trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Should one be sad when an opportunity is lost?
by diegocaleiro — 2014-03-11T01:48:26.369Z

There are many ways to tackle this question, but I mean this in a homo economicus, not biased perspective. If we were great optimizers of some things (experiences, states of the world, utility in the emotional sense), should we be sad upon hearing we lost an opportunity?

The intuitive answer, to me, is yes. But for many things, for most things I have begun to believe otherwise. This is because we combine two distinct meanings of opportunity

Opportunity1 = Something good in the future that is uncertain at the moment and could happen to you, frequently depending on environmental factors outside of your control and some factors within your control in the time between now and the opportunity taking place. Ex:

Getting a promotion

Finding a romantic partner

Having a really good friendship

Having a large H index (for scientific publications)

Opportunity2 = Something good in the future that is uncertain at the moment and could happen to you, but all the actions you could have personally taken that could influence this are in the past, and now only time and chance will determine if it will be the case. Ex:

Being approved at Google after the entire interview process has happened

Being accepted at Harvard

Avoiding wine in your clothing after it has been dropped

Being accepted to work with CEA after filling in the entire application.

I think it is very reasonable to be sad when you lose opportunites1 but completely pointless to be sad over the loss of the second kind, opporunities2. It feels obvious to me, but in case it isn't I'll try to make it explicit:

When you lose opportunities1, you change the course of your future actions, each of your actions, your time and your effort has become less valuable, since you have to do more to get the same odds or even less.

When you lose opportunities2 you are only being notified of an indexical property, you learn in which of the possible universes you could be you happen to be. You have gained knowledge, you can tailor your future actions regarding other things accordingly. Nothing has become pricier for your efforts, in fact, now you have a better map, and can navigate with ease.

So let us be neutral or happy with the loss of oportunities2, and gain strenght from the loss of opportunities1. It seems right to allocate emotional and psychological resources to things ...
A vote against spaced repetition
by ancientcampus — 2014-03-10T19:27:04.492Z

LessWrong seems to be a big fan of spaced-repetition flashcard programs like Anki, Supermemo, or Mnemosyne. I used to be. After using them religiously for 3 years in medical school, I now categorically advise against using them for large volumes of memorization.

[A caveat before people get upset: I think they appropriate in certain situations, and I have not tried to use them to learn a language, which seems its most popular use. More at the bottom.]

A bit more history: I and 30 other students tried using Mnemosyne (and some used Anki) for multiple tests. At my school, we have a test approximately every 3 weeks, and each test covers about 75 pages of high-density outline-format notes. Many stopped after 5 or so such tests, citing that they simply did not get enough returns from their time. I stuck with it longer and used them more than anyone else, using them for 3 years.

Incidentally, I failed my first year and had to repeat.

By the end of that third year (and studying for my Step 1 boards, a several-month process), I lost faith in spaced-repetition cards as an effective tool for my memorization demands. I later met with a learning-skills specialist, who felt the same way, and had better reasons than my intuition/trial-and-error:

Flashcards are less useful to learning the “big picture”
Specifically, if you are memorizing a large amount of information, there is often a hierarchy, organization, etc that can make leaning the whole thing easier, and you loose the constant visual reminder of the larger context when using flashcards.
Flashcards do not take advantage of spatial, mapping, or visual memory, all of which the human mind is much better optimized for. It is not so well built to memorize pairs between seemingly arbitrary concepts with few to no intuitive links. My preferred methods are, in essence, hacks that use your visual and spatial memory rather than rote.

Here are examples of the typical kind of things I memorize every day and have found flashcards to be surprisingly worthless for:

The definition of Sjögren's syndrome
The contraindications of Metronidazole
The significance of a rise in serum αFP

Here is what I now use in place of flashcards:

Ven diagrams/etc, to compare and contrast similar lists. (This is more specific to medical school, when you learn subtly different diseases.)
Mnemonic pictures. I have used this myself for years to great effect, and later le

...
Academia as a career option, its social value, and alternatives
by VipulNaik — 2014-03-10T18:32:46.462Z

Many of the high school and college students who contacted us at Cognito Mentoring were looking for advice were considering going into academia. The main draw to them was the desire to learn specific subjects and explore ideas in greater depth. As a result, we've been investigating academia as a career option and also considering what alternatives there may be to academia that fulfill the same needs but provide better pay and/or generate more social value. The love of ideas and epistemic exploration is shared by many of the people at Less Wrong, including those who are not in academia. So I'm hoping that people will share their own perspectives in the comments. That'll help us as well as the many LessWrong lurkers interested in academia.

I'm eager to hear about what considerations you used when weighing academia against other career options, and how you came to your decision. Incidentally, there are a number of great answers to the Quora question Why did you leave academia?, but there's probably many thoughts people have here that aren't reflected in the Quora answers. I've also written up a detailed review of academia as a career option on the info wiki for Cognito Mentoring here (long read), and I'd also love feedback on the validity of the points I make there.

Many of our advisees as well as the LessWrong readership at large are interested in choosing careers based on the social value generated by these careers. (This is evidenced in the strong connection between the LessWrong and effective altruism communities). What are your thoughts on that front? Jonah and I have collaboratively written a page on the social value of academia. Our key point is that research academia is higher value than alternative careers only in cases where either the person has a chance of making big breakthroughs in the area, or if the area of research itself is high-value. Examples of the latter may include machine learning (we're just starting on investigating this) and (arguably) biomedical research (we've collected some links on this, but haven't investigated this in depth).

For those who are or were attracted to academia, what other career options did you consider? If you decided not to join, or chose to quit, academia, what alternative career are you now pursuing? We've identified a few possibilities at our alternatives to academia page, but we're largely shooting in the dark he...
Meetup : Salt Lake City, UT: Schelling Day
by hamnox — 2014-03-10T12:38:14.723Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Salt Lake City, UT: Schelling Day

WHEN: 20 April 2014 02:45:00PM (-0600)

WHERE: 9771 S 170 E, Sandy UT

Every person reading this (ESPECIALLY YOU!) is challenged to leave ONE piece of feedback regarding what you think about this event. Before, during, or after. One sentence. Doable?

Why should I care?

There will be dinner! Eat food!

Hang out with and befriend generally awesome people!

Have friends or family you want to introduce to rationality? This makes a great appeal for emotional thinkers!

Generate hedons and warm fuzzies!

Generate fond memories to be nostalgic about!

Receive empathy for what's going on in your life!

Gain arbitrary Kudo points for having come!

I like hanging out with just generally awesome people. It's why I joined this group in the first place!

Spending time with people is fun. But getting to know people—really, truly getting to know people—is hard. Rewarding, but hard.

Sharing your fondest hopes and deepest fears is a powerful way to make connections, but exposing your soul like that terrifying. Worse, it’s awkward. There are few socially appropriate times to bring up stuff like that. Even when everything works out beautifully, getting it started feels stressful and not-fun.

As soon as people are in a context where everyone agrees that sharing is normal (e.g. an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, or a conversation with a therapist, or Truth or Dare), the stigma and self-consciousness don’t hold people back nearly as much.

This is our version of Truth or Dare: optimized for more plausible deniability, more warm fuzzy feelings, less debasement†, and more genuine connection with other people.

Five different flavors of Truth: Struggles, Joys, Confessions, Hopes, and Miscellaneous.

To provide plausible deniability, everyone rolls a die before speaking. A one means you cannot speak your turn, a 6 means you MUST. The result is not shared.

What happens in the Schelling Game stays in the Schelling Game.

This game is traditionally meant to played every April 14th, the birthday of Thomas Schelling, for the obvious reason‡, followed by dinner and socializing. I moved it around a bit to get it on the weekend instead of a Monday.

Any of that interest you? All you have to do is:

RSVP now. I won't hold it against you if you back out later.

Show up at 9771 S 170 E, Sandy UT
2:45pm o

...
Optimal Exercise
by RomeoStevens — 2014-03-10T03:37:37.761Z

Followup to: Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity.

What does it mean for exercise to be optimal?

Optimal for looks

Optimal for time

Optimal for effort

Optimal for performance

Optimal for longevity

There may be even more criteria.

We're all likely going for a mix of outcomes, and optimal exercise is going to change depending on your weighting of different factors. So I'm going to discuss something close to a minimum viable routine based on meta-analyses of exercise studies.

Not knowing which sort of exercise yields the best results gives our brains an excuse to stop thinking about it. The intent of this post is to go over the dose responses to various types of exercise. We’re going to break through vague notions like “exercise is good” and “I should probably exercise more” with a concrete plan where you understand the relevant parameters that will cause dramatic improvements.

How much exercise?

Optimality aside, I recommend starting with a very minimal routine for 6-ish weeks to build the habit of exercise in to your life. You'll want a program that causes you little mental stress that you can actually stick with. You've got a few options for achieving this. The gains from weightlifting can be surprisingly quick—you'll see dramatic changes in your appearance in 4 months—and seeing yourself lift more weight every session can be a great motivator. Couch to 5k is a basic running progression designed for sedentary people. A daily bodyweight routine is a good way to achieve habit formation through consistency. I recommend making a firm choice and sticking with it until it becomes easy.

Once you've made exercise a habit, you'll want to gradually nudge yourself towards the level that's optimal. So what is that level? Most of the rest of the claims in this post are supported by this review by Swiss researchers. As far as I know, this is the largest systematic review of exercise studies ever undertaken, reviewing 7000 studies with 80 meeting inclusion criteria covering over 1.3 million subjects. Sheer size, however, is not the only reason to take this study very seriously. As someone who has read hundreds of exercise studies, I can say that the methodology of the meta-analysis done to determine dose-response to exercise is excellent. What is most encouraging is that the study authors repeatedly point out shortcomings, a...
In favour of terseness
by Sophronius — 2014-03-08T18:01:06.447Z

I like posts that are concise and to the point. Posts like that maximize my information/effort ratio. I would really like to see experienced rationalists simply post a list of things they believe on any given subject with a short explanation for why they believe each of those things. Then I could go ahead and adjust my beliefs based on those lists as necessary.

Sadly I don’t see any posts like this. Presumably this is because of the social convention where you’re expected to back up any public belief with arguments, so that other people can attempt to poke holes in them. I find this strange because the arguments people present rarely have anything to do with why they believe those things, which makes the whole exercise a giant distraction from the main point that the author is trying to bring across. In order to prevent this kind of derailment, posters tend to cover their arguments with endless qualifications so that their sentences read like this: “I personally believe that, in cases X Y Z and under circumstances B and C, ceteris paribus and barring obvious exceptions, it seems safe to say that murder is wrong, though of course I could be mistaken.” The problems with such excessive argumentation and qualification are threefold:

The post becomes less readable: The information/effort ratio is lowered.

It becomes much more difficult to tell what the author genuinely believes: Are they really unsure or just trying to appear humble? Is that their true objection, or just an argument?

Despite everything, someone is STILL going to miss the point and reply that sometimes killing people is ok in certain situations, and then the next 100 comments will be about that.

By contrast, tersenes

...
Strategic choice of identity
by Vika — 2014-03-08T16:27:22.728Z

Identity is mostly discussed on LW in a cautionary manner: keep your identity small, be aware of the identities you are attached to. As benlandautaylor points out, identities are very powerful, and while being rightfully cautious about them, we can also cultivate them deliberately to help us achieve our goals.

Some helpful identities that I have that seem generally applicable:

growth mindset

low-hanging fruit picker

truth-seeker

jack-of-all trades (someone who is good at a variety of skills)

someone who tries new things

universal curiosity

mirror (someone who learns other people's skills)

Out of the above, the most useful is probably growth mindset, since it's effectively a meta-identity that allows the other parts of my identity to be fluid. The low-hanging fruit identity helps me be on the lookout for easy optimizations. The universal curiosity identity motivates me to try to understand various systems and fields of knowledge, besides the domains I'm already familiar with. It helps to give these playful or creative names, for example, "champion of low-hanging fruit". Some of these work well together, for example the "trying new things" identity contributes to the "jack of all trades" identity.

It's also important to identify unhelpful identities that get in your way. Negative identities can be vague like "lazy person" or specific like "someone who can't finish a project". With identities, just like with habits, the easiest way to reduce or eliminate a bad one seems to be to install a new one that is incompatible with it. For example, if you have a "shy person" identity, then going to parties or starting conversations with strangers can generate counterexamples for that identity, and help to displace it with a new one of "sociable person". Costly signaling can be used to achieve this - for example, joining a public speaking club. The old identity will not necessarily go away entirely, but the competing identity will create cognitive dissonance, which it can be useful to deliberately focus on. More specific identities require more specific counterexamples. Since the original negative identity makes it difficult to perform the actions that generate counterexamples, there needs to be some form of success spiral that starts with small steps.

Some examples of unhelpful identities I've had in the past were "person who doesn't waste things" and "person with poor in...
Meetup: Philadelphia, March 9, 2014
by NancyLebovitz — 2014-03-08T06:43:15.146Z

Discussion prompt: Nick Szabo's essay on judging tradition, "Objective Versus Intersubjective Truth".
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/tradition.html

1 PM (remember daylight saving time!)

Nam Phuong at 11th and Broad St. This is a Vietnamese restaurant which is good, cheap, quiet, and on mass transit.

Discussion group/mailing list.
Updateless Intelligence Metrics in the Multiverse
by Squark — 2014-03-08T00:25:59.903Z

Followup to: Intelligence Metrics with Naturalized Induction using UDT

In the previous post I have defined an intelligence metric solving the duality (aka naturalized induction) and ontology problems in AIXI. This model used a formalization of UDT using Benja's model of logical uncertainty. In the current post I am going to:

Explain some problems with my previous model (that section can be skipped if you don't care about the previous model and only want to understand the new one).

Formulate a new model solving these problems. Incidentally, the new model is much closer to the usual way UDT is represented. It is also based on a different model of logical uncertainty.

Show how to define intelligence without specifying the utility function a priori.

Since the new model requires utility functions formulated with abstract ontology i.e. well-defined on the entire Tegmark level IV multiverse. These are generally difficult to construct (i.e. the ontology problem resurfaces in a different form). I outline a method for constructing such utility functions.

Problems with UIM 1.0

The previous model postulated that naturalized induction uses a version of Solomonoff induction updated in the direction of an innate model N with a temporal confidence parameter t. This entails several problems:

The dependence on the parameter t whose relevant value is not easy to determine.

Conceptual divergence from the UDT philosophy that we should not update at all.

Difficulties with counterfactual mugging and acausal trade scenarios in which G doesn't exist in the "other universe".

Once G discovers even a small violation of N at a very early time, it loses all ground for trusting its own mind. Effectively, G would find itself in the position of a Boltzmann brain. This is especially dangerous when N over-specifies the hardware running G's mind. For example assume N specifies G to be a human brain modeled on the level of quantum field theory (particle physics). If G discovers that in truth it is a computer simulation on the merely molecular level, it loses its epistemic footing completely.

UIM 2.0

I now propose the following intelligence metric (the formula goes first and then I explain the notation):

IU(q) := ET[ED[EL[U(Y(D)) | Q(X(T)) = q]] | N]

N is the "ideal" model of the mind of the agent G. For example, it can be a universal Turing machine M w

...
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2014-03-07T18:14:15.291Z

This summary was posted to LW main on February 28th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

Boston - Optimizing Empathy Levels: 02 March 2014 02:00PM
Hamburg - Structure: 04 March 2014 05:00PM
Munich Meetup: 08 March 2014 02:00PM
Saint Petersburg sunday meetup: 01 March 2014 04:00PM
Sydney Meetup - March: 26 March 2014 06:30PM

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:

Berkeley: Implementation Intentions: 05 March 2014 07:00PM
[Berlin] Community Weekend in Berlin: 11 April 2014 04:00PM
Brussels - Calibration and other games: 08 March 2014 01:00PM
London Games Meetup 09/03, + Socials 02/03 and 16/02 : 09 March 2014 02:00PM
NYC Rationality Megameetup and Unconference: April 5-6: 05 April 2014 11:00AM
Salt Lake City UT — Open Possibilities and Improv Skills: 09 March 2014 02:00PM

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...
Meetup : West LA—Expert At Vs. Expert On
by OpenThreadGuy — 2014-03-07T10:10:14.961Z

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Expert At Vs. Expert On

WHEN:
12 March 2014 06:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
11066 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. I will bring a Rubik's Cube. The presence of a Rubik's Cube will be strong Bayesian evidence of the presence of a Less Wrong meetup.

Parking is completely free. There is a sign that claims there is a 45-minute time limit, but it is a lie.

Discussion: Expert at vs. expert on is a fairly important distinction. It's also a really simple one, which makes it conceptual low-hanging fruit. It's not totally without nuance; for example the terminology implies either total mastery or encyclopedic knowledge, but it applies just as well at any level of competence.

Recommended Reading:

Expert At Versus Expert On. I know of no other writing that is explicitly on this topic. Robin Hanson emphasizes the signaling aspect (of course he does), but I do not.

It is well-known that you learn to play baseball by playing baseball, not by reading essays about baseball. However, it is not usually made explicit that the former makes you an expert at baseball, and the latter makes you an expert on baseball.

Another nuance: Being an expert at something helps you become an expert on it; the vice versa may be true also. For example, you are probably a better linguist if you speak many languages.

NB: No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible. Also, we may or may not play a card game.

Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Expert At Vs. Expert On