trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Meetup : Atlanta:  Problems With Friendly AI: A (non-technical) MIRI Book Review
by Nova_Division — 2014-04-03T17:00:25.353Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta: Problems With Friendly AI: A (non-technical) MIRI Book Review

WHEN:
12 April 2014 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE:
491 Lindbergh Place NE Apt 618 Atlanta, GA 30324

At this meetup, we'll be looking over some of the points made in the recent MIRI book: Smarter Than Us, The Rise of Machine Intelligence. This is a non-technical introduction to some of the problems facing us in creating Friendly Artificial Intelligence. If you haven't read the book this is a great way to get a general overview without reading it yourself or to decide whether or not do so, and if you have read it, you can discuss your favorite parts with others!
Time permitting, we may also discuss material from Luke Muelhauser's: Facing The Intelligence Explosion. Both books are available here: http://intelligence.org/all-publications/#books
We'll also be doing our usual eclectic mix of life optimization brain storming, snacks, games, and randomness! New members: This specific apartment can be hard to find. Please give Katie a call at 678-416-0248 if you have any problems.
And check out our facebook group at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Atlanta.Lesswrong/

Discussion article for the meetup : Atlanta: Problems With Friendly AI: A (non-technical) MIRI Book Review
Meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Rationality and Cooking
by Manfred — 2014-04-03T16:18:18.737Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Rationality and Cooking

WHEN:
06 April 2014 12:01:01PM (-0500)

WHERE:
412 W. Elm St, Urbana, IL

There are a lot of rationality skills applicable to cooking. On the one hand, this is nice for cooking. On the other hand, it's an interesting example of how little we use explicit rationality by default, and what we do instead.

Also, I may cook some food for A/B testing.

Discussion article for the meetup : Urbana-Champaign: Rationality and Cooking
Meetup : Frankfurt meetup
by Kendra — 2014-04-03T07:08:54.911Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Frankfurt meetup

WHEN:
17 April 2014 05:00:00PM (+0200)

WHERE:
Frankfurt, Ginnheimer Landstraße

Our next meetup, right before Easter! As usual, contact me under 0049 176 34 095 760. We also have a mailing list you're welcome to join: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/less-wrong-frankfurt
If you have special needs for attending (diet, barrier-free location, difficulties with social anxiety, etc.) you're welcome to contact me beforehand.
Food we have is either vegan or at least vegan-friendly.

Discussion article for the meetup : Frankfurt meetup
Items to Have In Case of Emergency...Maybe.
by daenerys — 2014-04-03T00:23:15.604Z

This post is inspired by a recent comment thread on my Facebook. I asked people to respond with whether or not they kept fire/lock boxes in their homes for their important documents (mainly to prove to a friend that this is a Thing People Do). It was pretty evenly divided, with slightly more people having them, than not. The interesting pattern I noticed was that almost ALL of my non-rationality community friends DID have them, and almost NONE of my rationality community friends did, and some hadn't even considered it.

This could be because getting a lock box is not an optimal use of time or money, OR it could be because rationalists often overlook the mundane household-y things more than the average person. I'm actually not certain which it is, so am writing this post presenting the case of why you should keep certain emergency items in the hope that either I'll get some interesting points for why you shouldn't prep that I haven't thought of yet, OR will get even better ideas in the comments.

General Case

Many LWers are concerned about x-risks that have a small chance of causing massive damage. We may or may not see this occur in our lifetime. However, there are small problems that occur every 2-3 years or so (extended blackout, being snowed in, etc), and there are mid-sized catastrophes that you might see a couple times in your life (blizzards, hurricanes, etc). It is likely that at least once in your life you will be snowed in your house and the pipes will burst or freeze (or whatever the local equivalent is, if you live in a warmer climate). Having the basic preparations ready for these occurrences is low cost (many minor emergencies require a similar set of preparations), and high payoff.

Medicine and Hospitality

This category is so minor, you probably don't consider it to be "emergency", but it's still A Thing To Prepare For. It really sucks having to go to the store when you're sick because you don't already have the medicine you need at hand. It's better to keep the basics always available, just in case. You, or a guest, are likely to be grateful that you have these on hand. Even if you personally never get sick, I consider a well-stocked medicine cabinet to be a point of hospitality. If you have people over to your place with any frequency, it is nice to have:

Medicine

Pain Reliever (ibuprofen, NSAID)

Zyrtec (Especially if you have c

...
NY Megameetup this weekend
by Raemon — 2014-04-02T22:35:41.943Z

Hey all, this is just a reminder that New York community is hosting a megameetup this weekend. Some information here:

The weekend of April 5th and 6th, the New York Rationality community is hosting the Spring East Coast Megameetup of 2014. It'll be held at the Highgarden Group House / Community Center.

The Agenda:

Start Time: 3:30 PM on Saturday (Attendees are encouraged to arrive beforehand to mingle and talk to other arriving folk)

Attendees are encouraged to arrive by Saturday afternoon to have time to settle in. We'll begin at 3:30 PM with some opening remarks, followed by a presentation by David Carlson, on "Legal Concerns Surrounding Startups". This'll be followed by dinner and a workshop on Goal Factoring - looking at the things you do and introspecting on why you're actually doing them, to gain insight into your true goals and then develop creative ways to accomplish them.

The next day, we'll be holding an unconference, starting at 10:00 AM. People are invited to prepare 15 minute presentations on whatever they find interesting. Some topics people are preparing include:

• Running a kickstarter

• Talent coefficients and the growth mindset

• Current landscape of the Effective Altruism community

Donations to run the event and (and, on the off chance we break even, future events at Highgarden), are welcome at: 1FtWbh8GyAcDewSy32geCBgsFoHEN7UoZ

The official facebook event is here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/723051941048754
Business Networking through LessWrong
by JoshuaFox — 2014-04-02T17:39:35.937Z

Is anyone interested in contacting other people in the LessWrong community to find a job, employee, business partner, co-founder, adviser, or investor?
Connections like this develop inside ethnic and religious groups, as well as among university alums or members of a fraternity. I think that LessWrong can provide the same value.

For example, LessWrong must have plenty of skilled software developers in dull jobs, who would love to work with smart, agenty rationalists. Likewise, there must be some company founders or managers who are having a very hard time finding good software developers.

A shared commitment to instrumental and epistemic rationality should be a good starting point, not to mentioned a shared memeplex to help break the ice. (Paperclips! MoR!)

Besides being fun, working together with other rationalists could be a good business move.

As a side-benefit, it also has good potential to raise the sanity waterline and help further develop new rationality skills, both personally and as a community.

Naturally, such a connection is not guaranteed to produce results. But it's hard to find the right people to work with: Why not try this route? And although you can cold-contact someone you've seen online, you don't know who's interested in what you have to offer, so I think more effort is needed to bootstrap such networking.
I'd like to gauge interest. (Alexandros has volunteered to help.) If you might be interested in this sort of networking, please fill out this short Google Form [Edit: Survey closed as of April 15]. I'll post an update about what sort of response we get.

Privacy: Although the main purpose of this form is to gauge interest, and other details may be needed to form good connections, the info might be enough to get some contacts going. So, we might use this information to personally connect people. We won't share the info or build any online group with it. If we get a lot of interest we may later create some sort of online mechanism, but we’ll be sure to get your permission before adding you.

---------

Edit April 6: We're still seeing that people are filling out the form, so we'll wait a week or two, and report on results.

---------

Edit April 15: See a summary of the results below.
Group Rationality Diary, April 1-15
by therufs — 2014-04-01T20:35:54.462Z

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for April 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.

Immediate past diary: March 16-31

Next diary: April 16-30

Rationality diaries archive
April 2014 Media Thread
by ArisKatsaris — 2014-04-01T07:14:07.748Z

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.
College discussion thread
by benkuhn — 2014-04-01T03:21:58.126Z

It's that time of year when high school seniors are thinking about colleges, and by extension, everyone who knows any high school seniors is thinking about colleges as well. So let's let Less Wrong join in!

Do you have:

questions about choosing, preparing for, or attending colleges?

sage advice about choosing, preparing for, or attending colleges?

announcements of which college you'll be attending or visiting and when (for instance, so that you can meet local LWers)?

other things not worth their own post such that 'people who clicked on the "College discussion thread"' is an appropriate audience?

Please post them below!
Biomedical research as a career
by JonahS — 2014-04-01T01:33:43.056Z

I did some preliminary research on biomedical research as a career. The case for becoming a biomedical researcher looks to be weak for most candidates for the career. Are there important points in favor of pursuing a career in biomedical research that I'm missing?

Summary

Some people find biomedical research very rewarding, but the job involves a lot of grant writing, not only research.

Job security for biomedical researchers in academia is extremely poor before tenure. We still have to research exit options for those who leave academia.

Biomedical researchers make substantially less money over a life time than they could in other fields.

The job involves ~60 hours of work per week

While biomedical research has historically produced a great deal of value, the situation today is more ambiguous, and it appears that the average biomedical researcher does little to advance the field.

The nature of the work

According to How to succeed in science: a concise guide for young biomedical scientists. Part I: taking the plunge by Yewdell (2009)

for individuals with a hunger for knowledge and an insatiable curiosity about how things work, science offers a constant challenge and, best of all, the intense thrill of discovery. What can match being the first person who has ever lived to know something new about nature? And not just the big, infrequent, paradigm-making (or breaking) discoveries, but the small, incremental discoveries that occur on a daily or weekly basis too. If this doesn’t give you goosebumps and if you are not in a rush to get to the laboratory in the morning to find the results of yesterday’s experiment, then you should seriously consider a non-laboratory career.

However, research is not the only part of the job: Yewdell writes

For your entire career as a PI, you will put inordinate efforts into writing grants

This is in consonance with GiveWell's post Exploring Life Science Funding which says

The existing system focuses on time-consuming, paperwork-heavy grant applications for individual investigators.

GiveWell's post also hints at researchers being constrained with respect to the research that they're able to get funding for:

The existing system favors a particular brand of research – generally incremental testing of particular hypotheses – and is less suited to supporting research

...
Book Review: Kazdin's The Everyday Parenting Toolkit
by Gunnar_Zarncke — 2014-03-31T21:29:21.217Z

Follow-up to Rational Parenting, Ignorance in Parenting, Soft Paternalism in Parenting

Part of a Sequence on Rational Parenting

This is a review of The Everyday Parenting Toolkit: The Kazdin Method for Easy, Step-by-step, Lasting Change for You and Your Child by Alan E, Kazdin (all phrases in quotes below are from this book if not otherwise indicated). I was pointed to this book by tadamsmars comment on Ignorance in Parenting.

This is a post in the sequence about parenting. I also see some cross relations to learning and cognitive sciences in general. Kazdins advice also is not only applicable to children but to adults as well if you read the book with a mind open to the backing research (Kazdin actually gives some such examples to illustrate the methods).

Summary TD;DR

Define the positive behavior you do want. Communicate this clearly and provide events that make it likely to occur. Praise any occurrence of the positive behavior effusively. Think about and communicate consequences beforehand. Use mild and short punishments (if at all). Provide a healthy environment.

Antecedents

Antecedents are ways to set up the behavior you want. "They come before the behavior in question." These are mainly prompts, e.g. "Please come over here". Also helpful are setting events, e.g. sitting together (quietly) improves chances of requests to stay calm (this is related to priming). Challenges - "I bet you can't do X" - increase the likelihood of the behavior (though no reason why this works is given).

Key points:

Prompts should be "calm, without harshness, with 'please' and [a] choice."

Be clear and specific.

Be near the child, speak softly and calm.

Prompts work best immediately before the behavior.

Combine multiple (but different) antecedents.

High probability requests before a low probability request.

Be positive, don't appeal to authority or threaten consequences.

Behaviors

Think about the behavior you do want. Specify it (actually write it down), but use only positives. Make it precise (smart). Start with a single behavior.

In case of problematic behaviors you want to reduce specify the positive opposite (this is a word you will read very often in the book) of the behavior. Do not address the negative behavior (that will just reinforce that; more below). Instead divert attention of the child toward positively reinforced oppos...
The concept of belief and the nature of abstraction
by common_law — 2014-03-31T20:14:02.315Z

[Cross-posted.]

Belief, puzzling to philosophy, is part of psychology’s conceptual framework. The present essay provides a straightforward yet novel theory of the explanatory and predictive value of describing agents as having beliefs. The theory attributes full-fledged beliefs exclusively to agents with linguistic capacities, but it does so as an empirical matter rather than a priori. By treating abstraction as an inherently social practice, the dependence of full-fledged belief on language resolves a philosophical problem regarding its possibility in a world where only concrete particulars exist.

The propositional character of belief

It can appear mysterious that the content of epistemic attitudes (belief and opinion) is conveyed by clauses introduced by that: “I believe that the dog is in his house.” If beliefs were causes of behavior, our success in denoting them gives rise to an apparently insurmountable problem: how do propositions—if they exist at all—exist independently of human conduct, so as to be fit for causally explaining it?
While belief ascriptions figure prominently in many behavioral explanations, their propositional form indicates that they pertain to states of information. My belief that my dog is in his house consists of the reliable use of the information that he’s there. Not only will I reply accordingly if asked about his location; in directing other my conduct, I may use that information. If I want the dog to come, I will yell in the direction of his house rather than toward his sofa. Yet, I won’t always use this information: I might absent-mindedly call to my dog on the sofa despite knowing (hence believing) that he is in his house. Believed information can be mistakenly disregarded.
Belief “that p” is a propensity to take p into rational account when p is relevant to the agent’s goals. But taking certain information into account involves also various skills, and it must be facilitated by the appropriate habits. The purposeful availability of believed information is also affected by, besides skills, inhibitions, habits, and desires.
What becomes striking on recognizing beliefs as propensities to use particular information is that behavior can be so successfully explained, when we know something of an agent’s purposes, by reference to the information on which we can p...
Meetup : Lesswrong Boulder CO - Timeless Decision Theory
by yakurbe0112 — 2014-03-31T19:36:55.099Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Lesswrong Boulder CO - Timeless Decision Theory

WHEN:
03 April 2014 07:00:00PM (-0600)

WHERE:
2690 Baseline Rd, Boulder, CO 80305

I've been trying to figure out how to explain TDT for a while. I think I have a good informal explanation. Unfortuatly, I haven't been able to find the actual wording for the decision theory. If you'd like to talk about decision theory and have pizza, you should come.

Discussion article for the meetup : Lesswrong Boulder CO - Timeless Decision Theory
Find a study partner - April 2014 thread
by Mati_Roy — 2014-03-31T19:24:12.184Z

This is the monthly thread to find a study partner.

For reasons mentioned in So8res article as well as for other reasons: studying with a partner can be very good.

So if you're looking for a study partner for an online course, reading a manual or else (whether it's in the MIRI course list or not) tell others in the comment section.

The past treads about finding a study partner can be found under the tag study_thread. However, you have higher probabilities of finding a study partner in the most recent thread. If you haven't found a study partner last month, you are welcome to post the same comment again here.
What has .impact done so far?
by Peter Wildeford — 2014-03-31T17:50:19.022Z

Jointly written by Peter Hurford, Ozzie Gooen, Patrick Brinich-Langlois, and Ciarán Phillips

-

Introduction

.impact is a group of people who want to volunteer on really useful projects. This means, however, we need some idea of whether or not our projects are actually useful. Thus, the purpose of this essay is to analyze whether or not our projects have been useful, whether putting more time and money into .impact is worth the cost, where .impact has stumbled, and what our plans for the future are.

Summary

.impact has worked on a total of 25 projects, 8 of which have been launched (Skillshare, Improving EA Presence on Wikipedia, EA Interview Series, Utilitarian Essays Redesign, CEA Homepage Redesign, Giving What We Can Redesign, and the EA Reddit).

Right now, we think the core benefits of .impact can be categorized as working on (a) building the EA community, (b) building EA infrastructure, (c) learning about volunteering, (d) giving people skills and credibility, and (e) encouraging an ethos of trying things.

Our case is not very rigorous. A lot of our evidence is anecdotal, and most of our impact lies in our yet-to-be-realized potential as an organization.

.impact has encountered setbacks. We've found the supply of volunteering to be more limited than expected. We've also found volunteer software projects to be more difficult than originally assumed, with it taking much more time than expected to make much progress on projects.

We've also found it difficult to predict how useful our projects would be. So far .impact has not progressed as much as we would like in systematic needs analysis, metric measurement, or project prioritization.

The original goal of some of our members to learn programming through doing programming projects has been more difficult to realize. Aligning high-impact development with education has proven challenging.

Our costs to date have been ~$50 and ~860 person hours (valued at $34.4K). However, much of .impact work is in the free time, and opportunity costs seem to be lower than one would initially expect.

Overall, we're quite confidant that we justify our costs and we look forward to seeing what happens in the next few months.

What have we done?

.impact was launched with the goal "to provide infrastructure to get people and useful projects together" and "...