance person with little technical expertise); it's a fairly fluffy high-level survey of the ecosystem, asking questions more like "what companies are doing this stuff and what are their products?" than like "what scientific advances have there been and how do they work inside?".

Here are a few quotations to give the flavour of the thing:

The two biggest changes I’ve noted since I did this analysis last year are (1) the emergence of autonomous systems in both the physical and virtual world and (2) startups shifting away from building broad technology platforms to focusing on solving specific business problems.

In last year’s roundup, the focus was almost exclusively on machine intelligence in the virtual world. This time we’re seeing it in the physical world, in the many flavors of autonomous systems: self-driving cars, autopilot drones, robots that can perform dynamic tasks without every action being hard coded. It’s still very early days—most of these systems are just barely useful, though we expect that to change quickly.

Similarly, researchers are doing things that make us stop and say, “Wait, really?” They are tackling important problems we may not have imagined were possible, like creating fairy godmother drones to help the elderly, computer vision that detects the subtle signs of PTSD, autonomous surgical robots that remove cancerous lesions, and fixing airplane WiFi (just kidding, not even machine intelligence can do that).

(Warning: one link in the last paragraph is to an article in the Daily Mail, which is a terrible terrible newspaper.)
Meetup : MelbLW Social Meetup
by Maelin — 2015-12-16T05:54:18.047Z

Discussion article for the meetup : MelbLW Social Meetup

WHEN:
18 December 2015 06:30:00PM (+1100)

WHERE:
Alchemist's Refuge, 228 Little Lonsdale St, Melbourne CBD

It's our final Social Meetup for the year! (Facebook event: click here)

MelbLW's social meetups run on the third Friday of each month. They are casual get-togethers where we chat about topics of interest over a couple of drinks. Some groups will often play games as well.

Where? Alchemist's Refuge, 328 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne CBD

When? From 6:30pm on Friday 18th. Feel free to show up later, though. We typically stay at the main venue until about 11pm.

Dinner? There are plenty of nearby food places including some that deliver to the Refuge. If you would like to wait, some members have a tradition of going to Stalactites for a post-meetup souvlaki

Games? Alchemist's Refuge has a few boardgames available for borrowing, if you'd like to play a game feel free to organise a group for it!

Contact? Any questions or issues, contact Chris on 0439471632

Hope to see you there!

Discussion article for the meetup : MelbLW Social Meetup
The art of grieving well
by Valentine — 2015-12-15T19:55:44.893Z

[This is one post I've written in an upcoming sequence on what I call "yin". Yin, in short, is the sub-art of giving perception of truth absolutely no resistance as it updates your implicit world-model. Said differently, it's the sub-art of subconsciously seeking out and eliminating ugh fields and also eliminating the inclination to form them in the first place. This is the first piece I wrote, and I think it stands on its own, but it probably won't be the first post in the final sequence. My plan is to flesh out the sequence and then post a guide to yin giving the proper order. I'm posting the originals on my blog, and you can view the original of this post here, but my aim is to post a final sequence here on Less Wrong.]

In this post, I'm going to talk about grief. And sorrow. And the pain of loss.

I imagine this won't be easy for you, my dear reader. And I wish I could say that I'm sorry for that.

…but I'm not.

I think there's a skill to seeing horror clearly. And I think we need to learn how to see horror clearly if we want to end it.

This means that in order to point at the skill, I need to also point at real horror, to show how it works.

So, I'm not sorry that I will make you uncomfortable if I succeed at conveying my thoughts here. I imagine I have to.

Instead, I'm sorry that we live in a universe where this is necessary.

If you Google around, you'll find all kinds of lists of what to say and avoid saying to a grieving person. For reasons I'll aim to make clear later on, I want to focus for a moment on some of the things not to say. Here are a few from Grief.com:

"He is in a better place."
"There is a reason for everything."
"I know how you feel."
"Be strong."

I can easily imagine someone saying things like this with the best of intentions. They see someone they care about who is suffering greatly, and they want to help.

But to the person who has experienced a loss, these are very unpleasant to hear. The discomfort is often pre-verbal and can be difficult to articulate, especially when in so much pain. But a fairly common theme is something like:

"Don't heave your needs on me. I'm too tired and in too much pain to help you."

If you've never experienced agonizing loss, this might seem really confusing at first — which is why it seems tempting to say those things in the first place, I think. But try assuming that the grieving person s...
Meetup : San Antonio Meetup: Seeking Strategic Updates
by Bryan-san — 2015-12-15T16:10:53.695Z

Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio Meetup: Seeking Strategic Updates

WHEN:
20 December 2015 02:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
12651 Vance Jackson Rd #118, San Antonio, TX 78230

Bubble tea, frozen yogurt, and discussion at Yumi Berry! All are welcome!

New Meetup to discuss rationality and all things LessWrong and meet the local community. Look for the sign that says Less Wrong!

Discussion article for the meetup : San Antonio Meetup: Seeking Strategic Updates
Agent-Simulates-Predictor Variant of the Prisoner's Dilemma
by Gram_Stone — 2015-12-15T07:17:04.191Z

I don't know enough math and I don't know if this is important, but in the hopes that it helps someone figure something out that they otherwise might not, I'm posting it.

In Soares & Fallenstein (2015), the authors describe the following problem:

Consider a simple two-player game, described by Slepnev (2011), played by a human and an agent which is capable of fully simulating the human and which acts according to the prescriptions of UDT. The game works as follows: each player must write down an integer between 0 and 10. If both numbers sum to 10 or less, then each player is paid according to the number that they wrote down. Otherwise, they are paid nothing. For example, if one player writes down 4 and the other 3, then the former gets paid $4 while the latter gets paid $3. But if both players write down 6, then neither player gets paid. Say the human player reasons as follows:

"I don’t quite know how UDT works, but I remember hearing that it’s a very powerful predictor. So if I decide to write down 9, then it will predict this, and it will decide to write 1. Therefore, I can write down 9 without fear."

The human writes down 9, and UDT, predicting this, prescribes writing down 1. This result is uncomfortable, in that the agent with superior predictive power “loses” to the “dumber” agent. In this scenario, it is almost as if the human’s lack of ability to predict UDT (while using correct abstract reasoning about the UDT algorithm) gives the human an “epistemic high ground” or “first mover advantage.” It seems unsatisfactory that increased predictive power can harm an agent.

More precisely: two agents A and B must choose integers m and n with 0 ≤ m, n ≤ 10, and if m + n ≤ 10, then A receives a payoff of m dollars and B receives a payoff of n dollars, and if m + n > 10, then each agent receives a payoff of zero dollars. B has perfect predictive accuracy and A knows that B has perfect predictive accuracy.

Consider a variant of the aforementioned decision problem in which the same two agents A and B must choose integers m and n with 0 ≤ m, n ≤ 3; if m + n ≤ 3, then {A, B} receives a payoff of {m, n} dollars; if m + n > 3, then {A, B} receives a payoff of zero dollars. This variant is similar to a variant...
Logical Counterfactuals Consistent Under Self-Modification
by abramdemski — 2015-12-15T06:38:00.000Z

I argue that the correct notion of logical counterfactual is the one which an agent would self-modify to have if the agent lacked it, and that this significantly constrains the possibilities. The argument is rather informal, and I'm not really sure if many of the points are new, so I'm posting it in Discussion.

Where the idea is coming from

(This section is an extended motivation, and may be skipped.)

At the most recent MIRIxLA, Alex Mennen led a discussion attempting to apply conservation of expected evidence to the Demski prior. The basic idea was that approximations of the Demski prior discussed so far can do quite unreasonable things before converging to good probabilities, even those that are uniformly coherent. Can we describe a property for approximations such that the probabilities given at finite times are in some sense reasonable? Based on the idea of conservation of expected evidence, is it possible for an approximation to give finite probabilities such that (in some sense) the probability that the estimate will drift up later is balanced by the probability it will drift down?

We didn't come up with any formulations of this idea which seemed both possible and nontrivial, and we came away with the feeling that something like what we were after would not be possible in the end. The version which we spent the longest time discussing was this one:

(1) ∀t,a≤b:Eϕ(P(ϕ)|Pt(ϕ)∈[a,b])∈[a,b]

Pt() represents the probability estimate at time t, while P() is the probability reached in the limit of the approximation process. The expectation is being taken over ϕ; we suppose a probability distribution μ(ϕ) which we're sampling sentences from. At any time t, sampling only ϕ whose probability estimate lands in a range [a,b], we want the expected value of the eventual probabilities to be in that same range. (Although inspired by conservation of expected evidence, this might also be seen as a notion of calibration.)

Although we convinced ourselves that this was very likely impossible, we didn't come up with a proof. None of our variations to the definition seemed very promising either.

Somewhat facetiously, I offered the following resolution to our difficulties. One thing which seems artificial about (1) is the expectation over ϕ based on μ. What this accomplishes is to inject a kind of made-up uncertainty into the logically certain world; if we turned a blind eye to the

...
Effective Giving vs. Effective Altruism
by Gleb_Tsipursky — 2015-12-14T23:49:01.324Z

This is mainly of interest to Effective Altruists, and was cross-posted on the EA forum

Why separate effective giving from Effective Altruism? Isn't the whole point of EA about effective giving, meaning giving to the most impactful charities to advance human flourishing? Sure, effective giving is the point of EA, but there might be a lot of benefit to drawing a distinct line between the movement of Effective Altruism itself, and the ideas of effective giving that it promotes. That's something that Kerry Vaughn, the Executive Director of Effective Altruism Outreach, and I, the President of Intentional Insights, discussed in our recent phone call, after having an online discussion on this forum. To be clear, Kerry did not explicitly endorse the work of Intentional Insights, and is not in a position to do so - this just reflects my recollection of our conversations.

Why draw that line? Because there's quite a bit of danger in rapid movement growth of attracting people who might dilute the EA movement and impair the building of good infrastructure down the road (see this video and paper). This exemplifies the dangers of simply promoting Effective Altruism indiscriminately, and just trying to grow the movement as fast as possible.

Thus, what we can orient toward is using modern marketing strategies to spread the ideas of effective altruism - what Kerry and I labeled effective giving in our conversations - without necessarily trying to spread the movement. We can spread the notion of giving not simply from the heart, but also using the head. We can talk about fighting the drowning child problem. We can talk about researching charities and using GiveWell, The Life You Can Save, and other evidence-based charity evaluators to guide one's giving. We can build excitement about giving well, and encourage people to think of themselves as Superdonors or Mega-Lifesavers. We can use effective marketing strategies such as speaking to people's emotions and using stories, and contributing to meta-charities such as EA Outreach and others that do such work. That's why we at Intentional Insights focus on spending our resources on spreading the message of effective giving, as we believe that getting ten more people to give effectively is more impactful than us giving of our resources to effective charities ourselves. At the same time, Kerry and I spoke of avoi...
[Link] Video of a presentation by Hal Arkes, one of the top world experts in debiasing, on dealing with the hindsight bias and overconfidence
by Gleb_Tsipursky — 2015-12-14T18:16:11.206Z

Here's a video of a presentation by Hal Arkes, one of the top world experts in debiasing, Emeritus Professor at Ohio State, and Intentional Insights Advisory Board member, on dealing with hindsight bias and overconfidence. This was at a presentation hosted by Intentional Insights and the Columbus, OH Less Wrong group. It received high marks from local Less Wrongers, so I thought I'd share it here.
Open thread, Dec. 14 - Dec. 20, 2015
by MrMind — 2015-12-14T08:09:14.535Z

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. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

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

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
State of the Solstice (NYC Event upcoming)
by Raemon — 2015-12-14T06:33:28.310Z

(For the time being, I'm posting this in both Main and in Discussion, to increase visibility. If it ends up getting promoted I may remove this one if people think I should)

Every year people mock the Rationalist Solstice Ritual. And every year I read the discussions, nod, and then go to New York and have a great time and meet amazing people and have fascinating discussions and get the songs stuck in my head for the next couple of weeks.

(“Stop enjoying yourself! Your enjoyment is wrong!”)

I think the rationalist movement has been especially blessed. Without really meaning to, and without having to deliberately believe cringeworthy things for the heck of it or unfairly attack others, we have managed to develop enough different ways of thinking that we naturally have a very strong in-group distinction – which in turn means a very strong community.
Less Wrong, More Rite, Part II - Slatestarcodex

Yesterday, the Bay Area and Boston each held a Solstice event. This upcoming weekend, the Seattle community will be putting on an event, and in New York City, we'll have a huge, flagship event with professional music throughout. (Details at the end of the post. If you'd like to come meet other rationalists but aren't into singing, there'll be a concurrent party hosted downstairs, turning into an official after party around 9:30pm)

The Bay Area folk were able to put together a streaming video. You can check it out here. It requires a little emotional investment to experience it through a computer monitor, but if you're willing to make that investment, I think it pays off well. I actually found myself singing along despite being alone in a room, and feeling like a part of the crowd. I also found myself clapping when several of the speakers delivered some excellent stories. (Your mileage may vary, of course.)
Watching the Bay Area video was a unique experience for me - quite possibly the proudest moment of my life.
For the first few years, Solstice felt like a thing that would only exist if I willed it into existence. Now, there are multiple communities running it without my help, coming together to create legitimate traditions that feel every bit as real and meaningful as an ancient institutions.
Once, I was a bit worried about associating the Solstice too closely with Less Wrong - I was afraid it was one weird thing too m...
State of the Solstice (NY Event Upcoming)
by Raemon — 2015-12-14T06:30:08.018Z

Every year people mock the Rationalist Solstice Ritual. And every year I read the discussions, nod, and then go to New York and have a great time and meet amazing people and have fascinating discussions and get the songs stuck in my head for the next couple of weeks.

(“Stop enjoying yourself! Your enjoyment is wrong!”)

I think the rationalist movement has been especially blessed. Without really meaning to, and without having to deliberately believe cringeworthy things for the heck of it or unfairly attack others, we have managed to develop enough different ways of thinking that we naturally have a very strong in-group distinction – which in turn means a very strong community.
Less Wrong, More Rite, Part II - Slatestarcodex

Yesterday, the Bay Area and Boston each held a Solstice event. This upcoming weekend, the Seattle community will be putting on an event, and in New York City, we'll have a huge, flagship event with professional music throughout. (Details at the end of the post. If you'd like to come meet other rationalists but aren't into singing, there'll be a concurrent party hosted downstairs, turning into an official after party around 9:30pm)

The Bay Area folk were able to put together a streaming video. You can check it out here. It requires a little emotional investment to experience it through a computer monitor, but if you're willing to make that investment, I think it pays off well. I actually found myself singing along despite being alone in a room, and feeling like a part of the crowd. I also found myself clapping when several of the speakers delivered some excellent stories. (Your mileage may vary, of course.)
Watching the Bay Area video was a unique experience for me - quite possibly the proudest moment of my life.
For the first few years, Solstice felt like a thing that would only exist if I willed it into existence. Now, there are multiple communities running it without my help, coming together to create legitimate traditions that feel every bit as real and meaningful as an ancient institutions.
Once, I was a bit worried about associating the Solstice too closely with Less Wrong - I was afraid it was one weird thing too many, in a community that already had a few weird-looking things causing PR problems. The PR concerns are real. There are communities other than Less Wrong that I don't want ...