trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
My workflow
by paulfchristiano — 2012-12-09T21:16:42.564Z

Over the last 6 months I've started doing a lot of things differently. Some of these changes seem to have increased my work output a good bit and made me happier. I normally hesitate to share habits, but I'm pretty happy with these in particular, and even if they will work for only a few people I think they are worth sharing. Most of the habits I've adopted are fairly common, but I hope I can help people anyway by identifying the habits that have most helped me.

I'm curious to hear about alternatives that have worked for you.

Workflowy:

Workflowy lets you edit a single collapsible outline. I use it very extensively. It is much more convenient than the network of google docs it replaced, and I use it much more often. It is much like other outliners, but (1) has a slicker interface, (2) works offline, (3) lets you recurse on and share sublists.

Workflowy is free to try but costs $5 a month. This may seem expensive for what it does, but if you use (or could use!) outliners a lot this is not enough to matter. After some searching Workflowy seems like the best option. I'm sure I like Workflowy more than most people, but I really like it, so I think it's worth trying.

Here is a skeleton of my workflowy list, which hosts many of the other systems in this post.

Checklists:

I have a checklist of tasks to do each night before sleeping. In the past I would often forget one of these things; putting them in a checklist helps me do them more reliably and makes me more relaxed.

Checklists for other occasions, particularly waking up and traveling, are also helpful, but are much less important to me.

Todo lists:

I now maintain two todo lists: one with a list of tasks for each upcoming day, and one with a list of tasks for future events ("I'm in the UK," "it is Thursday," "I'm going grocery shopping"). Whenever I think of something I should do, I either put it under a future day and do it when that day arrives, or I put it with an associated event. Each night I check both lists and decide what to do tomorrow.

Beeminder:

Beeminder is a service that holds you to commitments and tracks your progress. It has helped me a lot over the last months. I've experimented with a few different commitments, but two have been most useful: following a daily routine, and doing a minimum amount of work each day (on average). Beeminder has pretty low overh...
Lifeism in the midst of death
by TobyBartels — 2012-12-09T13:28:16.278Z

tl;dr: My grandpa died, and I gave a eulogy with a mildly anti-deathist message, in a Catholic funeral service that was mostly pretty disagreeable.

I'm a little uncomfortable writing this post, because it's very personal, and I'm not exactly a regular with friends here. But I need to get it out, and I don't know any other place to put it.

My grandfather (one of two) died last week, and there was a funeral mass (Catholic) today. Although a ‘pro-life’ organisation, the Roman Catholic Church has a very deathist funeral liturgy. It wasn't just ‘Stanley has gone on to a better place’, and all that; the priest had the gall to say that Grandpa had probably done everything that he wanted to do in life, so it was OK for him to die now. I know from discussions with my mother and my aunt that Grandpa did not want to die now; although his life and health were not what they used to be, he was happy to live. Yes, he had gone to his great-granddaughter's second birthday party, but he wanted to go to her third, and that will never happen.

There are four of us grandchildren, two (not including me) with spouses. At first, it was suggested that each of us six say one of the Prayers of the Faithful (which are flexible). Mom thought that I might find one that I was willing to recite, so I looked them up online. It wasn't so bad that they end with ‘We pray to the Lord.’ recited by the congregation; I would normally remain silent during that, but I decided that I could say it, and even lead others in saying it, pro forma. And I could endorse the content of some (at least #6 from that list) with some moderate edits. But overall, the whole thing was very disturbing to me. (I had to read HPMoR 45 afterwards to get rid of the bad taste.) I told Mom ‘This is a part of the Mass where I would normally remain in respectful silence.’, and she apologised for ‘put[ting] [me] in an uncomfortable position’ (to quote from our text messages). In the end, the two grandchildren-in-law were assigned to say these prayers.

But we grandchildren still had a place in the programme; we would give eulogies. So I had to think about what to say. I was never close to Grandpa; I loved him well enough, but we didn't have much in common. I tried to think a...
Participation in the LW Community Associated with Less Bias
by Unnamed — 2012-12-09T12:15:42.385Z

Summary

CFAR included 5 questions on the 2012 LW Survey which were adapted from the heuristics and biases literature, based on five different cognitive biases or reasoning errors. LWers, on the whole, showed less bias than is typical in the published research (on all 4 questions where this was testable), but did show clear evidence of bias on 2-3 of those 4 questions. Further, those with closer ties to the LW community (e.g., those who had read more of the sequences) showed significantly less bias than those with weaker ties (on 3 out of 4-5 questions where that was testable). These results all held when controlling for measures of intelligence.
METHOD & RESULTS
Being less susceptible to cognitive biases or reasoning errors is one sign of rationality (see the work of Keith Stanovich & his colleagues, for example). You'd hope that a community dedicated to rationality would be less prone to these biases, so I selected 5 cognitive biases and reasoning errors from the heuristics & biases literature to include on the LW survey. There are two possible patterns of results which would point in this direction:

high scores: LWers show less bias than other populations that have answered these questions (like students at top universities)

correlation with strength of LW exposure: those who have read the sequences (or have been around LW a long time, have high karma, attend meetups, make posts) score better than those who have not.

The 5 biases were selected in part because they can be tested with everyone answering the same questions; I also preferred biases that haven't been discussed in detail on LW. On some questions there is a definitive wrong answer and on others there is reason to believe that a bias will tend to lead people towards one answer (so that, even though there might be good reasons for a person to choose that answer, in the aggregate it is evidence of bias if more people choose that answer).
This is only one quick, rough survey. If the results are as predicted, that could be because LW makes people more rational, or because LW makes people more familiar with the heuristics & biases literature (including how to avoid falling for the standard tricks used to test for biases), or because the people who are attracted to LW are already unusually rational (or just unusually good at avoiding ...
[SEQ RERUN] Underconstrained Abstractions
by MinibearRex — 2012-12-09T06:57:20.586Z

Today's post, Underconstrained Abstractions was originally published on 04 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

The problem with selecting abstractions is that for your data, there are probably lots of abstractions that fit the data equally well. In that case, we need some other way to decide which abstractions are useful.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Permitted Possibilities, & Locality, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
What information has surprised you most recently? 
by FiftyTwo — 2012-12-09T04:43:58.029Z

Information that surprises you is interesting as it exposes where you have been miscalibrated, and allows you to correct for that.

I suspect the users of LessWrong have fairly similar beliefs, so it is probable that information that has surprised you would surprise others here, so it would be useful for them if you shared them.

Example: In a discussion with a friend recently I realised I had massively miscalibrated on the percentage of the UK population who shared my beliefs on certain subjects, in general the population was far more conservative than I had expected.

In retrospect I was assuming my own personal experience was more representative than it was, even when attempting to correct for that.
Poll - Is endless September a threat to LW and what should be done?
by Epiphany — 2012-12-08T23:42:14.949Z

Various people raised concerns that growth might ruin the culture after reading my "LessWrong could grow a lot" thread. There has been some discussion about whether endless September, a phenomenon that kills online discussion groups, is a significant threat to LessWrong and what can be done. I really care about it, so I volunteered to code a solution myself for free if needed. Luke invited debate on the subject (the debate is here) and will be sent the results of this poll and asked to make a decision. It was suggested by him in an email that I wait a little while and then post my poll (meta threads are apparently annoying to some, so we let people cool off). Here it is, preceded by a Cliff's notes summary of the concerns.

Why this is worth your consideration:

- Yvain and I checked the IQ figures in the survey against other data this time, and the good news is that it's more believable that the average LessWronger is gifted. The bad news is that LessWrong's IQ average has decreased on each survey. It can be argued that it's not decreasing by a lot or we don't have enough data, but if the data is good, LessWrong's average has lost 52% of it's giftedness since March of 2009.

- Eliezer documented the arrival of poseurs (people who superficially copycat cultural behaviors - they are reported to over-run subcultures) which he termed "Undiscriminating Skeptics".

- Efforts to grow LessWrong could trigger an overwhelming deluge of newbies.

- LessWrong registrations have been increasing fast and it's possible that growth could outstrip acculturation capacity. (Chart here)

- The Singularity Summit appears to cause a deluge of new users that may have similar effect to the September deluges of college freshman that endless September is named after. (This chart shows a spike correlated with the 2011 summit where 921 users joined that month, which is roughly equal to the total number of active users LW tends to have in a month if you go by the surveys or Vladmir's wget.)

- A Slashdot effect could result in a tsunami of new users if a publication with lots of readers like the Wall Street Journal (they used LessWrong data in this article) decides to write an article on LessWrong.

- The sequences contain a lot of the culture and are long meaning that "TLDR" may make LessWrong vulnerable to c...
Help Reform A Philosophy Curriculum
by JonathanLivengood — 2012-12-08T22:45:24.550Z

A couple of days ago, Luke posted a recommendation for reforming how philosophy is taught. My department at the University of Illinois is in the midst of some potentially large-scale changes.* Hence, now seems to be a great time to think about concrete steps towards reforming or partially reforming the curriculum in an actual philosophy department. I would appreciate some help thinking through how to make changes that will (a) improve the philosophy education of our undergraduates, (b) recruit and retain better students, (c) improve faculty experiences with teaching philosophy, and (d) be salable to the rest of the philosophy faculty. To some extent, this post is me thinking out loud through what I want to say to my department's curriculum committee (probably in January).

How Things Stand Right Now

In this section, I will try to lay out the situation as I see it right now.

First, we have the following problem: philosophy courses that we offer are not sufficiently gated. In the mathematics department at my university, you can't take mathematical logic until you've taken a course called Fundamental Mathematics, which looks to be a class about proof techniques, mathematical induction, etc. And you can't take that until you've taken the second semester of calculus. Computer science, economics, physics, and most every other science curriculum works like this. If you want to take advanced courses, you have to pass through the gates of less advanced courses, which (theoretically, at least) prepare you for the material covered in the more advanced course.

By contrast, in the philosophy department, you may take a senior-level (400 at my school) course after taking a freshman-level (100 at my school) introduction to philosophy. The result is that students who take our 400-level courses are typically unprepared. At least, that has been my experience. (Shockingly, many students taking 400-level classes then complain that they were expected to know things about philosophy!) A big part of the problem here is that we do not presently have enough faculty to cover intermediate-level courses on a regular enough basis, and let's be honest, faculty members don't usually want to teach lower-level courses anyway.

Second, we have the following resource: our department currently has strong and growing connections with several world-class science or science-related departmen...
Science, Engineering, and Uncoolness; Here and Now, Then and There
by Ritalin — 2012-12-08T19:52:17.556Z

[Feel free to read this poor little unrigorous and unsourced post in JK Simmons' voice. That is entirely optional and you are of course free to read it in any voice you like; I only thought it might be interesting in the light of what is mentioned in the edit at the bottom of the text]

Nowadays, it seems that the correlation between sciency stuff, social ineptitude, and uncoolness, is cemented in the mind of the public. But this seems to be very era-specific, even time-specific.
As a lesswronger, I find what follows ironic: In Islamic countries, "scientists" are called with the same word use for religious leaders and other teachers, "olama", literally "knowers"; historically, there's been a huge overlap between the two, and, when one of these folks speaks, you're supposed to shut up and listen. This is still true to this day. There might not be much wealth to be gained from marrying a scientist, but there was status; amusingly enough, it's in modern-day materialism that is pushing them into irrelevance as money becomes, more and more, the sole measure of status.
In the West, in the XIXth century, Science and Progress were hip and awesome. Being a scientist of some sort was practically a requirement for any pulp hero. In the USA, an era of great works of engineering that had a dramatic impact on life quality made engineers heroes of popular fiction, men of knowledge and rigour who would not bow down to money and lawyer-cushioned bourgeois, or to corrupt and fickle politicians, men who would stand up against injustice and get the job done no matter what. Everyone wanted to call themselves an engineer, and the word was rampantly abused into meaninglessness; florists called themselves "flower engineers"! That's how cool being an engineer was.
In the Soviet Union, as long as they didn't step on the toes of the Party, scientists were highly acclaimed and respected, they got tons of honour and status. There was a huge emphasis on technological progress, on mankind reaching its full potential (at least on paper).
Nowadays, nearly the entire leadership of China is made of technicians and engineers. Not lawyers, or economists, or literati. These people only care about one thing, getting the job done - and that's what Science does.
So, I've really got to ask, when and *how* did Science and Engineering become "uncool", and why are they termed "geek", the term used for sidesho...
Procedural Knowledge Gaps, part 2
by  — 2012-12-08T17:49:13.947Z

With Alicorn's permission, I'm resurrecting this thread.

I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.

I'll start off with one of my own: What kinds of exercise can I do at home (I do have 5- and 20-pound weights), and what are good ways to get motivation to do so regularly?
Akrasia survey data analysis
by John_Maxwell — 2012-12-08T03:53:35.658Z

Followup to: Akrasia hack survey

p(hack akrasia|heard of hack and thought it was worth trying)

What are the odds of you succumbing to "hack akrasia", never trying or not consistently applying a hack, given that you'd heard of it and thought it was worth trying?

lukeprog's algorithm for beating procrastination: 83%

The Pomodoro Technique: 68%

Exercise for increased energy: 60%

LeechBlock or similar: 38%

Comments: Hack akrasia seems pretty darn high overall. LeechBlock is least susceptible.

p(using hack profitably|heard of hack and thought it was worth trying)

The "real success rate". What percentage of the time does thinking a hack is worth trying translate in to adopting it and using it consistently?

lukeprog's algorithm for beating procrastination: 02%

The Pomodoro Technique: 04%

Exercise for increased energy: 25%

LeechBlock or similar: 15%

Comments: Exercise is the clear winner. If you didn't think exercise was worth trying (5% of survey respondents), you might want to reconsider.

p(hack seems to work|tried hack)

In a world without hack akrasia, what success rates would be be seeing?

lukeprog's algorithm for beating procrastination: 42%

The Pomodoro Technique: 58%

Exercise for increased energy: 84%

LeechBlock or similar: 37%

Comments: Again, exercise is the clear winner. If you don't exercise, next time you're in an akrasia-killing mood, it seems you'd be well advised to try and set up some sort of regular exercise regimen for yourself. Setting up a Pomodoro regime for yourself seems like a solid 2nd choice.

p(hack seemed worth trying|heard of hack)

lukeprog's algorithm for beating procrastination: 75%

The Pomodoro Technique: 79%

Exercise for increased energy: 94%

LeechBlock or similar: 60%

Comments: This was for comparison with actual success rates. Multiple people wrote in that they didn't have the problem LeechBlock tries to solve, so this may account for its low rate. If you do have the problem LeechBlock tries to solve but you did't think it's worth trying, you may wish to revise your opinion, as its "real success rate" is in 2nd place at 15%.

Yes, LeechBlock may be relatively easy to subvert. I was turned off by this initially as well. But now I think that it's not all that important--the main thing is to disrupt your distraction-seeking behavior, not present an impenetrable barrier. I'd...
[SEQ RERUN] Permitted Possibilities, & Locality
by MinibearRex — 2012-12-08T01:17:40.821Z

Today's post, Permitted Possibilities, & Locality was originally published on 03 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Yudkowsky's attempt to summarize Hanson's positions, list the possible futures discussed so far, and identify which ones seem most and least likely to Yudkowsky.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Whither Manufacturing?, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.