trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Why I haven't signed up for cryonics
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2014-01-12T05:16:55.458Z

(OR)

How I'm now on the fence about whether to sign up for cryonics

I'm not currently signed up for cryonics. In my social circle, that makes me a bit of an oddity. I disagree with Eliezer Yudkowsky; heaven forbid.

My true rejection is that I don't feel a visceral urge to sign up. When I query my brain on why, what I get is that I don't feel that upset about me personally dying. It would suck, sure. It would suck a lot. But it wouldn't suck infinitely. I've seen a lot of people die. It's sad and wasteful and upsetting, but not like a civilization collapsing. It's neutral from a point of pleasure vs suffering for the dead person, and negative for the family, but they cope with it and find a bit of meaning and move on.

(I'm desensitized. I have to be, to stay sane in a job where I watch people die on a day to day basis. This is a bias; I'm just not convinced that it's a bias in a negative direction.)

I think the deeper cause behind my rejection may be that I don't have enough to protect. Individuals may be unique, but as an individual, I'm fairly replaceable. All the things I'm currently doing can and are being done by other people. I'm not the sole support person in anyone's life, and if I were, I would be trying really, really hard to fix the situation. Part of me is convinced that wanting to personally survive and thinking that I deserve to is selfish and un-virtuous or something. (EDIT: or that it's non-altruistic to value my life above the amount Givewell thinks is reasonable to save a life–about $5,000. My revealed preference is that I obviously value my life more than this.)

However, I don't think cryonics is wrong, or bad. It has obvious upsides, like being the only chance an average citizen has right now to do something that might lead to them not permanently dying. I say "average citizen" because people working on biological life extension and immortality research are arguably doing something about not dying.

When queried, my brain tells me that it's doing an expected-value calculation and the expected value of cryonics to me is is too low to justify the costs; it's unlikely to succeed and the only reason some people have positive expected value for it is that they're multiplying that tiny number by the huge, huge number that they place on the value of my life. And my number doesn't feel big enough to outweigh those odds at ...
Deregulating Distraction, Moving Towards the Goal, and Level Hopping
by So8res — 2014-01-12T03:21:21.364Z

This is the third post in a series discussing my recent bout of productivity. Within, I discuss two techniques I use to avoid akrasia and one technique I use to be especially productive.

Deregulating Distraction

I like to pretend that I have higher-than-normal willpower, because my ability to Get Things Done seems to be somewhat above average. In fact, this is not the case. I'm not good at fighting akrasia. I merely have a knack for avoiding it.

When I was young, my parents were very good at convincing me to manage my money. They gave me an allowance, perhaps a dollar a week. When we would go to the store, I'd get excited about some trite toy and ask my parents whether I could buy it.

Their answers were similar. My mother would crouch down, put a hand on my shoulder, and say "Of course you can. But before you do, think carefully about how much you will enjoy this after you've bought it, and what other things you would be able to buy if instead you saved up."

My father was a bit more direct. He'd just shrug and say "It's your money", with the barest hint of derision.

I rarely spent my allowance.

I now use a similar technique when dealing with distractions.

(It's worth noting that it's always been very easy to put me into far mode, perhaps in part because I decided at a very young age that I wasn't going to die.)

As Kaj Sotala and a few others noted, assigning guilt to non-productive tasks is not especially healthy. Nor is it, in my experience, sustainable. In a few different cases, I experienced scenarios where I wanted to do something but couldn't will myself to do it. I suffered ego depletion and hit a vicious cycle of unproductivity and depression. I never fell completely into the self-hate death spiral, but I flirted around at the edges. It became clear that I needed a new strategy.

To break the cycle, I decided to stop fighting myself.

The world is full of distractions, and I have plenty of vices. I am just as susceptible as anyone to binging on TV shows or video games or book series. Instead of trying (and often failing) to stop myself from indulging, I decided to allow myself to indulge whenever I really wanted to.

"It's your time", I told myself.

This changed the game entirely. I no longer willed myself to avoid temptation: I weighed temptations alongside my other options, took their pros and cons into account, and made an informed decision. Did I need to distra...
AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything
by Will_Newsome — 2014-01-12T02:18:04.159Z

If you want people to ask you stuff reply to this post with a comment to that effect.

More accurately, ask any participating LessWronger anything that is in the category of questions they indicate they would answer.

If you want to talk about this post you can reply to my comment below that says "Discussion of this post goes here.", or not.
Try more things.
by whales — 2014-01-12T01:25:56.497Z

(Cross-posted from my personal site.)

Several months ago I began a list of "things to try," which I share at the bottom of this post. It suggests many mundane, trivial-to-medium-cost changes to lifestyle and routine. Now that I've spent some time with most of them and pursued at least as many more personal items in the same spirit, I'll suggest you do something similar. Why?

Raise the temperature in your optimization algorithm: avoid the trap of doing too much analysis on too little data and escape local optima.

You can think of this as a system for self-improvement; something that operates on a meta level, unlike an object-level goal or technique; something that helps you fail at almost everything but still win big.

Variety of experience is an intrinsic pleasure to many, and it may make you feel less that time has flown as you look back on your life.

Practice implementing small life changes, practice observing the effects of the changes, practice noticing further opportunities for changes, practice value of information calculations, and reinforce your self-image as an empiricist working to improve your life. Build small skills in the right order and you'll have better chances at bigger wins in the future.

Advice often falls prey to the typical-mind (or typical-body) fallacy. That doesn't mean you should dismiss it out of hand. Think about not just how likely it is to work for you, but how beneficial it would be if it worked, how much it would cost to try, and how likely it is that trying it would give you enough information to change your behavior. Then just try it anyway if it's cheap enough, because you forgot to account for uncertainty in your model inputs.

Speaking of value of information: don't ignore tweakable variables just because you don't yet have a gwern-tier tracking and evaluation apparatus for the perfect self-experiment. Sometimes you can expect consciously noticeable non-placebo effects from a successful trial. You might do better picking the low hanging fruit to gain momentum before you invest in a Zeo and a statistics textbook.

You know what, if there's an effect, it may not even need to be non-placebo. C.f. "Lampshading," as well as the often-observed "honeymoon" period of success with new productivity systems.

It's very tempting, especially in certain communities, to focus exclusively on shiny, counterintuitive, "rational," tech-bas

...
I Will Pay $500 To Anyone Who Can Convince Me To Cancel My Cryonics Subscription
by ChrisHallquist — 2014-01-11T10:39:04.856Z

Background:

On the most recent LessWrong readership survey, I assigned a probability of 0.30 on the cryonics question. I had previously been persuaded to sign up for cryonics by reading the sequences, but this thread and particularly this comment lowered my estimate of the chances of cryonics working considerably. Also relevant from the same thread was ciphergoth's comment:

By and large cryonics critics don't make clear exactly what part of the cryonics argument they mean to target, so it's hard to say exactly whether it covers an area of their expertise, but it's at least plausible to read them as asserting that cryopreserved people are information-theoretically dead, which is not guesswork about future technology and would fall under their area of expertise.

Based on this, I think there's a substantial chance that there's information out there that would convince me that the folks who dismiss cryonics as pseudoscience are essentially correct, that the right answer to the survey question was epsilon. I've seen what seem like convincing objections to cryonics, and it seems possible that an expanded version of those arguments, with full references and replies to pro-cryonics arguments, would convince me. Or someone could just go to the trouble of showing that a large majority of cryobiologists really do think cryopreserved people are information-theoretically dead.

However, it's not clear to me how well worth my time it is to seek out such information. It seems coming up with decisive information would be hard, especially since e.g. ciphergoth has put a lot of energy into trying to figure out what the experts think about cryonics and come away without a clear answer. And part of the reason I signed up for cryonics in the first place is because it doesn't cost me much: the largest component is the life insurance for funding, only $50 / month.

So I've decided to put a bounty on being persuaded to cancel my cryonics subscription. If no one succeeds in convincing me, it costs me nothing, and if someone does succeed in convincing me the cost is less than the cost of being signed up for cryonics for a year. And yes, I'm aware that providing one-sided financial incentives like this requires me to take the fact that I've done this into account when evaluating anti-cryonics arguments, and apply extra scrutiny to them.

Note that there are several issues that ul...
Meetup : Washington DC Effective Altruism Meetup
by rocurley — 2014-01-11T10:15:49.807Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Effective Altruism Meetup

WHEN:
12 January 2014 03:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC 20001, USA

We'll be meeting to discuss effective altruism, or whatever else people want to talk about.

Discussion article for the meetup : Washington DC Effective Altruism Meetup
Calculating an expected value
by polymathwannabe — 2014-01-11T06:41:15.191Z

This is a tiny question that I wouldn't be asking if I had paid more attention in economics class. Anyway, a friend of mine was at the mall with me and he needed to go to the mall parking to retrieve his car. However, if he played at the mall casino, the parking fee would be waived. Without much interest, I heard him calculate his options out loud, until he got to this part:

"The parking fee is $4. I might get that amount waived yet lose more than that at the casino. Or I could play at the casino and win, in which case my expected value is whatever I win plus $4..."

At that moment I felt I had to intervene:

"You don't get to add the parking fee to your expected value if you win at the casino; you merely don't substract it."

But he kept insisting that he could add it. We didn't meet later to check his numbers, but I was left with this question.

Was my objection accurate?
Free online course: How to Reason and Argue starting Mon. Any interest in study group?
by pinyaka — 2014-01-10T19:25:02.313Z

I am going to take the free Coursera class "Think Again: How to Reason and Argue" starting Monday, January 13 (three days from now) and I thought I'd to see if there was any interest in going through this as a group. This is one of the MIRI recommended courses under the "Heuristics and Biases" section. If you're interested and you will sign up if we get a group together, please leave a note in the comments (if you will only sign up if the group hits a specific size, please leave that requirement in the comments as well). If enough people are willing to sign up (5 or more? idk), I will start a group on Google (or somewhere else if that's preferred) so that we can have a forum to share thoughts, ask questions, etc. Otherwise, email may be a better way to maintain contact.

EDIT: We hit five people willing to start, so I created a Google group here. If you're interested in taking the course with us, please sign up there.

The recommended text is fairly inexpensive on Amazon (<$20 USD) and can be found on libgen.info for free if that's your thing. It's taught in English, lasts 12 weeks and predicts that it will take 5-6 hours/week. More info from the course website:

Think Again: How to Reason and Argue

Reasoning is important. This course will teach you how to do it well. You will learn how to understand and assess arguments by other people and how to construct good arguments of your own about whatever matters to you.

About the Course

Reasoning is important. This course will teach you how to do it well. You will learn some simple but vital rules to follow in thinking about any topic at all and some common and tempting mistakes to avoid in reasoning. We will discuss how to identify, analyze, and evaluate arguments by other people (including politicians, used car salesmen, and teachers) and how to construct arguments of your own in order to help you decide what to believe or what to do. These skills will be useful in dealing with whatever matters most to you.

Course Syllabus

PART I: HOW TO ANALYZE ARGUMENTS

Week 1: How to Spot an Argument
Week 2: How to Untangle an Argument
Week 3: How to Reconstruct an Argument
Quiz #1: At the end of Week 3, students will take their first quiz.

PART II: HOW TO EVALUATE DEDUCTIVE ARGUMENTS

Week 4: Propositional Logic and Truth Tables
Week 5: Categorica

...
New LW Meetups: Portland, Sydney
by FrankAdamek — 2014-01-10T17:04:51.917Z

This summary was posted to LW main on January 3rd. The following week's summary is here.

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

[Portland] I moved to Portland! I want to meet you!: 11 January 2014 11:50AM
Sydney Meetup: January: 22 January 2014 06:30PM

Other irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Montreal - How to Actually Change your Mind: 07 January 2014 07:00PM
Southeast Michigan: 04 January 2014 02:00PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX: 04 January 2020 01:30PM
Brussels monthly meetup: [topic TBD]: 11 January 2014 01:00PM
London 2014 Protospective: 05 January 2014 02:00PM
Vienna: 18 January 2014 03:00PM
Washington DC fun and games meetup: 05 January 2014 03:00PM

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

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

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

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

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Berlin, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Marin CA, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Portland,...
Dr. Jubjub predicts a crisis
by Apprentice — 2014-01-10T15:52:07.327Z

Dr. Jubjub: Sir, I have been running some calculations and I’m worried about the way our slithy toves are heading.

Prof. Bandersnatch: Huh? Why? The toves seem fine to me. Just look at them, gyring and gimbling in the wabe over there.

Dr. Jubjub: Yes, but there is a distinct negative trend in my data. The toves are gradually losing their slithiness.

Prof. Bandersnatch: Hmm, okay. That does sound serious. How long until it becomes a problem?

Dr. Jubjub: Well, I’d argue that it’s already having negative effects but I’d say we will reach a real crisis in around 120 years.

Prof. Bandersnatch: Phew, okay, you had me worried there for a moment. But it sounds like this is actually a non-problem. We can carry on working on the important stuff – technology will bail us out here in time.

Dr. Jubjub: Sir! We already have the technology to fix the toves. The most straightforward way would be to whiffle their tulgey wood but we could also...

Prof. Bandersnatch: What?? Whiffle their tulgey wood? Do you have any idea what that would cost? And besides, people won’t stand for it – slithy toves with unwhiffled tulgey wood are a part of our way of life.

Dr. Jubjub: So, when you say technology will bail us out you mean you expect a solution that will be cheap, socially acceptable and developed soon?

Prof. Bandersnatch: Of course! Prof. Jabberwock assures me the singularity will be here around tea-time on Tuesday. That is, if we roll up our sleeves and don’t waste time with trivialities like your tove issue.

Maybe it’s just me but I feel like I run into a lot of conversations like this around here. On any problem that won’t become an absolute crisis in the next few decades, someone will take the Bandersnatch view that it will be more easily solved later (with cheaper or more socially acceptable technology) so we shouldn’t work directly on it now. The way out is forward - let’s step on the gas and get to the finish line before any annoying problems catch up with us.

For all I know, Bandersnatch is absolutely right. But my natural inclination is to take the Jubjub view. I think the chances of a basically business-as-usual future for the next 200 or 300 years are not epsilon. They may not be very high but they seem like they need to be seriously taken into account. Problems may prove harder than they look. Appa...
Meetup : Vancouver Biweekly Sequences Discussion: Politics Is the Mind-killer
by eggman — 2014-01-10T10:21:25.364Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Biweekly Sequences Discussion: Politics Is the Mind-killer

WHEN:
12 January 2014 03:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
Benny's Bagels: 2505 W Broadway, Vancouver, British Columbia V6K 2E9

For those not in the know, the Less Wrong sequences are a corpus of essays written by the self-educated blogger and AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky on applying rationality further into and also beyond the domains of science and skepticism. Less Wrong is the website where Mr. Yudkowsky and others blog about rationality.

This week we'll be reading "Politics is the Mind-Killer". It's a series of essays about how errors in thinking about politics and social dichotomies prevent people from reaching more accurate beliefs, and how these errors in thinking might be identified and corrected.

If you're interested in attending, please read the posts under the heading "most important posts" at this link:
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_Mind#Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer

We'll primarily be discussing those seven essays, but feel free to read the rest of the ones in the sequence if you have the time.

This is the first biweekly meetup for this reading and discussion group. We hope to see you there.

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver Biweekly Sequences Discussion: Politics Is the Mind-killer
[LINK] People become more utilitarian in VR moral dilemmas as compared to text based.
by trifith — 2014-01-09T20:28:11.785Z

A new study indicates that people become more utilitarian (save more lives) when viewing a moral dilemma in a virtual reality situation, as compared to reading the same situation in text.

Abstract.

Although research in moral psychology in the last decade has relied heavily on hypothetical moral dilemmas and has been effective in understanding moral judgment, how these judgments translate into behaviors remains a largely unexplored issue due to the harmful nature of the acts involved. To study this link, we follow a new approach based on a desktop virtual reality environment. In our within-subjects experiment, participants exhibited an order-dependent judgment-behavior discrepancy across temporally-separated sessions, with many of them behaving in utilitarian manner in virtual reality dilemmas despite their non-utilitarian judgments for the same dilemmas in textual descriptions. This change in decisions reflected in the autonomic arousal of participants, with dilemmas in virtual reality being perceived more emotionally arousing than the ones in text, after controlling for general differences between the two presentation modalities (virtual reality vs. text). This suggests that moral decision-making in hypothetical moral dilemmas is susceptible to contextual saliency of the presentation of these dilemmas.

Full paper

Video of simulations
Variables in Arguments as a Source of Confusion
by kremlin — 2014-01-09T13:16:46.247Z

I was reading an argument happening in the comments of an article about Light Table switching to open source. The argument was about freedom in relation to software, and it went basically something like this:

People who use OSX are less free [than Linux users], because they don't have the freedom to modify their OS source code.

No, they have the exact same freedom. People who use OSX and people who use Linux both have the freedom to modify the source code of Linux.

I'm not entirely sure, but this conversation reminded me immediately of arguing about a tree falling and making a sound when nobody's around to hear.

The first persons statement uses a variable in the place that the second persons statement uses a constant.

X's freedom is [partially] a function of [X's OS].
vs
X's freedom is [partially] a function of OS_List. (where OS_List is just a list of the OSs that he could in principle modify, regardless of if he wants to or is using any of those OSs)

(Obviously OS_List is a variable as well, but with respect to each person it's relatively unchanging).

I've seen this crop up in various conversations before - one person arguing using a variable where another person is using a constant (if that's the right way to describe it).

How does one diagnose the problem with this argument, if there is a problem? Is it a similar problem to the Tree in the Forest problem? Is there a standard rationalist way to dissolve the dispute so that both parties can leave not only agreeing, but also having a high probability of being correct when they leave?